Defending The Found Footage Subgenre
Ever since I saw Cloverfield in theaters twice over opening weekend, I have had a soft spot in my heart for the found footage, shaky cam subgenre of horror film. I still firmly believe that when they’re done right, they can be profoundly interesting takes on typical horror iconography, scary for their implied, supposed realism and the way this realism necessitates that we don’t see more than our civilian videographer would. But what makes a good found footage film? For one thing, it can still be effective and innovative at times, and that is why I still want to advocate for it. First, let me just say however that I haven’t seen Blair Witch Project in many years, but I know enough to retrospectively argue that this film was the game changer. I think more so than even filmmaking...
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We’re All Spectators Here: How We Watch Movies Dictates How We React
In my undergraduate senior film seminar, we’ve been talking a lot about issues of spectatorship, and it made me realize that how you watch movies really matters. In an age where we’re increasingly more apt to see films in solitary ways via Netflix on screens that are likewise decreasing in scale, I have become all the more aware that the way we experience movies can be really dependent on things completely outside of the movie itself. When I saw Kick-Ass 2, which I gave a positive review of on my blog, it was 5 days before the actual release. I went to a free pre-screening with 500 or so other fans of the first film (as evidenced by our mutual wearing of Kick-Ass garb as we waited in line for the chance to get in). Seeing a film in...
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NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: Why the Classic Still Holds Up
Seeing a beloved classic or just a personal favorite replayed on a big screen years after its actual theatrical release can be like getting stuck in a cinematic time warp of sorts. We have come so far in our movie-making abilities that sometimes these older films come across like fossils or time capsules, evoking a strange combination of nostalgia, reverence, and laughter. Seeing George A. Romero’s 1968 masterpiece Night of the Living Dead in a small but beautiful art house movie theater was, on one level, such an experience. In our current zombie-obsessed pop cultural moment, the visual effects and archaic aims for suspense can come across as humorous; I was in no way offended at people’s laughter at certain moments that The Walking Dead would put to dramatic and gory shame, with its arsenal of modern violence and makeup....
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The Day Geek Pop Culture Went Mainstream
At your local movie theater, you’ll probably be able to find something “nerdy” at any given moment: some comic book adaptation or a high-budget sci-fi flick for instance. But with both San Diego and New York Comic-Con (the latter of which I attended this past weekend) increasing in popularity and variety, I thought I’d take this time to just muse on why and how these phenomena came to be the hottest, most prestigious and sought after events of the year for fans and professionals alike. Comic-Con specifically encompasses all that is pop culture, even though once it literally was a convention about comic books and nothing much else at all. Now, the former stereotypes given to people who attend and the specificity of the genres and mediums represented by panels, guests, and vendors on the show floor are practically...
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NUOVOMONDO: An Exercise in Historical Art House
Hollywood is, as I’m sure we all subconsciously know, not as much of a noun at times as it is an adjective implying a kind of attitude, style, and set of expectations we carry with us. What then can we do with these expectations when a film might subvert them so seamlessly? Well, as I watched an Italian film called Nuovomondo from 2006 (with the English title The Golden Door, as if to intentionally deny the viewer any chance at thinking they know that they’re getting into as they would have done had they translated it literally to the seemingly trite “new world”), these expectations proved refreshingly useless. It satisfies on a level that Hollywood historical epics so seldom do, perhaps because we are not shown the typical set of images and conventions we are used to, which can...
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Who Are Horror Movies For Anymore? YOU’RE NEXT, THE CONJURING And The Future Of A Genre
For decades now, the stigma surrounding horror has encompassed similar disdain to lower forms of entertainment all together, some media research even comparing the pleasures these films give us to the seedy and singular experience that pornographic films denote. Then, in recent years, we’ve been given regurgitated remakes, gratuitous gore-nography and trite torture porn. Now, don’t get me wrong—I love the first two Saw films and both Hostel films just as much as the next person, actually. I wouldn’t even necessarily venture to say they’re guilty pleasures because I see them as just one of many coexisting subgenres with merits and flaws alike. But when even those things which start off as brilliant become exercises in merely how many horrific ways of killing people on screen writers can concoct, things do get a little stale. I likewise have no...
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