movies, with a jerky segue into horror
Feb. 7th, 2006 08:11 pmYes I Sank Your Barge: "Because if you don't take their barge away from them, they're going to keep pratting around on the river, buying and selling ever-larger cargoes like some demented bunch of early Renaissance Elite players, for their entire sodding lives, boring the pants off their GM and not going through the kind of violent, dreadful existence that is the proper fate of authentic Warhammer FRP characters." James Wallis is my hero. [A bit of background for the barge incident.]
Satyrday night I went to see three trailers. Ultraviolet you already know about; Silent Hill looks to be every bit as creepy as its namesake, without resorting to things-jumping-out-at-you cheap scares. And She's the Man . . . this looks incredibly dumb and I am nevertheless compelled to go see it, mainly due to the source material. (Which, I am geekily proud to say, I recognised after hearing the name of the main character's twin brother.) Oh yeah, there was also Underworld: Evolution afterwards, which had its moments.
"Creepy" does a heck of a lot more for me than shock or gore. These things can be part of creepy, but take away the creepy and they're just . . . eh. Orson Scott Card, in Maps in a Mirror, had an essay on horror that broke it down into "dread" (fear of the unknown), "terror" (fear of the known), and "horror" (fear of, um, the results, basically). Dread is harder to do right but way more effective than the other two. Plus, I'm kinda jumpy, and dislike having to restart my heart every time some schlock filmmaker decides he needs to get the audience's attention.
But then there's things like, say, Hostel, or Wolf Creek. Even without the shock moments, those aren't movies I want to see. I have no real interest in seeing the horrid things that people are capable of doing to one another: you can dress it up as "an exploration of the darker side of the human psyche," but it still won't do much for me. Without either a sympathetic antagonist (yeah, I know) or a point to the torment of the protagonist, all you have is a twisted kind of voyeurism. Bleh. Jacob's Ladder arguably has both of these (or neither, depending on your interpretation), and is quite possibly my favorite 'creepy' film.
. . . man, that's some meandering ramble, up there. May as well post it.
Satyrday night I went to see three trailers. Ultraviolet you already know about; Silent Hill looks to be every bit as creepy as its namesake, without resorting to things-jumping-out-at-you cheap scares. And She's the Man . . . this looks incredibly dumb and I am nevertheless compelled to go see it, mainly due to the source material. (Which, I am geekily proud to say, I recognised after hearing the name of the main character's twin brother.) Oh yeah, there was also Underworld: Evolution afterwards, which had its moments.
"Creepy" does a heck of a lot more for me than shock or gore. These things can be part of creepy, but take away the creepy and they're just . . . eh. Orson Scott Card, in Maps in a Mirror, had an essay on horror that broke it down into "dread" (fear of the unknown), "terror" (fear of the known), and "horror" (fear of, um, the results, basically). Dread is harder to do right but way more effective than the other two. Plus, I'm kinda jumpy, and dislike having to restart my heart every time some schlock filmmaker decides he needs to get the audience's attention.
But then there's things like, say, Hostel, or Wolf Creek. Even without the shock moments, those aren't movies I want to see. I have no real interest in seeing the horrid things that people are capable of doing to one another: you can dress it up as "an exploration of the darker side of the human psyche," but it still won't do much for me. Without either a sympathetic antagonist (yeah, I know) or a point to the torment of the protagonist, all you have is a twisted kind of voyeurism. Bleh. Jacob's Ladder arguably has both of these (or neither, depending on your interpretation), and is quite possibly my favorite 'creepy' film.
. . . man, that's some meandering ramble, up there. May as well post it.