Showing posts with label post-season. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-season. Show all posts
Friday, February 21, 2014
Horror Off-Season: Oculus: Chapter 3
Ok, so the Oculus short hit my radar a few years ago when I first saw Absentia. Director Mike Flanagan had mostly focused on character dramas until that point, though he had dabbled in horror before. First as DP on 2004's amazing cult cheesefest Chainsaw Sally, and then again as writer/director in 2006 with his own short film Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man With the Plan.
Originally planned as a 9 part short film anthology focused on the film's Lasser Glass mirror, only Part 3 was made due to budgetary constraints. Following the success of Absentia, Flanagan was able to direct a feature length adaptation of the story. That version premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in Sept of 2013 and Relativity Media secured distribution rights for an April 2014 US release. Unfortunately, that deal seems to have included pulling sales of the original short, which I feel is a tremendous missed marketing opportunity but rumor mill has it that the short will be included as bonus material on the DVD/BD release of Oculus.
Filmed for about $2,000 over the course of 4 days as primarily a monologue and clocking in at roughly 32 minutes Oculus: Chapter 3 is an amazing example of a less-is-more horror ideology. And beyond that, it's goddamned scary.
The film is set entirely in a single, white room with a small table and a battery of cameras on tripods at one end and an easel at the other with the very imposing mirror on it. The single character, Tim Russel (played by Scott Graham), wears jeans and a grey baseball collar t-shirt. To say sparse would be an understatement. Tim is here because his father was one of the previous owners of the Lasser Glass and also its most recent victim. Tim believes the mirror is haunted/possessed/evil and somehow compelled his father to kill his mother and himself. He's set up an experiment to prove the mirror has supernatural powers in order to clear his father's name.
During the run of the movie Tim explains the nature of the experiment he's running as well as external controls and checks. A system he feels will protect him from falling victim to the mirror as well. He also recounts the mirror's bloody history and the tragedy that fell on each previous owner. These are simple stories, but quite eerie. As the experiment goes on Tim becomes increasingly erratic, losing time, yelling at his friend on the phone, rambling, etc. The cameras in the room are all hooked to monitors on a table, and the perspective jumps between them and an omniscient camera leading to great creepy shots where Tim is in frame and a monitor doing something different. It throws into question assumptions of truth...which image is real?
Flanagan relies fairly heavily on his tight depth of field and editing to obscure elements making what really should be dumb instead very scary due to context and execution. Both tricks he would also use in Absentia to make the not-very intimidating Daniel Riley freaking frightful as the gape-mouthed ghoul. The final sprint is an absolute bedlam of amazing that begs me to never look at alarm clocks the same way, and the repeating line from the trailer ("I've met my demons and they are many, I've seen the Devil and he is me...") is really disturbing when it finally appears.
It's not a great looking movie, which isn't surprising given its budget and time. But it looks good for what it is, and the execution is stellar for a scary movie. The compressed insanity at the end left me actually speechless for a bit after the short ended, it was kindof a drive-by. Though it is very tight, I feel like bits could have been shaved off earlier in the movie to make Tim's decent a little less breakneck, but it still works very well as is.
That said, there's very little wrong with the movie and I'd highly recommend it.
--PXA
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Horror Off-Season: Banshee Chapter
Banshee Chapter is a late 2013 independent horror movie with a somewhat Lovecraftian bent that just recently got a limited theatrical release.
We grabbed this from Amazon Instant because the theatrical release was only in the Hollywood area. We start with archive footage from the disclosure of some of MKUltra, but quickly switches gears to a young investigative journalist being filmed by a friend so as to have an accurate record of his activities while tripping on a special kind of DMT, which is in some way related to secret government experiments. He's more or less unaffected until he starts hearing a radio and begins to get increasingly paranoid and uneasy. He continues to claim that "they" are coming and want to wear him and the cameraman, at some point he vanishes from view until bumping back into the cameraman as a ghastly black-eyed monstrous version.
And now the movie switches off of the found-footage angle and goes to an omniscient camera as we start tracking another journalist who's pursuing the story of the special DMT and the death of the first journalist, who was a classmate of hers while in college. After an initial encounter in the desert, she gets involved with then enlists the help of a Hunter S Thomson-like figure played by Ted Levine.
The story is very close to Lovecraft's "From Beyond", however it's the DMT itself rather than any wave-generation machine that allows the other side to sense and interact with our side of reality. It's a little confusing regarding the origin of the compound, but the twists are interesting enough. There's a little of it that reminds me a bit of John Dies at The End, which makes sense given that JDaTE is basically Hunter S Thompson + HP Lovecraft + Poop Jokes. Banshee Chapter is obviously much more serious, but Ted Levine's character keeps it somewhat light.
While having a lot of very nice moments of creepiness and tension, I feel like it may have been a bit rushed or at least poorly allocated. The nice scary parts seem like they go past very quickly while less important character interactions linger, leading to an ending sprint that is crammed and maybe a bit too much of a sprint. Sitting with some of the revelations from the climax before the actual climax would've probably made the whole thing feel a bit weightier.
That said, I really enjoyed watching it and have given some thought to renting it again, or claiming a more permanent copy. So if a decent adaptation of "From Beyond" with colors of "Fear and Loathing" sounds interesting, check it out.
--PXA
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Horror Off-Season: The Loved Ones
What the hell did I just watch? It claims to be a movie called The Loved Ones, an Australian horror film written and directed by Sean Byrne. What I think it actually is, is a prank in some absurd contest between horror directors for who can come up with the most deranged, over-the-top, stupid-bloody, bizarre and senseless crap possible.
I'm sure a lot of this is going to mirror my complaints about Asylum Blackout, but that movie actually had a character or two, a setup, and an ok ending. The Loved Ones exists solely to bombard the viewer with as much twisted violence as possible, delivered by some cute but mentally disturbed girl. Which I'm sure is part of its angle, a sort of "Oooo lookie she wears pink and lobotomizes boys with a power drill while giggling about it" thing.
Well, that jokes gets old pretty quickly and the movie has nothing else that makes any sense to offer. The beginning of the movie is a perfect example: It starts in teen movie mode, with pretty-boy Brent doing school, buying drugs, talking about condoms with his friend. There's a dance coming up and Brent is going with his girlfriend, Holly. This requires him to turn down a sweet, comely girl, named Lola. Brent goes to screw his girlfriend in the car, and after he gets to EXPERIENCE BIJ he goes home and acts depressed. Suddenly, he's decided to go into the wilderness and climb a rock face. After staring at the sun he for a while he's assaulted by an old guy and dragged off to a pickup truck. If that seems jarring and inconsistent, it's because it is. I have no idea why our protagonist went from getting laid, to listening to heavy metal, to mumbling at his mom, to free climbing, except to provide a conveniently isolated location for him to be abducted from.
The rest of the movie plays like a mating of the Mickey Mouse Club and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. With lobotomized cannibal pseudo-zombies. Can't forget those. They're in there, in some secret basement pit with blast-doors under the living room floor. And I think the worst part is that everything that I've mentioned, aside from the heavy metal and the rock climbing, are in the preview. There's nothing this movie has, plot wise, that hasn't already been shown. So the only reason to watch is to see everything that was hinted at get revealed in uncensored glory. It's like they made a trailer and then filled in the blanks.
The Loved Ones also does that high-contrast, slightly desaturated thing that seems pretty popular now in movies like yellowbrickroad, though the scenes in the torture house are sharply lit and over-saturated to make everything look even more screwed up and garish. I was half expecting low-angle shots with a fish-eye lens like a 90s grunge music video.
The one shot I actually enjoyed was right at the end where Lola's in the prom dress, bloody and beaten, crawling down the street with a cleaver in-hand.
Outside of that, this was like...Disney presents iCarly in HOSTEL. I am so sick of torture porn. I'm gonna go watch Absentia again.
--PXA
I'm sure a lot of this is going to mirror my complaints about Asylum Blackout, but that movie actually had a character or two, a setup, and an ok ending. The Loved Ones exists solely to bombard the viewer with as much twisted violence as possible, delivered by some cute but mentally disturbed girl. Which I'm sure is part of its angle, a sort of "Oooo lookie she wears pink and lobotomizes boys with a power drill while giggling about it" thing.
Well, that jokes gets old pretty quickly and the movie has nothing else that makes any sense to offer. The beginning of the movie is a perfect example: It starts in teen movie mode, with pretty-boy Brent doing school, buying drugs, talking about condoms with his friend. There's a dance coming up and Brent is going with his girlfriend, Holly. This requires him to turn down a sweet, comely girl, named Lola. Brent goes to screw his girlfriend in the car, and after he gets to EXPERIENCE BIJ he goes home and acts depressed. Suddenly, he's decided to go into the wilderness and climb a rock face. After staring at the sun he for a while he's assaulted by an old guy and dragged off to a pickup truck. If that seems jarring and inconsistent, it's because it is. I have no idea why our protagonist went from getting laid, to listening to heavy metal, to mumbling at his mom, to free climbing, except to provide a conveniently isolated location for him to be abducted from.
The rest of the movie plays like a mating of the Mickey Mouse Club and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. With lobotomized cannibal pseudo-zombies. Can't forget those. They're in there, in some secret basement pit with blast-doors under the living room floor. And I think the worst part is that everything that I've mentioned, aside from the heavy metal and the rock climbing, are in the preview. There's nothing this movie has, plot wise, that hasn't already been shown. So the only reason to watch is to see everything that was hinted at get revealed in uncensored glory. It's like they made a trailer and then filled in the blanks.
The Loved Ones also does that high-contrast, slightly desaturated thing that seems pretty popular now in movies like yellowbrickroad, though the scenes in the torture house are sharply lit and over-saturated to make everything look even more screwed up and garish. I was half expecting low-angle shots with a fish-eye lens like a 90s grunge music video.
The one shot I actually enjoyed was right at the end where Lola's in the prom dress, bloody and beaten, crawling down the street with a cleaver in-hand.
Outside of that, this was like...Disney presents iCarly in HOSTEL. I am so sick of torture porn. I'm gonna go watch Absentia again.
--PXA
Monday, July 9, 2012
Horror Off-Season: Absentia
So I have no idea where I first heard about Absentia, or why it took me so long to get to watching it. I'm now grateful to the Netflix shipping glitch that delivered the DVD to me a few days early because after the mind-bending story and gnawing questions of Prometheus and the brutality and left-field ending of Asylum Blackout... Absentia was a breath of fresh scares.
Absentia is an indie horror movie written and directed by Mike Flanagan and released in 2011. And it is one of the best put together indie movies I've seen. It's not without flaws and you can definitely tell it didn't have much of a budget but the movie looks excellent. The soundtrack is practically non-existent but it serves to accentuate the uncomfortable sparseness of the movie.
The basic plot here, trying not to give too much away, is that 7 years ago Tricia's husband Daniel vanished without a trace. 7 years later Tricia is still living in their apartment directly across the street from a pedestrian tunnel under an overpass. She's devoted the majority of her life over the last 7 years to searching for Daniel, as evidenced by the opening shot in which a very pregnant Tricia replaces tattered Missing Person posters around the neighborhood with fresh ones. Tricia's sister, Callie, arrives to help her finalize the paperwork declaring Daniel "Dead in Absentia" and move to a new place. The emotional strain is causing Tricia to have nightmares and hallucinations of a ghastly Daniel with sunken eyes and a gaping silently screaming mouth.
During the days Tricia makes arrangements while Callie goes jogging. On one of these jogs she almost trips over a beat up emaciated stranger played by Doug Jones. This is Walter and he's the first hint we get of a larger plot involving the tunnel.
This is how most of the rest of the movie plays out, Tricia holds the plot thread of Daniel while Callie holds the plot thread of the tunnel. The threads are mostly separate until the sisters come together near the end. After a massive reveal/twist at about the halfway point, the movie becomes a very different kind of supernatural thriller. This 2nd half focuses more on straining the character relationships that have been developed. The movie also starts to tie in existing fairy tales into its mythology, giving it a real urban legend quality. The movie ends with a heroic sacrifice that unfortunately was for naught and closes with a similar sequence to the opening bit with the Missing Person posters, making everything nicely circular...although really depressing.
I really like the scares in this movie, there were pretty slick looking and the editing worked well. There were lots of shots where it seemed like there were two Daniels and that was pretty cool. I also really liked that they weren't punctuated by the sound track in that face-smack way a lot of movies do. I loved the scares in Insidious partially because of the soundtrack, but here it would have seemed silly and out of place since the entire movie is presented with a massive sense of restraint when it came to focus, lighting, and soundtrack.
Absentia isn't a perfect or amazing movie, but it is really good and a nice change from the increasingly violent horror mainstream. It's a great tragic story with well executed scares. The camera work and soundtrack create a atmosphere of brooding depression and strained emotions that really gets under your skin and sits with you for a while. But the cop characters are so awkward they almost don't seem like people. There is an odd subplot involving Doug Jones' character and his son that I wish had gotten more fleshed out, especially given the time they spent with it in the first half of the movie. I felt cheated when it got downgraded to "supporting evidence" status. It's well worth watching and the scares were so good they almost kept me up at night.
--PXA
Absentia is an indie horror movie written and directed by Mike Flanagan and released in 2011. And it is one of the best put together indie movies I've seen. It's not without flaws and you can definitely tell it didn't have much of a budget but the movie looks excellent. The soundtrack is practically non-existent but it serves to accentuate the uncomfortable sparseness of the movie.
The basic plot here, trying not to give too much away, is that 7 years ago Tricia's husband Daniel vanished without a trace. 7 years later Tricia is still living in their apartment directly across the street from a pedestrian tunnel under an overpass. She's devoted the majority of her life over the last 7 years to searching for Daniel, as evidenced by the opening shot in which a very pregnant Tricia replaces tattered Missing Person posters around the neighborhood with fresh ones. Tricia's sister, Callie, arrives to help her finalize the paperwork declaring Daniel "Dead in Absentia" and move to a new place. The emotional strain is causing Tricia to have nightmares and hallucinations of a ghastly Daniel with sunken eyes and a gaping silently screaming mouth.
During the days Tricia makes arrangements while Callie goes jogging. On one of these jogs she almost trips over a beat up emaciated stranger played by Doug Jones. This is Walter and he's the first hint we get of a larger plot involving the tunnel.
This is how most of the rest of the movie plays out, Tricia holds the plot thread of Daniel while Callie holds the plot thread of the tunnel. The threads are mostly separate until the sisters come together near the end. After a massive reveal/twist at about the halfway point, the movie becomes a very different kind of supernatural thriller. This 2nd half focuses more on straining the character relationships that have been developed. The movie also starts to tie in existing fairy tales into its mythology, giving it a real urban legend quality. The movie ends with a heroic sacrifice that unfortunately was for naught and closes with a similar sequence to the opening bit with the Missing Person posters, making everything nicely circular...although really depressing.
I really like the scares in this movie, there were pretty slick looking and the editing worked well. There were lots of shots where it seemed like there were two Daniels and that was pretty cool. I also really liked that they weren't punctuated by the sound track in that face-smack way a lot of movies do. I loved the scares in Insidious partially because of the soundtrack, but here it would have seemed silly and out of place since the entire movie is presented with a massive sense of restraint when it came to focus, lighting, and soundtrack.
Absentia isn't a perfect or amazing movie, but it is really good and a nice change from the increasingly violent horror mainstream. It's a great tragic story with well executed scares. The camera work and soundtrack create a atmosphere of brooding depression and strained emotions that really gets under your skin and sits with you for a while. But the cop characters are so awkward they almost don't seem like people. There is an odd subplot involving Doug Jones' character and his son that I wish had gotten more fleshed out, especially given the time they spent with it in the first half of the movie. I felt cheated when it got downgraded to "supporting evidence" status. It's well worth watching and the scares were so good they almost kept me up at night.
--PXA
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Horror Off-Season: Chernobyl Diaries
Before we begin, there is one thing that I should probably get out of the way. Whenever I write these movie reviews I try to be as objective as possible. Of course reviews are by nature opinion pieces, and it's impossible to form an opinion of something that isn't colored by personal experience or feelings regarding a given topic. So what I mean is that I try to be as aware of these biases as I can so that when one of them makes me feel a certain way about a movie, I can explain it and not just stumble around trying to claim my opinion is absolute truth.
In the interests of being as clear about my own personal biases regarding the subject matter as I can, I will preface this discussion of Chernobyl Diaries with the fact that I am Ukrainian. Now, I was born and raised in suburban America but I'm 50% Ukrainian by blood. My mother immigrated here when she was 14 and attempted to raise me to at least be aware of my heritage. While I never managed to incorporate the language or culture into my own personal identity (unless a drinking contest is involved), there are aspects of my upbringing that are impossible to get around. Namely, I was born in 1985 and the Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986, well before my first conscious memory. I have literally been aware of what happened since I could understand human language. When I was a kid my mother's church would hold fund raisers for Chernobyl victims in their basement, so I would be there toddling around and being exposed to these science fair-style triptychs of the devastation. I saw photos of abandoned and looted apartments and midways, mutated animals, mutated people...for better or worse these images are a part of my formative years, and nuclear disasters and mutants are some of my earliest nightmares.
So I don't need a movie to show me all the gory details or parade a freak with a melted face in front of me like The Hills Have Eyes did. All it needed to do was say "Pripyat" and establish a credible atmosphere and I will take that ball and run with it, imagining nightmare fuel around every corner. And on that token, Chernobyl Diaries performed admirably.
From a visual aspect the film felt a lot like Cloverfield or Quarantine, using mostly handheld camera shots making you feel like you were another person in the middle of the scene. They also had some great wide shots that really drove home the eerie stillness and isolation of the city. The dialog and pace of the plot was all very frantic keeping you moving along from point to point without too much time to stop and catch your bearings, but it was never too difficult to tell what was going on. There was a point towards the end of the movie where an incredibly creepy looking little girl appeared; before you could really get a good look at her, shit went bananas and everybody had to run again. I lost track a bit there because a roving band of theater hoppers appeared in my 11:30pm showing and started critiquing the characters.
The introduction bits were difficult to get through because the film knew that with as little as it was going to show of the Pripyat inhabitants that it needed to get going as quickly as possible. As such, it felt like we were being forcibly dragged through the first several minutes of the movie, establishing the character relationships. I'm not really sure if it was a bad thing, but I didn't feel like I could really focus on anything until the movie settled into the main storyline.
There were bits where it could be argued that the characters behave retardedly for plot convenience and that no real person would act so stupid, but I didn't see it. Yes, there were instances of information being withheld until after it would've been most important, or just mentioned and brushed aside...but from the perspective of the characters that information did not matter. Even if they had been able to put 2 and 2 together to get 4, it wouldn't have made a lick of difference for their situation. The characters weren't particularly deep, but nobody seemed like an obviously obnoxious stereotype without any other qualities, and the acting was passable enough that everyone felt genuine. That's not to say everyone was memorable or unique, some of them were boring and forgettable, but they felt like real people. Uri is a standout because while I may question his badass credentials, he felt a bit tragic when he was giving the tour.
The group dynamics were a bit chaotic, but can you really blame them given the situation? In the chaos, it also seemed like the movie kindof dropped a few things. There was a moment where one character was bitten pretty badly by some mutant fish, and then nothing is ever made of it again. It's a little odd, but I didn't even think of it until several hours after the movie.
The very end of the movie threw me for a total loop, I think it could've actually benefited from being maybe 5 minutes shorter. It's one of those totally unexpected, very unfair, twist ending sucker punches where they kill the final cast member in like the last frame of the movie in a very cruel way. It was just so sudden and strange that I couldn't really make sense of it. I'm sure there's an audience for that sort of thing since I've seen a lot of other movies and episodes of The Outer Limits end like that, but it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Chernobyl Diaries isn't some grand horror statement, but it is a pretty competently done scary movie. I think that all it was aiming to do was have some fun with an interesting premise and do something exciting, and at that I can't fault it. I know I have a large bias regarding the setting going in, but I don't think that has anything to do with why I think it's not a bad flick. I think that given the subject matter and just a bit of imagination anyone can psych themselves up for a scary movie set in a mini-nuclear wasteland. It is creepier because it really exists.
I enjoyed it, it was a fun movie to watch and it had some very well done scary moments.
Anyway, that's just like...my opinion, man.
--PXA
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Self-extension, Video game characters, and the horror of discovery... Oh my?
It took me a really long time to write the previous article because I just had too many topics I wanted to bring up, and that led to an over-long and meandering article. I'd still like to discuss them a bit, so while I edited them out of the previous post so it could focus on SCP-087 I'd like to visit some of them now.
Firstly, when I was writing Bro-Horror I became really interested in the nature of horror games vs movies. Video games are in a unique position to tell their stories because you interact with them, it's an active experience instead of a passive one like watching a movie. In a movie you can connect with a well written character and vicariously experience the horror they're going through, but that doesn't quite compare with the depth of connection you have to a player character in a game and the game world. People always talk about the immersiveness of video games, and how a great game can pull you into the story. I think there's also more at play here, because as SCP-087 shows: it's not just the world/story/character, you can immerse a player with nothing but an in-game avatar.
What I'm referring to are the theories of psychologist Gordon Allport (1897 - 1967). Allport was one of the first humanist psychologists, and his theories on personality and self went on to influence other major players like Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs. He posited a concept he called "Self-extension", basically that at around age 4 we begin to incorporate external identifiers into our sense of a self. Concepts like "I'm a New Yorker" and "I'm a software engineer", and also why we take damage or slights to our cars or other possessions so personally. There's something really special about controlling the car that really gets people to identify with it. We often take damage to our cars personally, and we talk about things that happen while we're driving without referencing the intermediate vehicle. Think of how often you hear "That guy cut me off!" vs "He cut me off with his car" or some other variant. It can't just be the constant use or the cost because I don't feel like this about my shoes or other property like my computer.
We tend to incorporate the car so far into our sense of self that it becomes part of "us" instead of "ours", and it seems this extends to video game characters. When we talk about video games we always refer to our characters in the 1st person instead of talking about them as characters. If you think about the sentence "So I cleared out all the Medusas." vs "Kratos cleared out all the Medusas." or "I had Kratos clear out all the Medusas.", the first seems more natural. If we're talking about God of War we talk about what we did in the game, not what Kratos did.
It's not surprising with this, that horror games have historically been really effective at creating a lasting connection with players. Some of the bigger games that came out of the PlayStation/PS2 era were survival horror games: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Clocktower. But more recent AAA titles have failed to recapture that magic, but other people have already contributed enough to why that is. The games that have succeeded have been smaller indie titles. I'm not entirely convinced this has to do with the budgets directly, but comes about as a side effect of where a studio has to focus their energies with the small budgets.
Enter, one of my favorite games: Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released in late 2010 by Frictional Games and was a great hit, even notoriously difficult to please Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation enjoyed the game and said he was scared by it. In the game you are Daniel, a helpless British guy with no memory or so much as a sharp stick to defend yourself with.
The game tells its brutal and Lovecraftian story through flash backs and diary entries that force you, as Daniel, to remember a past that you obviously didn't want to remember. Although at first glance it seems a little trite, the amnesiac protagonist trope does something very useful to the story: it equalizes your knowledge with Daniel's. Even in a game like Skyrim or Fallout where you have a huge amount of customization available, your character has had a rich life before you got ahold of them. That gap will always insulate you from the character, but because both you and Daniel know exactly as much about Daniel's life as he does that element of separation between you and the character is removed.
Amnesia's story is based on the need to know more and what happens when you learn terrible knowledge not meant for man. This theme is present in the game as the Orb, and the Shadow that kills anyone who attempts to learn its secrets. However, it's also present in what happens to you as the player when Daniel learns more about his past. His past was filled with very unsavory things, and as you continue to uncover them you can't help but feel that you didn't want to know that. What's important is that when you learn that Daniel had done these things, you actually feel a little bad about them because Daniel is a part of "you", to some degree. This makes the first play through so uncomfortable, but the affect does diminish.
In the Silent Hill games, particularly Silent Hill 2 because I've never played 1 or 3 at all, James is a fully fleshed out character with a life, personal connections, and flaws to put it lightly. And you know none of it, but the both of you have been placed in the middle of all this craziness that neither of you understands, that similarity can connect you. In this game part of the horror relies on the story, and the connections to James, so they need to have a character they can tack all these flaws on and build a connection to the town into. Those things themselves are disturbing so they can still be scary when they're not internalized to the degree that Daniel's actions were. Also, they're unknown to you at the beginning of the game so when the connection is revealed to you and James there is still some of the horror of discovery because you've both had the same experience in the town.
While it's not related to self-extension, I think the horror of discovery is worth mentioning because it does play such a huge role in making these two games psychologically disturbing, and plays to Amnesia's Lovecraftian theme. While everything in both games is pretty messed up on its own, it's passive: the monsters are just being presented to you. Discovery is active: when you think about the story while you play, and put James' or Daniel's actions into context and discover for yourself how they relate to the situation. You've been forced to participate in the disturbing realization and that really makes it internal to your thoughts...you've been incepted except instead of "break up my father's empire", the idea planted in your head is "James murdered his infirm wife and half the monsters in Silent Hill are manifestations of his own sexual guilt.".
In Dead Space, which is a technically wonderful game that I've yet to get around to finishing, the best and most skin-crawling parts are when I see logs with Dr. Kyne or encounter Mercer. It's that feeling of realizing your trapped in a tin can breached to the vacuum of space with an absolutely insane and truly zealous adherent of some Necromorph religion. Unfortunately, what should have been gut-wrenching tension spent most of the game as frustrated nervousness because everything is a jump scare and Necromorphs kept sneaking into my camera's blind spot and eviscerating me in one blow. I did the same battle probably close to 20 times before I finally got through it, that made it annoying and not scary. The game thought the monsters were creepier than their story, so I had to get through them before continuing the story and that ruined the atmosphere. Nothing takes you out of the immersion like a game-over screen every few minutes for a few hours.
Anyway, those are just some ideas I had. What do you think?
Firstly, when I was writing Bro-Horror I became really interested in the nature of horror games vs movies. Video games are in a unique position to tell their stories because you interact with them, it's an active experience instead of a passive one like watching a movie. In a movie you can connect with a well written character and vicariously experience the horror they're going through, but that doesn't quite compare with the depth of connection you have to a player character in a game and the game world. People always talk about the immersiveness of video games, and how a great game can pull you into the story. I think there's also more at play here, because as SCP-087 shows: it's not just the world/story/character, you can immerse a player with nothing but an in-game avatar.
 | |
| Gordon Allport |
We tend to incorporate the car so far into our sense of self that it becomes part of "us" instead of "ours", and it seems this extends to video game characters. When we talk about video games we always refer to our characters in the 1st person instead of talking about them as characters. If you think about the sentence "So I cleared out all the Medusas." vs "Kratos cleared out all the Medusas." or "I had Kratos clear out all the Medusas.", the first seems more natural. If we're talking about God of War we talk about what we did in the game, not what Kratos did.
It's not surprising with this, that horror games have historically been really effective at creating a lasting connection with players. Some of the bigger games that came out of the PlayStation/PS2 era were survival horror games: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Clocktower. But more recent AAA titles have failed to recapture that magic, but other people have already contributed enough to why that is. The games that have succeeded have been smaller indie titles. I'm not entirely convinced this has to do with the budgets directly, but comes about as a side effect of where a studio has to focus their energies with the small budgets.
 |
| Amnesia: The Dark Descent |
The game tells its brutal and Lovecraftian story through flash backs and diary entries that force you, as Daniel, to remember a past that you obviously didn't want to remember. Although at first glance it seems a little trite, the amnesiac protagonist trope does something very useful to the story: it equalizes your knowledge with Daniel's. Even in a game like Skyrim or Fallout where you have a huge amount of customization available, your character has had a rich life before you got ahold of them. That gap will always insulate you from the character, but because both you and Daniel know exactly as much about Daniel's life as he does that element of separation between you and the character is removed.
Amnesia's story is based on the need to know more and what happens when you learn terrible knowledge not meant for man. This theme is present in the game as the Orb, and the Shadow that kills anyone who attempts to learn its secrets. However, it's also present in what happens to you as the player when Daniel learns more about his past. His past was filled with very unsavory things, and as you continue to uncover them you can't help but feel that you didn't want to know that. What's important is that when you learn that Daniel had done these things, you actually feel a little bad about them because Daniel is a part of "you", to some degree. This makes the first play through so uncomfortable, but the affect does diminish.
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| Silent Hill 2 |
While it's not related to self-extension, I think the horror of discovery is worth mentioning because it does play such a huge role in making these two games psychologically disturbing, and plays to Amnesia's Lovecraftian theme. While everything in both games is pretty messed up on its own, it's passive: the monsters are just being presented to you. Discovery is active: when you think about the story while you play, and put James' or Daniel's actions into context and discover for yourself how they relate to the situation. You've been forced to participate in the disturbing realization and that really makes it internal to your thoughts...you've been incepted except instead of "break up my father's empire", the idea planted in your head is "James murdered his infirm wife and half the monsters in Silent Hill are manifestations of his own sexual guilt.".
In Dead Space, which is a technically wonderful game that I've yet to get around to finishing, the best and most skin-crawling parts are when I see logs with Dr. Kyne or encounter Mercer. It's that feeling of realizing your trapped in a tin can breached to the vacuum of space with an absolutely insane and truly zealous adherent of some Necromorph religion. Unfortunately, what should have been gut-wrenching tension spent most of the game as frustrated nervousness because everything is a jump scare and Necromorphs kept sneaking into my camera's blind spot and eviscerating me in one blow. I did the same battle probably close to 20 times before I finally got through it, that made it annoying and not scary. The game thought the monsters were creepier than their story, so I had to get through them before continuing the story and that ruined the atmosphere. Nothing takes you out of the immersion like a game-over screen every few minutes for a few hours.
Anyway, those are just some ideas I had. What do you think?
Friday, May 11, 2012
Horror games only work if you want to keep playing
I don't often discuss games publicly because I just don't feel qualified to talk about most aspects of them with any sort of authority. However, horror games are definitely something I feel like I understand, since I spend so much time talking about horror outside of games.
Recently, someone on reddit.com/r/horror posted a link to a small game based on the horror/creepypasta project called "The SCP Foundation". The game is specifically based on SCP-087, the code name given to a bottomless stairwell located at an unnamed college campus, and is one of the most terrifying games that I have ever played. I'm not lying when I say I lost sleep because of how deeply frightened I was after playing this game for like 20 minutes at 3 in the afternoon. This is despite the fact that it has maybe 3 distinct textures that don't even wrap correctly, no story beyond the SCP itself, and seems to have been made in spare time then released for free by a bunch of guys from 4chan's /v/ board. I noticed something interesting about what exactly made it so compelling and horrifying at the same time and I wanted to talk about it.
SCP-087 is cheap and ugly but it is, knowingly or not, a brilliant exercise in purely experiential gaming. Video games, while generally being pretty immersive always break that immersion in a very fundamental way: You aren't your character. You always know something or see something your character doesn't, and the disconnect is either integral to the story or the gameplay. It's either creating tension by giving the players knowledge of events that affect the character but that the character doesn't know, or assisting gameplay by giving the character knowledge or skill that the player doesn't know about until told. I can't think of very many games that have stories that are told entirely during the run time by what happens to the character. Maybe some of the early FPS games that are more about the run-and-gun experience and don't need more than a very simple story.
The story frames the experience, but a story needs characters so in order to exist in a story you have to have a vessel to act through, and this will always be not-you. The horror you experience in these cases is a lot more like the horror you get when you're really immersed in a movie or a book. It can be really terrifying but there's always a comfort in the fact that it's happening to a character in a story, not you. The eventual resolution of the main plot is also a satisfying experience which gives you a nice payoff.
By doing away with an in-game story SCP-087 has removed the need to have a character for you to act through. By not having any sort of goals, the game no longer needs any of the traditional mechanisms for interacting with the player so it has no options, no HUD, no inventory or anything. With all of this out of the way there's nothing separating you from your in-game self, for all intents and purposes you are in the game and that makes it uniquely terrifying. There's no more disconnect, or comfort because this is all happening to a character.
In most other games, horror or not, the motivation to keep playing the game comes from a desire to reach the end. If a game is too long, without giving us anything new most people will stop playing, but if a game continues to weave new and interesting events into the narrative people will just keep playing. Look to RPGs, especially Mass Effect and Fallout for evidence of this. A game like Amnesia uses this to great effect since as you go on you learn more and more about Daniel's past and experience the dawning realization that Daniel has done horrible things. The very act of continuing the story contributes to the horror of the experience and also has the effect of strengthening the player's resolve to reach the end-game and take revenge on Alexander.
SCP-087 doesn't have an end game, but you keep playing beyond the point where you've seen everything because you want to continue the experience. I had always thought a good horror game relied on a compelling story and a great player character, with mechanics and visuals that supported the themes of the game, but now it seems like everything else is just a means to an end because you can have a truly terrifying game without any characters or story.
This just goes to further my theory that major studios simply can't produce a good horror game anymore, because how on Earth would you market a game without characters or a story?
Games are weird, man.
--PXA
Recently, someone on reddit.com/r/horror posted a link to a small game based on the horror/creepypasta project called "The SCP Foundation". The game is specifically based on SCP-087, the code name given to a bottomless stairwell located at an unnamed college campus, and is one of the most terrifying games that I have ever played. I'm not lying when I say I lost sleep because of how deeply frightened I was after playing this game for like 20 minutes at 3 in the afternoon. This is despite the fact that it has maybe 3 distinct textures that don't even wrap correctly, no story beyond the SCP itself, and seems to have been made in spare time then released for free by a bunch of guys from 4chan's /v/ board. I noticed something interesting about what exactly made it so compelling and horrifying at the same time and I wanted to talk about it.
SCP-087 is cheap and ugly but it is, knowingly or not, a brilliant exercise in purely experiential gaming. Video games, while generally being pretty immersive always break that immersion in a very fundamental way: You aren't your character. You always know something or see something your character doesn't, and the disconnect is either integral to the story or the gameplay. It's either creating tension by giving the players knowledge of events that affect the character but that the character doesn't know, or assisting gameplay by giving the character knowledge or skill that the player doesn't know about until told. I can't think of very many games that have stories that are told entirely during the run time by what happens to the character. Maybe some of the early FPS games that are more about the run-and-gun experience and don't need more than a very simple story.
The story frames the experience, but a story needs characters so in order to exist in a story you have to have a vessel to act through, and this will always be not-you. The horror you experience in these cases is a lot more like the horror you get when you're really immersed in a movie or a book. It can be really terrifying but there's always a comfort in the fact that it's happening to a character in a story, not you. The eventual resolution of the main plot is also a satisfying experience which gives you a nice payoff.
By doing away with an in-game story SCP-087 has removed the need to have a character for you to act through. By not having any sort of goals, the game no longer needs any of the traditional mechanisms for interacting with the player so it has no options, no HUD, no inventory or anything. With all of this out of the way there's nothing separating you from your in-game self, for all intents and purposes you are in the game and that makes it uniquely terrifying. There's no more disconnect, or comfort because this is all happening to a character.
In most other games, horror or not, the motivation to keep playing the game comes from a desire to reach the end. If a game is too long, without giving us anything new most people will stop playing, but if a game continues to weave new and interesting events into the narrative people will just keep playing. Look to RPGs, especially Mass Effect and Fallout for evidence of this. A game like Amnesia uses this to great effect since as you go on you learn more and more about Daniel's past and experience the dawning realization that Daniel has done horrible things. The very act of continuing the story contributes to the horror of the experience and also has the effect of strengthening the player's resolve to reach the end-game and take revenge on Alexander.
SCP-087 doesn't have an end game, but you keep playing beyond the point where you've seen everything because you want to continue the experience. I had always thought a good horror game relied on a compelling story and a great player character, with mechanics and visuals that supported the themes of the game, but now it seems like everything else is just a means to an end because you can have a truly terrifying game without any characters or story.
This just goes to further my theory that major studios simply can't produce a good horror game anymore, because how on Earth would you market a game without characters or a story?
Games are weird, man.
--PXA
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Horror Off-Season: 13 Ghosts 1960 and 2001 compared
13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies. It stars a post-American Pie Shannon Elizabeth and a pre-Monk Tony Shalhoub. The movie is a remake of William Castle's 1960 13 Ghosts, which is interesting in itself in that it involved a pretty cool and specific gimmick: Illusion-O.
Rather than write a standard review, since even the remake is over a decade old at this point I thought it would be fun to sort of compare/contrast the two and see how the material was updated 40 years later.
So, first off, William Castle was famous for inventing tons of gimmicks to get audiences into his movies and get his movies talked about. Just to name a few:
Illusion-O was an early form of color filtering, where the majority of the movie was in standard black & white while certain scenes with ghosts in them where tinted blue and the ghosts were overlayed in red. The audience could choose to either watch with blue tinted glasses or red ones, supposedly provided by the character Dr. Plato Zorba (Cyrus Kriticos in the remake). The blue glasses would make the ghosts invisible and the red ones would make them stand out. These glasses mirror the glasses in the movie the characters have to use to see the ghosts, and makes for a really interesting interactive element where you can choose how you want to see the scene.
Basic concept
The brief concept of the movie is largely the same as the original: A rich relative dies and leaves his house to his nephew, who is struggling to financially support his family consisting of an attractive daughter and a son with an odd obsession. In this house are 12 distinct spirits, and the nephew has been branded as the 13th. In the original the supernatural happenings are more or less incidental to the main story arc, which is the lawyer's attempt to find the uncle's hidden fortune. The remake obviously places a greater emphasis on the supernatural aspect making it the main focus and inventing a ghost-powered mechanism. This is pretty obvious as the opening scene in the remake is Cyrus and Dennis in the act of entrapping a ghost named "The Juggernaut", a scene that establishes the uncle's character as a ghost hunter with massive resources and also a lot of the internal mythology invented for the movie. The original opened with a short title sequence and then started the story with a short bit of Cyrus lecturing at an archeology museum.
The Family
The characters are pretty similar in archetype, as mentioned above but the remake differs slightly. The original had a "complete" family of Cyrus and Hilda as husband and wife with son, Buck, and daughter, Medea. The uncle is Plato Zorba and the lawyer is Ben Rush. Elaine Zacharides is the maid at the house and Cyrus has a friend named Van Allen, they serve as exposition speakers. The remake has a "broken" family, because the wife has died and the husband has to continue as a single father...something that wasn't nearly as accepted in 1960. So the father is Arthur Kriticos with son, Bobby, and daughter, Kathy. The uncle is Cyrus Kriticos and the lawyer is Ben Moss. The remake invents the characters of Kalina Oretzia and Dennis Rafkin to serve exposition, but they are unfamiliar to Arthur and more closely related to the uncle, Cyrus. They've also invented Maggie Bess to serve as Bobby and Kathy's nanny, although I think the motivation for the character's creation was really to have a sassy black female played by a popular musician.
What's interesting is that in the original, Cyrus was characterized much more as husband and family man. He had a slightly adversarial relationship with his wife and seemed firstly concerned with the family unit as a nebulous whole and then his wife. When the character becomes Arthur in the remake he's very much the father and is concerned with his kids over all else. His emotions and reactions to any threats confronting his kids are much more powerful and immediate while Cyrus seems restrained and sometimes even uninvolved with the situation.
The Ghosts
The original's ghosts are all fairly unique, and they explain some of them in the story. None of them are particularly hostile towards the family, apart from one scene in which the ghost of a chef in the kitchen throws a kitchen knife at the wall and almost hits Cyrus. The ghosts don't really serve any particular point in the narrative except to be spooky, and they don't even have particularly involved backgrounds. The two that are explained the most are a lion tamer, who's head was bitten off by a lion (and the lion) and a chef who catches his love with another man and kills them both.
One of the things that I really liked about the remake is the ghosts were central to the story about the house being a machine, and they all had rich backgrounds which were alluded to in the movie itself and expanded upon further by a DVD extra. The ghosts all are made to fit distinct archetypes from a "Black Zodiac" created for the film. Since the whole story is more focused on the supernatural aspect they spend a lot of effort creating and showing this internal mythology with quicksilver flares, spoken spells on reel-to-reel tapes, written spells carved into the glass walls of the house, cubes, even the glasses take a more consistent and frequent role. I noticed that in the original there was only a single pair of glasses, often worn by Cyrus. Buck seemed to be able to see the ghosts pretty well without the glasses, as evidenced by him telling his parents to move out of the way of the knife before it was thrown in the kitchen scene.
In Closing
Neither movie is particularly scary, but I think if you're in the right mindset and especially with the glasses the original has a lot more potential even though the entire story and supernatural aspects in particular are a lot weaker. The remake suffers from everything being so well designed and just "Damn, isn't that COOL?!" to really get under your skin and unnerve you. However, I think that also makes its production design and visual style strengths as entrance to Bro-horror. Although I wouldn't call this bro-horror in the strictest sense because it does hit some very good emotional cues. A lot of people absolutely hate Matthew Lillard, but I don't think he's that bad of an actor and the way his character, Dennis, grows attached to Arthur's family and even sacrifices himself in the end is quite touching. It's also got a lot of depth to the universe because of the spell rules and the backstories given to each ghost, it all feels very solid and fleshed out. I would almost want to see more movies that play around with the mythology established for this remake of a William Castle gimmick movie from 1960.
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So, first off, William Castle was famous for inventing tons of gimmicks to get audiences into his movies and get his movies talked about. Just to name a few:
- Macabre (1958): Lloyds of London insured each audience member for $1,000 in case they die of fright during the movie.
- House on Haunted Hill (1959): Emerg-O, where a glow-in-the-dark skeleton was suspended over the audience for a climactic scene.
- The Tingler (1959): Percept-O, where he had theaters install electric joy-buzzers in some seats to give people electric shocks during a section where the monster came off the screen and into the audience.
- Homicidal (1961): The Fright Break, immediately before the climax audience members who were too afraid would be allowed to leave the theater and be treated and calmed by a nurse in the lobby.
Basic concept
The brief concept of the movie is largely the same as the original: A rich relative dies and leaves his house to his nephew, who is struggling to financially support his family consisting of an attractive daughter and a son with an odd obsession. In this house are 12 distinct spirits, and the nephew has been branded as the 13th. In the original the supernatural happenings are more or less incidental to the main story arc, which is the lawyer's attempt to find the uncle's hidden fortune. The remake obviously places a greater emphasis on the supernatural aspect making it the main focus and inventing a ghost-powered mechanism. This is pretty obvious as the opening scene in the remake is Cyrus and Dennis in the act of entrapping a ghost named "The Juggernaut", a scene that establishes the uncle's character as a ghost hunter with massive resources and also a lot of the internal mythology invented for the movie. The original opened with a short title sequence and then started the story with a short bit of Cyrus lecturing at an archeology museum.
The Family
The characters are pretty similar in archetype, as mentioned above but the remake differs slightly. The original had a "complete" family of Cyrus and Hilda as husband and wife with son, Buck, and daughter, Medea. The uncle is Plato Zorba and the lawyer is Ben Rush. Elaine Zacharides is the maid at the house and Cyrus has a friend named Van Allen, they serve as exposition speakers. The remake has a "broken" family, because the wife has died and the husband has to continue as a single father...something that wasn't nearly as accepted in 1960. So the father is Arthur Kriticos with son, Bobby, and daughter, Kathy. The uncle is Cyrus Kriticos and the lawyer is Ben Moss. The remake invents the characters of Kalina Oretzia and Dennis Rafkin to serve exposition, but they are unfamiliar to Arthur and more closely related to the uncle, Cyrus. They've also invented Maggie Bess to serve as Bobby and Kathy's nanny, although I think the motivation for the character's creation was really to have a sassy black female played by a popular musician.
What's interesting is that in the original, Cyrus was characterized much more as husband and family man. He had a slightly adversarial relationship with his wife and seemed firstly concerned with the family unit as a nebulous whole and then his wife. When the character becomes Arthur in the remake he's very much the father and is concerned with his kids over all else. His emotions and reactions to any threats confronting his kids are much more powerful and immediate while Cyrus seems restrained and sometimes even uninvolved with the situation.
The Ghosts
The original's ghosts are all fairly unique, and they explain some of them in the story. None of them are particularly hostile towards the family, apart from one scene in which the ghost of a chef in the kitchen throws a kitchen knife at the wall and almost hits Cyrus. The ghosts don't really serve any particular point in the narrative except to be spooky, and they don't even have particularly involved backgrounds. The two that are explained the most are a lion tamer, who's head was bitten off by a lion (and the lion) and a chef who catches his love with another man and kills them both.
In Closing
Neither movie is particularly scary, but I think if you're in the right mindset and especially with the glasses the original has a lot more potential even though the entire story and supernatural aspects in particular are a lot weaker. The remake suffers from everything being so well designed and just "Damn, isn't that COOL?!" to really get under your skin and unnerve you. However, I think that also makes its production design and visual style strengths as entrance to Bro-horror. Although I wouldn't call this bro-horror in the strictest sense because it does hit some very good emotional cues. A lot of people absolutely hate Matthew Lillard, but I don't think he's that bad of an actor and the way his character, Dennis, grows attached to Arthur's family and even sacrifices himself in the end is quite touching. It's also got a lot of depth to the universe because of the spell rules and the backstories given to each ghost, it all feels very solid and fleshed out. I would almost want to see more movies that play around with the mythology established for this remake of a William Castle gimmick movie from 1960.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Horror Off-Season: Splatter Disco
I picked up a DVD of Splatter Disco at the Chiller expo a few years ago, and really wasn't expecting much except "enjoyably retarded". The featured indie movie that year was heavily promoted at the show and was called Late Fee, which was trying to be a clever anthology but was just really bad and thrown together.
Splatter Disco markets itself as the first Slasher Musical and the DVD cover features a furry wielding a knife overlaid onto a disco ball, so it's easy to understand where my initial expectation came from. However, it's actually a really cleverly written and well-crafted low budget genre movie.
Released in 2007, Splatter Disco was written and directed by Richard Griffin and stars Ken Foree, Trent Haaga, and Debbie Rochon. It's got a decidedly low budget Troma-films feel and Trent even got his start with Troma.
The basic story is that Kent Chubb (Haaga) is the owner of the Den 'O Iniquity, a fetish dance club in a small New England town, and is forced to contend with the corrupt city government trying to shut down his club (for being immoral), his dying father Shank (Foree), and his wife (Rochon) running off with his drugged out lawyer. All while a psychopathic killer is picking off his patrons. There's also a terrifyingly endearing B-plot concerning one of the clubgoer's efforts to stand up for himself and win the affections of a cute girl who's dating a jackass.
It's a low budget movie so there is definitely some awkward acting and sets, but it's still really funny.
The musical numbers are often pretty tongue-in-cheek, including a really interesting rendition of Cole Porter's Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love featuring a horde of yiffing furries. There's also a number which is actually a drug trip in the mind of Kent's lawyer as he attempts to defend Kent in court immediately after dropping acid and includes a singing Angel.
Towards the last act of the movie the killer plot takes a more center roll with all the characters banding together to save themselves, which is a nice contrast to standard slashers which typically only include a single (female) survivor.
There's not a whole lot of gore, just suggestive blood effects. There is some T&A, but being as low budget as the movie is it's not all good. And really it's not often focused on, the movie is more interested in playing sex for laughs. I like that they play fetishes lightly and laugh at the absurdity of it when you really look at some of it. It's more judgmental of the "moral crusaders", while the people at the fetish club are just doing what they like and enjoying the acceptance.
I've seen this movie a few times since first watching it after Chiller that year, and it's still a really fun, campy, genre flick. Well worth checking out.
--PXA
Splatter Disco markets itself as the first Slasher Musical and the DVD cover features a furry wielding a knife overlaid onto a disco ball, so it's easy to understand where my initial expectation came from. However, it's actually a really cleverly written and well-crafted low budget genre movie.
Released in 2007, Splatter Disco was written and directed by Richard Griffin and stars Ken Foree, Trent Haaga, and Debbie Rochon. It's got a decidedly low budget Troma-films feel and Trent even got his start with Troma.
The basic story is that Kent Chubb (Haaga) is the owner of the Den 'O Iniquity, a fetish dance club in a small New England town, and is forced to contend with the corrupt city government trying to shut down his club (for being immoral), his dying father Shank (Foree), and his wife (Rochon) running off with his drugged out lawyer. All while a psychopathic killer is picking off his patrons. There's also a terrifyingly endearing B-plot concerning one of the clubgoer's efforts to stand up for himself and win the affections of a cute girl who's dating a jackass.
It's a low budget movie so there is definitely some awkward acting and sets, but it's still really funny.
The musical numbers are often pretty tongue-in-cheek, including a really interesting rendition of Cole Porter's Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love featuring a horde of yiffing furries. There's also a number which is actually a drug trip in the mind of Kent's lawyer as he attempts to defend Kent in court immediately after dropping acid and includes a singing Angel.
Towards the last act of the movie the killer plot takes a more center roll with all the characters banding together to save themselves, which is a nice contrast to standard slashers which typically only include a single (female) survivor.
There's not a whole lot of gore, just suggestive blood effects. There is some T&A, but being as low budget as the movie is it's not all good. And really it's not often focused on, the movie is more interested in playing sex for laughs. I like that they play fetishes lightly and laugh at the absurdity of it when you really look at some of it. It's more judgmental of the "moral crusaders", while the people at the fetish club are just doing what they like and enjoying the acceptance.
I've seen this movie a few times since first watching it after Chiller that year, and it's still a really fun, campy, genre flick. Well worth checking out.
--PXA
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Horror Off-Season: The Innkeepers
Sunday became a bit of a Ti West-fest. After watching the nicely creepy House of the Devil, I just had to check out writer/director Ti West's follow up: The Innkeepers.
In contrast to House of the Devil, this movie is set in modern day at a Connecticut inn called the Yankee Pedlar. Interestingly, this inn actually exists and the movie was even shot there...though how much varies depending on where you read. The inn's site obviously claims the whole movie was shot there. This is also the 2nd film he's shot (maybe set?) in Connecticut, so there might be a Stephen King/Maine style relationship developing between the New England state and Ti. (Update: I just watched an interview with Ti West, apparently the crew stayed at the Yankee Pedlar during the filming of House of the Devil, and weird things kept happening at the hotel but he didn't have the idea to make the movie until a year later. Interesting connection between the two movies.)
The story here is that the Yankee Pedlar is closing (it really isn't, feel free to visit), and the two remaining staff members, Claire and Luke, are keeping up a largely empty inn. Outside of their rooms, there are only two rooms occupied at any given time. To entertain themselves in the off time, the two innkeepers are performing a live-in paranormal investigation to uncover the inn's haunted past. Specifically to confirm the haunting of the inn by a tragic widow named Madeline O'Malley who hung herself in the inn.
A lot of the movie is really just the two of them bantering and doing EVP sessions in various places during the night. The movie really takes its time getting into things, spending a lot of time just watching the characters' daily lives...guests checking in, forgetting towels, fangasming at a famous actress, being creeped out by an oversharing barista, etc. I really liked this, partly because I was expecting something to happen and when it never did, I started getting nervous. Also partly because it was entertaining. I liked watching the characters interact and actually got a feeling for them outside of the context of the movie. It was really good that they didn't take everything deadly serious, and neither did the movie. They felt real, which made it even better when the creepy stuff started to happen.
I really loved the way they approached the creepy things, because it was very suspenseful and discomforting. You spent a lot of the movie tensely waiting for something to happen, and when something did happen it didn't jump out at you and then cut quickly because it wasn't actually something scary, it was presented slowly and deliberately. You could see the thing coming into frame and KNEW that once you saw it, you'll wish you hadn't...but you just keep looking.
The ending sprint is a great, panicked payoff after the setup and development.
This whole movie was really well put together, it had some very funny bits and the characters were great. The horror elements were carefully placed, but the build up and atmosphere made them super effective. I'm definitely on the look out for more Ti West.
--PXA
In contrast to House of the Devil, this movie is set in modern day at a Connecticut inn called the Yankee Pedlar. Interestingly, this inn actually exists and the movie was even shot there...though how much varies depending on where you read. The inn's site obviously claims the whole movie was shot there. This is also the 2nd film he's shot (maybe set?) in Connecticut, so there might be a Stephen King/Maine style relationship developing between the New England state and Ti. (Update: I just watched an interview with Ti West, apparently the crew stayed at the Yankee Pedlar during the filming of House of the Devil, and weird things kept happening at the hotel but he didn't have the idea to make the movie until a year later. Interesting connection between the two movies.)
The story here is that the Yankee Pedlar is closing (it really isn't, feel free to visit), and the two remaining staff members, Claire and Luke, are keeping up a largely empty inn. Outside of their rooms, there are only two rooms occupied at any given time. To entertain themselves in the off time, the two innkeepers are performing a live-in paranormal investigation to uncover the inn's haunted past. Specifically to confirm the haunting of the inn by a tragic widow named Madeline O'Malley who hung herself in the inn.
A lot of the movie is really just the two of them bantering and doing EVP sessions in various places during the night. The movie really takes its time getting into things, spending a lot of time just watching the characters' daily lives...guests checking in, forgetting towels, fangasming at a famous actress, being creeped out by an oversharing barista, etc. I really liked this, partly because I was expecting something to happen and when it never did, I started getting nervous. Also partly because it was entertaining. I liked watching the characters interact and actually got a feeling for them outside of the context of the movie. It was really good that they didn't take everything deadly serious, and neither did the movie. They felt real, which made it even better when the creepy stuff started to happen.
I really loved the way they approached the creepy things, because it was very suspenseful and discomforting. You spent a lot of the movie tensely waiting for something to happen, and when something did happen it didn't jump out at you and then cut quickly because it wasn't actually something scary, it was presented slowly and deliberately. You could see the thing coming into frame and KNEW that once you saw it, you'll wish you hadn't...but you just keep looking.
The ending sprint is a great, panicked payoff after the setup and development.
This whole movie was really well put together, it had some very funny bits and the characters were great. The horror elements were carefully placed, but the build up and atmosphere made them super effective. I'm definitely on the look out for more Ti West.
--PXA
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Horror Off-Season: The House of the Devil
The House of the Devil is a 2009 thriller written and directed by Ti West, starring Jocelin Donahue and Tom Noonan. The story is set in the early 80's, and feels like it could easily have been filmed then. Ti uses a lot of 80's techniques, and even shoots on 16mm film. This sort of dedication really makes the movie. When I first started watching it, I told people it was really good at being set in the 80s. A Haunting In Connecticutt is one of my favorite movies, but it's terrible at being set in the 80s. It felt so modern I just didn't get that it was supposed to be set in a different decade.
Between this movie, The Innkeepers(2011), and being on the horror anthology v/h/s Ti West has really been making a name for himself that is surprisingly unmarred by having directed Cabin Fever 2. And he deserves it, man makes a mighty fine movie. And this is his IMDB picture.
The House of the Devil's premise is a pretty uninteresting throw back to the haunted house/slasher movies it's trying to emulate. Our main character is Samantha, a "nice" college girl who's trying to find her own apartment because her roommate gets too much late-night nookie. To pay for her new apartment she takes a babysitting job being advertised by flyer on campus. The call is decidedly shady, but she takes the job any way. Even after meeting the person placing the ad and having him explain in the creepiest way possible that everything he said about the job until now was a lie.
The house is creepy, all the characters except Samantha and her roommate are pretty creepy. It's a little cheesy, almost, but still very creepy.
The movie builds nicely and then goes totally sideways with a great Satanic twist. There's nothing really remarkable about the ending, but it is gripping to watch. There's a lot that reminds me of Rosemary's Baby and When a Stranger Calls. The ending would be completely ineffective, and downright silly, without the great buildup and characterization from the rest of the movie.
It definitely moves slow, which lends to some of the early atmosphere building feeling like it's laid on too thick, but it pays off because it involves you in the story. This was a really nice throw back to early 80s movies, but with better quality and more interesting pacing. I thought this was a great movie, but it could definitely come off as too slow or too dull or too weird to some audiances.
If you like the old school, or really appreciate a good creepy slow burn without a lot of jump scares or gore, this is worth checking out.
--PXA
Between this movie, The Innkeepers(2011), and being on the horror anthology v/h/s Ti West has really been making a name for himself that is surprisingly unmarred by having directed Cabin Fever 2. And he deserves it, man makes a mighty fine movie. And this is his IMDB picture.
 |
| Where do I sign up to have Buckaroo Bonzai direct my movie? |
The House of the Devil's premise is a pretty uninteresting throw back to the haunted house/slasher movies it's trying to emulate. Our main character is Samantha, a "nice" college girl who's trying to find her own apartment because her roommate gets too much late-night nookie. To pay for her new apartment she takes a babysitting job being advertised by flyer on campus. The call is decidedly shady, but she takes the job any way. Even after meeting the person placing the ad and having him explain in the creepiest way possible that everything he said about the job until now was a lie.
The house is creepy, all the characters except Samantha and her roommate are pretty creepy. It's a little cheesy, almost, but still very creepy.
The movie builds nicely and then goes totally sideways with a great Satanic twist. There's nothing really remarkable about the ending, but it is gripping to watch. There's a lot that reminds me of Rosemary's Baby and When a Stranger Calls. The ending would be completely ineffective, and downright silly, without the great buildup and characterization from the rest of the movie.
It definitely moves slow, which lends to some of the early atmosphere building feeling like it's laid on too thick, but it pays off because it involves you in the story. This was a really nice throw back to early 80s movies, but with better quality and more interesting pacing. I thought this was a great movie, but it could definitely come off as too slow or too dull or too weird to some audiances.
If you like the old school, or really appreciate a good creepy slow burn without a lot of jump scares or gore, this is worth checking out.
--PXA
Thursday, March 22, 2012
What is Bro Horror?
In the Devil Inside review previously posted I used the term "Bro-horror", which I realize doesn't actually exist. But I think it should, so I should attempt to define it and explain why it's relevant to the discussion. ...bro.
There's an interesting parallel to literature where there's a genre often referred to as "Fratire" which is defined by the use of "Frat-boy" humor and focus on binge drinking and crude sexual humor. If you're interested go check out Tucker Max's book I hope they serve beer in hell or the film adaptation. Tucker Max is a deplorable human being, but I'll be damned if he's not worth a laugh.
Anyway, I'm not saying that these are movies that are for bros. This is is not defining a genre by the preconceived notions we might have about the audience. This is applying the stereotype to the material directly.
The stereotype I'm working with here is the college guy who calls all his friends "Bro". He loves his sports, wears polo shirts with popped collars and sandals. The guys with hopelessly superficial adherence to 80's macho attitudes, just mixed with the surfer stereotype's laid back but stubborn refusal to let anything get them down. This is the stereotype the internet loves to make fun of when we imagine people saying "Dude, that was a brotastrophy, bro" or "Broseidon, king of the Brocean". An absolute caricature.
How does that apply to horror movies?
The core engagement of a horror movie is to be scared, to be made uncomfortable by something. A good horror movie has to offer you something to identify with and emotionally invest in so that you can experience fear of something. There a lot of ways a movie can do that, but they all depend on you being involved in the story so that you're emotionally open and can feel the fear.
Paranomal Activity 1 & 3 are great at this. They create characters you can identify with, and place them in a situation where they're helpless and don't understand what's happening to them. The handheld camera style helps you buy into the realism of the story and suspend your disbelief so that you can share those feelings with the characters. Other movies like Insidious unsettle you: They create situations and scenes in which what you are seeing does not make sense. They're familiar, but not right at the same time, and then they give you a payoff by throwing something in your face and startling you, but not every time.
All this only works if you're invested. In the case of Paranormal Activity if you don't care about what's happening you're bored, and in Insidious you're annoyed.
Now, what about this bro-horror thing?
Part of the stereotype we're working with is a superficially macho refusal to expose "tender" emotions, like fear. Simply put: Bro, you can't be scared, that's just a movie, bro.
Bro-horror is a horror movie that at some level is mocking the idea of being scared of a movie. When I first said bro-horror in the other review I was talking about Stay Alive, which I admitted was a movie I really liked. However, the movie itself didn't think anyone watching it should be afraid of what it was showing us. It felt more like the movie was making fun of the idea that a video game could be killing people, and that it would be ludicrous for someone to be afraid of that.
Another aspect of bro-horror is schadenfreude, a German word meaning pleasure derived from another's misfortune. Slashers have always had an element of moral judgment, where the killer tends to first go after characters that display "immoral" behavior, but in the modern crop of these movies that's the entire point. You don't want to see anyone live because they're all terrible people. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, they got drunk and ran over a guy who then just got revenge killings. This creates an effect where instead of feeling horror at the death of other people, you watch the movie in order to see them die. When they die, instead of feeling the death had an impact you turn to friend and say "Aaaawww, DUUUDE! Look at that, bro!".
Often the kills are so over-the-top they're funny. They've taken the most superficial trappings of horror movies and draped them over top of usually a pretty dull premise, just for the purpose of doing a movie where you find creative ways to kill off the cast and have the audience enjoy it in a really similar way to watching stuff explode in action movies.
Quit harshing my buzz, bro.
I just wanted to define an interesting phenomenon, not say these movies are bad. A bad bro-horror movie is that because it's a bad movie. There are movies I would say are bro-horror that I really enjoy, they've succeeded as movies. They're not scary or unsettling, so they're not really horror, but they are entertaining. I liked Stay Alive, Cabin Fever (even though it's really strange), Jason X, The Final Destination series, and other things along these lines. I even somewhat enjoyed the Friday the 13th remake.
Some of these are good movies, but they're not horror. They don't quite fit anywhere else, but they should have their own distinction.
--PXA
* image taken out of context from: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=285 Please don't sue me, Scott.
There's an interesting parallel to literature where there's a genre often referred to as "Fratire" which is defined by the use of "Frat-boy" humor and focus on binge drinking and crude sexual humor. If you're interested go check out Tucker Max's book I hope they serve beer in hell or the film adaptation. Tucker Max is a deplorable human being, but I'll be damned if he's not worth a laugh.
Anyway, I'm not saying that these are movies that are for bros. This is is not defining a genre by the preconceived notions we might have about the audience. This is applying the stereotype to the material directly.
The stereotype I'm working with here is the college guy who calls all his friends "Bro". He loves his sports, wears polo shirts with popped collars and sandals. The guys with hopelessly superficial adherence to 80's macho attitudes, just mixed with the surfer stereotype's laid back but stubborn refusal to let anything get them down. This is the stereotype the internet loves to make fun of when we imagine people saying "Dude, that was a brotastrophy, bro" or "Broseidon, king of the Brocean". An absolute caricature.
 |
| Meet Chet and JR* |
How does that apply to horror movies?
The core engagement of a horror movie is to be scared, to be made uncomfortable by something. A good horror movie has to offer you something to identify with and emotionally invest in so that you can experience fear of something. There a lot of ways a movie can do that, but they all depend on you being involved in the story so that you're emotionally open and can feel the fear.
Paranomal Activity 1 & 3 are great at this. They create characters you can identify with, and place them in a situation where they're helpless and don't understand what's happening to them. The handheld camera style helps you buy into the realism of the story and suspend your disbelief so that you can share those feelings with the characters. Other movies like Insidious unsettle you: They create situations and scenes in which what you are seeing does not make sense. They're familiar, but not right at the same time, and then they give you a payoff by throwing something in your face and startling you, but not every time.
All this only works if you're invested. In the case of Paranormal Activity if you don't care about what's happening you're bored, and in Insidious you're annoyed.
Now, what about this bro-horror thing?
Part of the stereotype we're working with is a superficially macho refusal to expose "tender" emotions, like fear. Simply put: Bro, you can't be scared, that's just a movie, bro.
Bro-horror is a horror movie that at some level is mocking the idea of being scared of a movie. When I first said bro-horror in the other review I was talking about Stay Alive, which I admitted was a movie I really liked. However, the movie itself didn't think anyone watching it should be afraid of what it was showing us. It felt more like the movie was making fun of the idea that a video game could be killing people, and that it would be ludicrous for someone to be afraid of that.
Another aspect of bro-horror is schadenfreude, a German word meaning pleasure derived from another's misfortune. Slashers have always had an element of moral judgment, where the killer tends to first go after characters that display "immoral" behavior, but in the modern crop of these movies that's the entire point. You don't want to see anyone live because they're all terrible people. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, they got drunk and ran over a guy who then just got revenge killings. This creates an effect where instead of feeling horror at the death of other people, you watch the movie in order to see them die. When they die, instead of feeling the death had an impact you turn to friend and say "Aaaawww, DUUUDE! Look at that, bro!".
Often the kills are so over-the-top they're funny. They've taken the most superficial trappings of horror movies and draped them over top of usually a pretty dull premise, just for the purpose of doing a movie where you find creative ways to kill off the cast and have the audience enjoy it in a really similar way to watching stuff explode in action movies.
Quit harshing my buzz, bro.
I just wanted to define an interesting phenomenon, not say these movies are bad. A bad bro-horror movie is that because it's a bad movie. There are movies I would say are bro-horror that I really enjoy, they've succeeded as movies. They're not scary or unsettling, so they're not really horror, but they are entertaining. I liked Stay Alive, Cabin Fever (even though it's really strange), Jason X, The Final Destination series, and other things along these lines. I even somewhat enjoyed the Friday the 13th remake.
Some of these are good movies, but they're not horror. They don't quite fit anywhere else, but they should have their own distinction.
--PXA
* image taken out of context from: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=285 Please don't sue me, Scott.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
October Horror 2011 - Post-season - Greatest hits 2009
I didn't originally write anything about the first October Horror Viewing season in 2009, but we watched some really good movies that year. So the first entry in the post season is this writeup of the entirety of the 2009 season.
That year we had simple categories since we were just starting: Zombies, Slashers, Hauntings & Exorcisms, and Scifi Horror.
Zombies week: Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Quarantine, Dead Snow, Braindead.
All these movies were pretty solid. Shaun and Zombieland are zombie/comedy classics and are very funny. Dead Snow was really fun to watch because of the novelty of the concept of Nazi Zombies and the balls to film zombies in bright daylight in the snow. Definitely a highlight and something I enjoy watching again from time to time. Although we originally watched the sub'd version I have a dub now which is much more fulfilling. 28 Days Later is a modern classic for being one of the first movies of the current zombie cultural resurgence, and also for the unapologetic fast zombies. Quarantine deserves special distinction since it was so unsettling it took me 3 tries to watch to the end. Braindead is an early Peter Jackson movie and is just weird. I don't know what to say about it, it's beyond messed up. I think my favorite of the week, horror wise, was Quarantine. In general I liked Shaun of the Dead the best since it is REALLY funny.
Slashers: Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Cut, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2004), Saw, Prom Night (2004)
Prom Night was also on this year's list, partially because we either never watched it in 2009 or just didn't remember watching it in 2009. Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street are all huge classics. I probably liked Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street the best. Friday the 13th has pretty excellent kills and the twist killer reveal absolutely floored me the first time I saw it. Nightmare of course put Robert Englund's Freddy on the map, and I really like him as a character because of how bizarre and manic he is while still being half a second away from killing you dead. I think Cut deserves special mention for being quite fun to watch with a pretty novel concept. It's a little silly, but hey...Molly Ringwald in a horror movie.
Hauntings & Exorcisms: The Unborn, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, 1408, A Haunting in Connecticut, The Amityville Horror, 13 Ghosts.
Exorcism movies are some of my favorites. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is probably #1 on my list of scariest movies ever. I watched it at 2 in the afternoon, with all the lights on, in a dorm room, with the door open, on a green tinted 15" CRT monitor and it still scared the crap out of it. Personally the least solid movie in this week was Rosemary's Baby. I just didn't think it aged well and it was kindof weird and boring. The Amityville (remake) was decent, although a little visual at the expense of personality. The Omen (remake) was also fun, but a bit silly. It was just a bit too easy to mock. 13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies, but not particularly scary. It's a very original concept and the execution is wonderfully stylish. The Unborn is also very stylish, with some excellent jump scares and a few genuinely creepy moments. 1408 is also very creepy, but feels a little rushed and frantic. They probably didn't want to run out of things to do since the movie was set in a single room. A Haunting in Connecticut is probably my favorite horror movie out of the week. Pretty much everything it does is perfect.
Scifi Horror: Pulse, The Mist, Dreamcatcher, The Thing, Doom, Event Horizon, Aliens.
Aliens was a poor choice, as it much more action focused than Alien. Doom as well, I honestly don't know why we put it there. I guess it had some horror moments in the middle. Dreamcatcher is another great movie that has a lot of fun moments, it's just a bit more disturbing than creepy. Still well worth watching. The Mist was a great tense movie, but the ending is very polarizing. You either really love it or you hate the death out of it. It gets a major thing right that a lot of monster movies just forget: The monsters are scarier the less you see of them. Pulse is a guilty pleasure for me. It never seems to get a lot of respect and the sequel was horrible. It's got a lot of plot holes but I just love the concept and the execution is competent enough to make it interesting. Event Horizon is a modern horror classic, as far as I'm concerned. It's scary, it's gross, it's bizarre. The concept is innovative and the execution is horrifyingly tense. It's also one of my favorite scary movies and does pretty much nothing wrong.
--PXA
That year we had simple categories since we were just starting: Zombies, Slashers, Hauntings & Exorcisms, and Scifi Horror.
Zombies week: Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Quarantine, Dead Snow, Braindead.
All these movies were pretty solid. Shaun and Zombieland are zombie/comedy classics and are very funny. Dead Snow was really fun to watch because of the novelty of the concept of Nazi Zombies and the balls to film zombies in bright daylight in the snow. Definitely a highlight and something I enjoy watching again from time to time. Although we originally watched the sub'd version I have a dub now which is much more fulfilling. 28 Days Later is a modern classic for being one of the first movies of the current zombie cultural resurgence, and also for the unapologetic fast zombies. Quarantine deserves special distinction since it was so unsettling it took me 3 tries to watch to the end. Braindead is an early Peter Jackson movie and is just weird. I don't know what to say about it, it's beyond messed up. I think my favorite of the week, horror wise, was Quarantine. In general I liked Shaun of the Dead the best since it is REALLY funny.
Slashers: Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Cut, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2004), Saw, Prom Night (2004)
Prom Night was also on this year's list, partially because we either never watched it in 2009 or just didn't remember watching it in 2009. Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street are all huge classics. I probably liked Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street the best. Friday the 13th has pretty excellent kills and the twist killer reveal absolutely floored me the first time I saw it. Nightmare of course put Robert Englund's Freddy on the map, and I really like him as a character because of how bizarre and manic he is while still being half a second away from killing you dead. I think Cut deserves special mention for being quite fun to watch with a pretty novel concept. It's a little silly, but hey...Molly Ringwald in a horror movie.
Hauntings & Exorcisms: The Unborn, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, 1408, A Haunting in Connecticut, The Amityville Horror, 13 Ghosts.
Exorcism movies are some of my favorites. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is probably #1 on my list of scariest movies ever. I watched it at 2 in the afternoon, with all the lights on, in a dorm room, with the door open, on a green tinted 15" CRT monitor and it still scared the crap out of it. Personally the least solid movie in this week was Rosemary's Baby. I just didn't think it aged well and it was kindof weird and boring. The Amityville (remake) was decent, although a little visual at the expense of personality. The Omen (remake) was also fun, but a bit silly. It was just a bit too easy to mock. 13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies, but not particularly scary. It's a very original concept and the execution is wonderfully stylish. The Unborn is also very stylish, with some excellent jump scares and a few genuinely creepy moments. 1408 is also very creepy, but feels a little rushed and frantic. They probably didn't want to run out of things to do since the movie was set in a single room. A Haunting in Connecticut is probably my favorite horror movie out of the week. Pretty much everything it does is perfect.
Scifi Horror: Pulse, The Mist, Dreamcatcher, The Thing, Doom, Event Horizon, Aliens.
Aliens was a poor choice, as it much more action focused than Alien. Doom as well, I honestly don't know why we put it there. I guess it had some horror moments in the middle. Dreamcatcher is another great movie that has a lot of fun moments, it's just a bit more disturbing than creepy. Still well worth watching. The Mist was a great tense movie, but the ending is very polarizing. You either really love it or you hate the death out of it. It gets a major thing right that a lot of monster movies just forget: The monsters are scarier the less you see of them. Pulse is a guilty pleasure for me. It never seems to get a lot of respect and the sequel was horrible. It's got a lot of plot holes but I just love the concept and the execution is competent enough to make it interesting. Event Horizon is a modern horror classic, as far as I'm concerned. It's scary, it's gross, it's bizarre. The concept is innovative and the execution is horrifyingly tense. It's also one of my favorite scary movies and does pretty much nothing wrong.
--PXA
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