Sunday!
So you want to scare the heck out of your audience and you only have so much budget for your movie. What’s your go-to? Well, there are a handful of tricks that have worked since the 1950’s:
The reaction shot. This can be your male lead taking a deep breath and a step or two back, a woman screaming at the top of her lungs, a priest seeing the scene and saying “My God” or something similar. You don’t need to show us what they saw. You’ll just mess it up. The imaginations of the audience will be better anyway. Just have your characters react and react strongly. Tell them that this is their big break.
Creepy music and have nothing happen. This builds tension. Build up a little more. Then a little more. At this point, you pretty much have to do one of two things (or both). Blow the steam off with a cat scare of some type. Have a cat jump up on the kitchen counter with a scream as if one of its paws had been stepped on (even though I have never had one of my cats jump up to anywhere while yelling like that… the noises they make are more of a half chirp/half grunt). When your protagonist realizes it’s just a cat, you can all let go a sigh of relief. Or you can have the bad guy show up. Or, why not? Let off the steam with the cat scare and *THEN* have the bad guy show up. Not that my cats would respond to a stranger with anything but “let’s get under the couch now”.
Or you can just buy a vintage doll and move it around the house. “Did you move the doll?” “No.” “That’s strange. Neither did I.” Nightmares for weeks.
Anyway, I’m not going to see Annabelle this weekend. I am going to try to see The Equalizer. Good, straightforward “I didn’t want trouble but…” righteous explosions.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
I’m reading a very fascinating but very long and dense book called “The Novel: A Biography” by Michael Schmidt.
Generally people don’t understand why I like reading books like this. I think they are great fun and amusing. One day I will find a woman who appreciates me for being a failed academic.Report
Was The Novel: A Biography adapted into Coupon: The Movie?
http://youtu.be/EPBIDPIo92QReport
I/m not familiar with Schmidt’s book, but from the title it sounds like it might be similar to Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda, which I really enjoyed a few years ago. Yagoda makes a strong case for memoir and autobiography being the defining literary form of the 20th Century and traces its development from Caesar and St. Augustine through various fads and bubbles over the centuries. It’s, as the title implies, a historical rather than heavily lit-crit approach and Yagoda doesn’t engage too heavily in philosophizing or theorizing, but he does discuss shifting cultural attitudes toward what we view as “true” and how much importance we place on supposed veracity. He traces the ways in which memoir became the most democratizing of formats — people were much more inclined and eager to read, for example, first-person African-American slave narriative than African-American fiction. And of course a major topic of the book is the long history of faked memoirs — even James Frey was working in a well-trodden tradition.
On another note, my two favorite TV shows of the moment ended their seasons last weekend: Masters of Sex and Outlander, so I am bereft. I might try checking out Gilmore Girls, which has come to Netflix.Report
We saw Gone Girl over the weekend. One of the best book adaptations I have seen in a long time.
We already have two casualties on the fall TV schedule. Forever was really, really bad. We wanted to like blackish but it didn’t make the cut either.Report
The critical divide over Gone Girl is pretty interesting. All I have time to say right now.Report
Two movies last night:
Death Race and Shoot Em Up.
Death Race is a Roger Corman movie in 2012 starring Jason Statham. It’s called “Death Race”. If you suspect that you won’t like it, you’re probably right. The good news is that if you’re wondering if you might like it? You probably will. There are a handful of problems when it comes to uncanny knowledge of the characters… but, hey, it’s called “Death Race”.
Shoot Em Up stars Clive Owen as Bugs Bunny in one of those anti-gun movies that makes its point by filling the screen with bullets as comedy. Sometimes the comedy works. Sometimes the comedy does not. Mostly it doesn’t… but there are some big laughs nonetheless. Pretty forgettable, all things considered.Report
I’ve been watching Bones and the Lizzie Bennet Diaries and finishing no books. Though I’m in the middle of several.Report
I hate creepy doll movies, because dolls are so inherently creepy, and enhancing that creepiness through the magic of the cinema is just…wrong. I still remember watching some BW horror flick as a kid, about a whole collection of dolls that came to life at night and caused mayhem. For the love of god, if you know the title please DO NOT SHARE, I really don’t need to relive it.Report