Haiti and Horror Movies

"Haiti and Horror Movies" is a six-minute video made by Rot & Decay Films that we hope you will watch and let us know what you think.

"Peeping Tom" and First-Person Horror

The Criterion Collection recently announced that they are discontinuing a slate of StudioCanal owned titles. They’ve lost the DVD rights to films like “Grand Illusion,” “Pierrot Le Fou” and Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy.

(They are having an Out of Print Sale, linked here)

I was dismayed to see “Peeping Tom” on the list. I can think of few films so essential to our understanding of contemporary horror.

The film follows the murderous exploits of Mark Lewis, a solitary photographer who preys on women. Sometimes posing as a documentarian, Mark gets his victims in front of his 16mm film camera, he kills them with his tripod immortalizing their death throes on film.

The viewer is thrust into the point of view of the camera’s viewfinder, forcing us into identification with both the deadly mechanism and the deeply disturbed Mark. We become both the murderer and the means. Even more disconcerting is the allegorical significance of this approach. The viewer is confronted with their own voyeurism.

“Peeing Tom’s” first person aesthetic takes on a new significance when we consider the current horror film fixation with POV. Camera phones, video messaging, and other portable media have provided a new awareness of the first person field of vision that the modern horror film exploits. Movies like “Quarantine” and “Cloverfield” mimic familiar digital platforms as a foray into traditional zombie/infection and monster films respectively.

These are standard genre movies but they are always seem to be reaching to a higher level of verisimilitude. Their approach assumes that the familiarity of the first person digital viewpoint is what incites fear in the viewer. The limited range of vision offered by this approach can be genuinely terrifying (see "[REC]") but a film like “Peeping Tom” exposes an oversight these recent horror films make. They do not realize that identification with the monster is far more horrifying than relation to the victim. When we are forced to identify with the monster, we are faced with out own unrepresentable dark side.

John Carpenter’s "Halloween” aligns us with the central monster to great effect. The opening tracking shot gives us the POV of Michael Myers as a child.

The power of this opener is that it gives us a greater understanding of his monstrous pervasiveness. When we find ourselves yelling at the screen at some nubile slasher victim-“Don’t go into that house, whatever you do, don’t go in that damn house!”- it’s because we have this special access to the monster that Carpenter provides.

(please refer to this great explication of the opening of “Halloween” on Jim Emerson’s Scanners website: Opening Shots: Halloween)

This does not mean that victim identification and pro-sumer video are useless as horror strategies. Perhaps more successful than the strict video mimicry of a film like “Quarantine” is the hybrid method of “28 Days Later" which replicated the lo-fi look of broadcast style video without tethering the film to a visual conceit. The flip side of this aesthetic discussion is the practical use of video. "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" -despite all their flaws and even- made their limitations a narrative virtue, far outstripping production costs upon release.

Interview Project - David Lynch

Interviews with Americans made over the space of a road trip...

NEW YORK CITY IN SOUND

"Manhattan Symphony" by Walter Murch and "New York from the 34th floor overlooking Central Park - The soundtrack for a film set in New York – circa 1970" by Michelangelo Antonioni
click ...

Éric Rohmer (4 April 1920 – 11 January 2010)

"Adieu, Eric Rohmer." Perhaps, "Au revoir" is more fitting, since we will continue to re-watch his films.

1977 Interview with Eric Rohmer from zenfoolio on Vimeo.

Lars Von Trier on handheld camera

From an interview with Lars Von Trier by Lars K. Anderson:

I had a discussion about it with my editor Tómas Gislason before we started working on the “The Kingdom,” and we started to move in the direction of using more handheld camera… I’ve always been very concerned, ultimately, with aesthetics: panning, dolly shots—with parallel movements especially. However what really opened things up for me was an American television series called Homicide: Life On the Streets by Barry Levinson… It’s generous view on the 180-degree rules of filmmaking was very interesting…. We’ve thrown out all those 180-degree rules, and its really so cool. … But it’s not just the 180-degree rules that are absent. We’ve also brought another great animal to slaughter: the continuity. When you do the scene you normally have one set idea about how the actors will play the scene… We asked them to play the same scene five times in five different ways—cheerfully, gloomily, et cetera—and at different places in the room every time. We then intercut these different takes, and then you watch it, you’ll perceive it as a perfectly normal take. You create the missing links in your brain. But performance-wise, you really get into some territory that makes for more interesting characters.

The Uncanny

From an interview by Michel Ciment with Stanley Kubrick, from Ciment's book Kubrick.

"A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analysed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether or not it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd. In his essay on the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life."

From "The Uncanny" by Freud:

"Among the many liberties that the creative writer can allow himself is that of choosing whether to present a world that conforms with the reader’s familiar reality or one that in some way deviates from it…. The imaginative writer may have invented a world that, while less fantastic than that of the fairy tale, differs from the real world in that it involves supernatural entities such as demons or spirits of the dead. Within the limits set by the presuppositions of this literary reality, such figures forfeit any uncanny quality that might otherwise attach to them. The souls in Dante’s Inferno or the ghostly apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, or Julius Caesar may be dark and terrifying, but at bottom they are no more uncanny than, say, the serene Gods of Homer. …Not so, however, if the writer has to all appearances taken up his stance on the ground of common reality. By doing so he adopts all the conditions that apply to the emergence of a sense of the uncanny in normal experience; whatever has an uncanny effect in real life has the same in literature. But the writer can intensify and multiply this effect far beyond what is feasible in normal experience; in his stories he can make things happen that one would never, or only rarely, experience in real life. In a sense, then, he betrays us to a superstition we thought we had ‘surmounted’; he tricks us by promising us everyday reality and then going beyond it."

William Friedkin on Horror

William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist provided commentary on the dvd release of The Leopard Man directed by Jacques Tourneur:

"The enemy of the horror film is coherence. I think the more that is explained, the more somebody in the film tries to help you to understand what's going on the less helpful they really are because these films lurk in the imagination, they lurk in that part of the unconscious where night terrors occur. These films play out like nightmares. They have the logic or illogic of a nightmare. They're flawed, as nightmares are. They have elements of surrealism--things within them that happen that are inexplicable and yet seem to make a kind of sense when it's all over or at least they stay with you...."

Shooting "The Shining"

From an interview with John Alcott, DP, The Shining, with Michel Ciment:

What lens did you use for Barry Lyndon?

A 22mm one for most of the interiors. We rarely used the 18mm as we often did on The Shining….


What lenses did you use for The Shining?

Faster lenses even than for Barry Lyndon. We used the whole range of Zeiss lenses, from 18mm to 85mm. On the other hand, we didn’t use the zoom much….

How did you envisage color for The Shining?

In two ways. For the beginning of the film, which takes place in autumn, we wanted, with natural light, to obtain a warm light. Then, with the approach of winter, we switched to one that was colder. I put blue filters on the outside of windows and used artificial lighting aside in relation to that blue.

Snorricam Tutorial

The Snorricam is named after two Icelandic cinematographers, both with the last name Snorri, who were somehow unrelated to each other. The Snorricam is a device that mounts the camera to the actors body with the lense pointed at the actor, while he moves about performing the scene. The result is that the actor appears stationary while the sorroundings move in the background. This effect is most notably used in Aronofsky's Requiem For a Dream.

Here's an entertaining tutorial made by two high school kids, explaining how you can make your very own snorricam.

Stephen King on the Success of Horror.

A bit from Stephen King's book Danse Macabre:

"Horror movies and the horror novels have always been popular, but every ten or twenty years they seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity and visibility. These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties (for what of a better term) which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations. They have done less well in periods when the American people have been faced with outright examples of horror in their own lives... Horror films went through a boom period in the 1930s.... We find few horror movies or novels of note in the 1940s..."