Manly Masculine Man Movies and my life, 2010

I am a blogging machine.

Look at what the New York Times just said to me:
"6. Superheroes take a break. Yes, there was “Iron Man 2,” but even that offered a respite from the glowering, pretentious action allegories that have dominated screens for most of the past decade. The battle between good and evil rages on in some quarters, but mostly in self-conscious, self-parodic form. In the strangely similar animated kiddie comedies “Despicable Me” and “Megamind” the heroes and villains are self-conscious role players, and the villains are actually nice as well as more interesting than their occasional square-jawed nemeses. This may reflect genre exhaustion (though another round of superhero blockbusters is already on the horizon), or a measure of real-world cynicism. The investigative documentaries that proliferated this year ("Inside Job," “Client 9,” “Casino Jack and “The United States of Money”) suggest that corruption and criminality exist virtually beyond the reach of justice." ((here) 


No. Absolutely not. I disagree. 


This was a year of revelations for me, mostly about gender and movies. And with that came the revelation that I need to stop avoiding superhero movies. They are campy just like slasher movies, take place in pretty cities with pretty girls, and deserve a lot more credit than I've given them in the past, which i suppose is just from neglect rather than dislike. 


Remember that I avoid modern films usually, but regardless, were i to make a list of my top ten films for this year, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World would be probably at the top of the list, and Kick ass would be on there somewhere too. 


Granted, i did see these movies with some of my very best friends on two very significant occasions. They were spots of movie brightness on some very dark days. But i went into them surrounded by warnings of, "Krista this movie is about video games, you probably won't like it," "This is a funny movie, but you won't get most of the jokes," and most ridiculous of all, "Krista, this movie is really violent, I don't know if you'll be able to handle it." 
Sigh. 
Both of these movies made me really, really happy. They were both hilarious and extremely well done, and played directly to the normal superhero film viewing audience. ( I know this because I only talk to five or six people on a regular basis, and one of them likes superhero movies like i like slasher movies.)


I know they aren't superhero movies in the traditional sense, really at all, but if you're going to put them in a genre that's the one where you put them. Comic book movies, at least. Maybe they do result from "genre exhaustion," since they're both sort of satire/deconstruct sort of films, but at least they aren't sequels or remakes or spin-offs. I suppose that these films are evidence of the "self conscious and self parodic" films that the article mentions, but I think it's an achievement for a genre to reach the point where it has a large enough fan base and an established enough personality that it can be self conscious and self parodic and still be successful. 


I suppose that this warrants a discussion on how we would define "genre exhaustion." What the article refers to I would say was the sort of ultimate point for a film genre to achieve. This may not be the case with a more general genre, for instance, action movie, or drama, but for a genre so specific with such a specific target audience: nerds. (I use the term in the most affectionate way posisble.) Recently it's seemed like superhero/comic book movies are trying to aim for a larger audience (aren't we all,) especially with the advent of technology creating a world where movies are seen just for the special effects, and comic books are, for many, obsolete. While they can no longer depend solely on a group of cult comic fans, they can rely on the fact that those people will show up to every movie at least once. Having a devoted audience like that certainly seems to help a genre get established--take slasher movies, for a totally random example. The slasher genre is built upon independent, low budget films that, while not at all applicable to a mainstream or high-film audience, were loved and relentlessly viewed by the genre fans, and for that matter, still are today. If formula slasher movies didn't make money off of those cult fans, more movies wouldn't have been made, changes wouldn't have happened, and we never would have gotten to Nightmare on Elm Street or even Silence of the Lambs. Going even further back, Psycho's success was pretty much dependent on the "cult" fans, if you will, of Alfred Hitchcock--all of the publicity was based around the fact that it was his movie. 


When a fan base gets big enough that movies can be made by a big production company and make a profit, that seems like a pretty huge deal, not a sign of genre exhaustion. There comes a saturation point with formula films, i guess, where you have to recognize that you are a formula film--and it seems like a fantastic moment to me. Wes Cravens' career success in the past twenty years is based entirely off Scream, and while maybe that means that he's no longer making movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, it means that...well, enough people get it. Enough people have seen enough films that a movie referencing them is successful in the mainstream (you may think I'm referencing the success of the Wayan and Selzer. I am not. Do not speak those dirty words here.) And, while I'm not at all an expert or even a little bit knowledgeable about superhero/comic book movies, I think it's the same situation. When you have enough (wonderful, loveable, awesome) nerds out there to understand Scott Pilgrim  or Kickass, you're pretty set. Congratulations, you're a genre. 


What i really want to talk about is how underappreciated Scott Pilgrim is. I just read quite a few articles about movies of the year, and I've looked at Academy Award Nominees: Scott Pilgrim is conspicuously absent from all of them. There's a lot of talk about how The Kids are All Right (which i haven't seen, but i love on principle,) represents our modern family structure and changing view on social acceptability, about how The Social Network works because we're all so obsessed with the internet, how Inception captures the confused, surrealistic, escapist view of entertainment right now. 
And yeah, i guess that's pretty much whats happening in 2010, but clearly none of these people spend any time looking at internet memes or in not-so-classy clubs, because they've forgotten about two very important and potentially opposite groups that are coming into the mainstream this year: nerds and hipsters. 
Maybe I'm biased, having my personality coincidently fitting parts of both stereotypes/subcultures, but i really think that in the future when you stereotype folks in 2010, or at least in the coming decades, they will be playing videogames, watching videos of lolcats, and arguing about cult film. They will be wearing plaid and fedoras and listening to Bright Eyes and The Avett Brothers and being "all ironic." 
Scott Pilgrim did not miss these subgroups. It represented them, and perfectly. No aspect of my weird little cultural underground, that lives somewhere in my boyfriends garage where D&D is played or at the Starbucks in Barnes&Noble where my best friend and i often sit judging people, was missed. My friends, this movie is our Breakfast Club. Teenagers will watch this movie thirty some odd years in the future and say, "Oh, thats what my parents were like in 2010." Or whatever we say when we watch Breakfast Club. No movie that's on all the lists really took these groups into account, as far as i know. 
Presumably, our culture is too focused on the nonsense that MTV is putting out to notice whats really going on in youth culture, or maybe I'm too focused on what isn't going on in youth culture to notice that whatever MTV is putting out is the reality of those under thirty. I'm pretty sure I'm right, though. Scott Pilgrim captured what i see as the mood of our generation perfectly, which few if any forms of mainstream pop culture had really done, as far as I can tell. So...congratulations, nerds and hipster, you're a subculture! 


Not to even get into the fact that a lot of the technical stuff Scott Pilgrim did was just insane. It's sort of concoction of aspects of videogames, comic books, movies, internet, and weird dream sequences was amazing and incredibly innovative, absolutely like nothing I've ever seen. If it influences movies as much as it should, it may signal the beginning of a hyper-realist surrealist movement or culture. The movie makes it seem like we are getting the truth, but from Scott Pilgrim's perspective--it is distorted, but exactly in the way an identity confused youth who spends much of his time in the world of video games, underground clubs, interrupted naps and the internet would imagine it to be. 


So really, there is a lot of room for a recognition, as that article claims there is, of the unhappy realities of crime fighting--the genre is acknowledging itself as fiction, which i think is a very mature thing to do. 


So! In conclusion! I think that the exclusion of Scott Pilgrim from prestigious film critic and award nominee lists is a horrible, horrible mistake, and that the film "trend reports," if you will, that I've read very much misinterpreted what the superhero movies of this year mean for the genre and the "state" of cinema and therefore, ourselves, in general. 


However, once again, I tend to look at genres backwards (from self parodic to origin, instead of the other way around,) so my knowledge of superhero films is super limited, so please disagree with me if you feel it necessary. 

Merry Christmas...

Babies.
For the last three weeks, this has been the topic of probably forty percent of all conversations. We talked about parenting during Frankenstein in English class, my ecology teacher is pregnant so everything in that class is about babies, we're learning developmental psychology in AP Psychology so that's all about infants, one of the documentaries we looked at in film studies was about gender in babies, a friend of a friend of a friend is pregnant so that friend has been talking about babies quite a bit, the human relations kids are carrying these little robot babies around, every sitcom i watch is about pregnancy somehow, and every night i take a pill to prevent the agony that comes from the workings of my body that someday could allow me to have a baby, god forbid.
So it's only appropriate that this movie i just watched was baby themed too.
Regardless of that, this is one of the best and most underrated slasher movies i have ever seen.

Black Christmas was released in 1974. Woah. I don't know if you understand what that means. While Halloween is credited as being the first "slasher," this one definitely deserves that title.
Don't get be wrong, i'm not hating on John Carpenter, I love Halloween, and it makes sense that it often gets credited with being the father of slasher movies, even down to it being the literal son of the unarguable grandfather of slasher movies, Psycho, the former having its main actress as the daughter of the latter's main actress. But this movie, Black Christmas, is much more related to the slasher movie as we think of it today, it came first, and it's...brilliant. Everybody should watch this movie, including non genre fans.

So the plot focuses on a group of sorority sisters and their brother fraternity (postmodernism ftw?), around christmas time, and they're getting all these weird phone calls from this guy who talks about all these weird, sexually perverted things. Nothing much going on, it's a sorority, sorority stuff happens. Most of the girls leave for Christmas vacation, and one of them gets killed by a totally unseen person.
To be honest, it wasn't until this point, (approx. ten minutes in) that i started paying attention, because this kill actually made me jump. I started watching this film as some festive background to my knitting and dress designing, but i quickly realized that it deserved a more thorough viewing.

Soon enough, we find out that survivor girl is British pregnant, the insanity of which i cannot even express. Keep in mind that there really hadn't been any formula slashers before this one, and besides this little problem, this movie kinda follows the formula (therefore setting it,) to a T. Even more insane than her being pregnant, she wants to get an abortion and doesn't want to marry the father. Sins on top of sins on top of sins! This girl is just full of sins and she's foreign! Kill her right away!

It becomes pretty clear pretty fast, however, that she's our main girl, and the movie, instead of focusing on the group or the killer like (i think) previous films had done, focuses mainly on her. The conflict becomes juxtaposed between the small town where they live looking for the first girl that died and the sorority dealing with the creepy phone calls, and Jess (survivorbritishgirl) negotiating her pregnancy with her angsty pianist boyfriend. As the latter conflict progresses, the former conflict gets closer and closer to it--the calls start seeming to come from/represent Jess's soon to be aborted fetus. And it's amazing. The whole movie has this outer conflict--the town looking for the first girl and trying to help a mother find her thirteen year old daughter, who is missing,--and the inner conflict, with Jess dealing with her potential motherhood/murder. It's just brilliant. The theme of parenthood and children run through the whole thing (am i crazy? have i just been reading too much Mary Shelley and learning too much about neonatal development?) There's this one really significant scene right when we're about to get to the battle where all these little children come caroling and Jess just looks at them all motherly and you can see the little hormones running around in her brain like "babies! look how nice they are!"
A really interesting thing is the babylike nature of the killer, and the killer in general. Mainly, the fact that we know nothing about him. We don't even ever see his face: just his hands and his eye. I suppose, in retrospect, that this is because (SPOILERS!) we're led to believe that Jess's boyfriend is the killer, which was a weirder part of the film.
When the killer (Billy/Agnes,) calls on the phone and when we hear him talk, it seems that he's got a bit of a Bates syndrome thing going on: He seems to speak for himself (who is a very childlike, innocent thing,) and for his mother, (more of a Grendel's mama deal,) who is the perverted violent killer, perhaps. It's never made very clear, but it's very creepy. This is all we see of him:

I paused this shot and just stared at it for probably a minute and a half.

Also, he makes the calls from the house mother's phone, which is pretty significant symbolism, if you ask me.
The movie has a lot of great symbolism, especially in the whole phallic weapon department, which is only appropriate considering it is a slasher movie. When promiscuous horrible drunk girl gets killed, it is in bed amongst flying blankets and hands reaching up and screaming and the like, and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think that church lady, who is outside with her aforementioned choir of caroling children, thinks that someone is having sex in the house and therefore leads her children away hurriedly. We know that the fight is about to start when survivorgirl looks over and very significantly sees a nice stick like fire poker deal, which even gets its very own super close up.

Freud is so happy right now.

She then goes on to kill who she thinks is the killer, her boyfriend, the father of her baby, with the penis  firepoker. OHMYGOD. Did they mean to have this much symbolism? Normally i would say no, but i find myself having a lot of faith in this movie. And it's just to good to pass up. She kills her boyfriend, who "stabbed" her with his "firepoker," if you will, and got her pregnant, and who questioned her choice to get an abortion, the combination of which seems to be causing this whole thing. Brilliant. Amazing. Slasher Perfection.

So the big question now is, why isn't this the movie all of us slasher devotees worship instead of Halloween? Why has this movie been thrown into the chest of weird low budget movies based on holidays instead of given the love and praise it deserves? And why on earth do we let foreign pregnant sin girl live?

Well, really, it can be argued that we don't let foreign pregnant sin girl live, because this movie wasn't very well received and doesn't have the legacy it deserves. This movie really sets the standard for that whole representing the time thing that maybe will make me a lot of money in book form some day, considering this whole nonsense about abortion happened at the Vatican a month before the films USA release, and that whole ERA thing that was going on in the seventies. So clearly, abortion and a woman's right to choose, or to kill their boyfriend with phallic symbols, was on the public brain when this movie came out. However, they made the fatal (haha,) mistake of not punishing these things. I'd say that by '74 we were on a downhill (sorry guys, politics,) slope to the new right of the 80's and sledding quickly away from that whole...thing that was the 60's. Four years later, Halloween's virginal Jamie Lee Curtis, who fears men and sex but adores children, made forty seven million dollars and our dear Jess here only made four million. If Jess had been killed, and maybe boring, pre victim Claire had survived instead, maybe the movie would have the legacy it deserves.
It probably didn't help either that the film is Christmas theme and was released on December 20th, right when people are finishing up their holiday shopping. I think this is most of why, straight up marketing wise, Halloween was so much more successful. Around the end of October you want to be scared, you want to go with your friends to the movies and vicariously be stabbed/stab, you want to think that every door that opens is going to lead to your worst nightmare. Even teenagers, though, feel a little less like that around this time of year, (unless they're me, apparently,) and even if they do still want to go to the movies and be horrified, there are family events and stuff to go to, and there's just no way your parents are going to let you skip out on decorating the tree with aunt Margie to go see that new gory trash at the cinema.
That's the other thing--with this and Halloween being the parents of slasherdom, why has it, even from the very beginning, had such a bad reputation for being gory and sex-filled? Slut-girl in this movie has a lot of weird scenes talking about sex, but there's no nudity and the gore is very, very minimal. Look, it's all wrapped up in plastic and clean....

It's really not that bad at all. The only reason i wouldn't recommend this to anyone, specifically non genre fans, is because if anything it's a bit slow. It's so clearly dealing with important issues though, and not just being a sex and gore fest. I know standards were different in 1974, but seriously. Less than a bottle of ketchup used for this film. Like Psycho, it is high quality in that all of the violence is implied, we don't see it happen. It's a bit disappointing at times, especially in that Jess killing her boyfriend is represented only by a scream, and then a shot of her with his dead body across her lap. Very simple, very smart.
Also, the cinematography is brilliant and highly underrated. Look at this.

Oh my god. Oh. My. God. I died. This is so beautiful. What is happening? Why is there a series of small square screens with blue backlighting in the basement of the sorority house?
I don't care at all. I want to paint my wall with a mural of this shot, it's so amazing.
The ending is also just...pure film happiness. Film magicalness. One of my favorite things ever is keeping the camera in the same place while action goes on basically without noticing it--the shot is static, and people come and go as the please, and you hear what they're doing and therefore know what you need to know. The camera then pans around to all the dead bodies, and we hear that the killers still alive, and the credits happen over a long, high angle shot of the house with the phone ringing and getting progressively louder until it ends.
Film gobledeegook, i know, but...magic. Magic magic magic. It made me so happy.

Here's more film gobledeegook: listen to this symbolism i just noticed. If Halloween, focusing on feminine themes but also masculine ones with the doctor and Micheal Myers, is the father of slasher films, then this film, with it's strong focus on a female lead and a gender ambiguous killer and maternal themes, is the MOTHER of slasher films. With that in mind! The fact that it was not well received says some serious things about how slasher audiences and filmmakers think they look at motherhood.

Woah guys. Woah. That is something to think about while you eat your Christmas pie.
If you're weird, like me, and think about gender in horror while at family gatherings.

Happy Holidays, all :)

Why Getting in Trouble is the next cult horror hit

Guys, I am watching Glee right now. Why do I do this to myself. It's so over the top. It tries way to hard. It lays it on so thick. Does it know how ridiculous it is?
It made a funny joke about that teacher/shoe guys hair tonight, but everything else about it just makes me upset.

So I decided to do what I've been doing lately when I'm upset about something. Watch Getting in Trouble.

Getting in Trouble is, arguably, one of the lowest quality horror movies ever made. One camera, no special lighting, written in exactly five days, performed by unprofessional teenage actors.

My best friend and I created this movie. It is our child. I love it to death. It is possibly the pride and joy of my entire high school career.

The creation of this film was inspired by a,) the advent of my obsession with slasher movies and, b)the subsequent summer nights my dear friend and i spent watching the slasher movies available to watch instantly on netflix. Most instrumentally, one called The Majorettes, one called Stupid Teenagers Must Die, and a third called Demon Summer. 


And these movies were terrible. The latter two were made just as we ended up making GiT: they were clearly produced on a budget of less than a thousand dollars, by some twenty somethings or even old teenagers, who were bored one summer and had a camera and a stolen copy of Final Cut and decided that instead of just hanging out with their friends, they'd make a movie.
Or something.
Majorettes is a different story. This movie had a budget of 85 thousand according to IMDB, and that isn't a lot, but it's something. Enough to hire like one writer. This movie is ridiculous. Demon Summer and Stupid Teenagers at least kind of know what they're doing: they credit themselves as having no budget, and a tagline for Teenagers on IMDB is "intentionally bad acting."

However, even in the realm of self-satire, these guys did a pretty bad job. I don't remember Demon Summer very well, except that the writing was clearly based off of the experiences of the kids who wrote it, and Teenagers seemed to have been based off of slasher movie stereotypes I didn't know existed--for instance, over the top geeks who end up sort of being bad guys or something, a lesbian couple who just starts having sex whenever the movie gets slow, and a kind of over complex plot.

The main idea of that rant is that Zoe (my best friend,) and I said to ourselves, "we can do better than those guys." And in some ways, considering our budget, ($35 dollars, including paying for pizza and costumes,) and our one camera, I think we did pretty fantastically.

Another big inciting force was that the house where Zoe lived at the time was immensely creepy. We didn't really use that to our advantage, but it was still inspirational.

All right, thats enough back story. On to the topic.

Cult Horror. All of the aforementioned films can fall into this category. Movies that have no quality, nearly no content, that are made only for genre fans. (Cult Horror Films: from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman to Zombies of Mora Tau says " the word cult suggests a small group of loyal fans, so a cult horror film would be one made strictly for the horror audience, the audience that will literally watch anything as long as it's a horror flick.") Unfortunately for a lot of indie film makers, a vast majority of horror falls into this category. But i'm talking extreme cult horror. Like, if you wore a t-shirt with a quote from one of these movies, you'd have to go to some sort of hard core horror convention in Manitoba to have somebody recognize it. Movies like The Evil Dead, Stupid Teenagers, Night of the Living Dead, I Spit on your Grave, Troll 2, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Children at Play anything MST3K reviews...there are a lot. They are really bad. Maybe even movies that aren't good enough to have a really loyal fan following.
But they are important. I love them. They synthesize what has been done in horror movies before, stop taking any of it seriously, subtract anything any production studio wants them to do, adds some very racy stuff, and end up having a huge influence on film for the rest of forever.
Horror film gets a lot of these because violence upsets mainstream people, so it's difficult (or it used to be) to make a horror that was palatable to a mainstream audience. Also, because special effects can be as simple as ketchup (or chocolate syrup, if you're amazing like Hitchcock,) and the characters are meant to be annoying, you don't need a ton of money to make them. Horror fans are also some of the most loyal folks in the world. You make it, they'll eat it up again and again, and back in the day, they even used to pay money for it.

And I'm not delusional. I read the feedback on Netflix. I know that most of these fans only like movies like this because they smoke a lot of marijuana. But still. It's an audience, and producers keep making the films.

OK. So in my opinion and experience, here are some of the things that go into making a cult film.

ON SCREEN

A complete lack of subtley--Characters are bad. You know they're going to get killed, and you want them to get killed. They're horrible, they're crude, they sin, they're stupid. You find yourself wondering why they are taking their clothes of in the middle of irrelevant scenes and where all the alcohol came from. See Stupid Teenagers, The Evil Dead, The Funhouse, MST3K


Extremely stereotyped characters--You have your virgin. The rebel. The smart girl. The slut. The comic relief that's really just annoying. The misogynist jock. The goth. The nerd. The black guy. The displaced ex-boyfriend. The stupid police officer. The psychologist who used to know the killer. The stoner. The best friend.
There are so many cliches to be used, and yet we keep using the same ones. In any case, there isn't any subtlety in the characterization either: you should be able to tell immediately by looking at each character who they are in the movie.
See any horror ever made ever.

Terrible, terrible quality footage. This  can be hard to avoid when your filming with your parents old camcorder while your trespassing in an abandoned barn. But it's definitely a part of these movies. Lighting is especially bad, and scenes that should take place at night might take place during the day. Cinematography tries, but may not succeed. The continuity issues are endless. (Did you know that movies actually have people just to check this?! I bet these movies don't.) The mic shadows are plentiful. Shaky cam is used excessively, whether intentionally or not. See Evil Dead, Stupid Teenagers, Demon Summer, MST3K

Sex and drugs...sex sex, and drugs.....: As noted above, the plot just whips these things out of nowhere. But they're always there. See any horror movie ever.

Pretty terrible writing: Plot revolves entirely around the preconceived notion of what horror movies should be. Slashers include your general teenagers go away from home, do bad things, get murdered one-by-one set up, that and others may include especially incest packed locales with lots of scary hillbillies. More than any other movie, you're inclined to say, "Don't go in there!"--not because of suspense, but because it just doesn't make sense for the characters to do that. Characters may also point out very obvious things in case the events that have transpired aren't clear enough to the audience. They also likely swear a lot. Take Cabin Fever for instance (<3) where, if you are unlucky enough to watch it on the sci fi channel, you will not understand most of what the characters say because it is censored.
Don't i recognize..?: You know who starred in a cult film? Brad Pitt. Jamie Lee Curtis. About a million other people.

Quoteable quotes: Usually hilariously unrealistic things that a character says, maybe the tagline. The thing that ends up on a tee shirt. A catch phrase of the killer, perhaps, or a particularly well delivered line.

OFF SCREEN:

Low budget: Or no budget.
Really, really good intentions: people don't films that they won't make money off of unless they have really good intentions and a creative urge to do so. From this, you can get a LOT out of some films that may or may not need to be there: one of my big theories is, because horror represents our most base human instincts (violence and sex,) theres a ton of room to add layers of social commentary--essentially any original aspect in the film becomes a social commentary. Sometimes this is intentional and therefore way over done, like in The Happening, and sometimes it's unintentional and subtle, but effective, like having a black protagonist in Night of the Living Dead. 
Filmed in a weird setting or situation: Again, the best example i can think of here is Romero: when they did Night of the Living Dead, it was just him, some crew, and a bunch of his friends living on location for a few weeks making this movie. This also comes from the low budget, so locations are chosen more based on convenience than selected for their perfection. (so like, low budget directors are r-strategic species, and high-budget directors are k-strategic species...oh god. I promise to never talk about ecology here again.)
Ketchup bottles: Guys i love ketchup so much.

With all of this taken as truth, then Getting in Trouble, my very own brain child and my pride and joy, is right in line to be the next great cult film, as soon as my friends all get into college and move far away and aren't minors any more so maybe i can put it on the internet.

Because it deserves some recognition.

N SCREEN

A complete lack of subtley--oh yes yes! We make it very clear what's going on here. Charity Conscience, survivor girl, constantly is saying "my parents aren't home!" Boyfriend Zane brings alcoholic chocolates (do those even exist?) and randomly decides in the middle of the movie to get naked and take a shower. Promiscuous Lotus and rebellious sleazy Donovan talk only in sexual euphamism. 

Extremely stereotyped characters--We thought of stereotypes, and then made the characters. This is emphasized by the fact that nobody is wearing normal clothes, and by names. The virginal good girl is Charity Conscience, slutty girl is named Lotus. Rebel Donovan wears a leather jacket, comedic relief Egmont wears an oversized t-shirt with a cartoon character, smart Rachel wears essentially a school uniform, jock Brad wears a school sweatshirt. The characters can only act within their stereotype. 

Terrible, terrible quality footage. We filmed this in artificial lighting overhead lighting and night vision. With a camcorder. Nuff said. 

The continuity problems are endless, and all the time in the background you can see tripods and assistant directors (myself,) and shadows of people that aren't there. The special effects are pretty  bad, the weapons are (almost? oops?) all plastic, you can't see anything in the night scenes. 

It's hilarious. It makes the movie fun and playful. 

Sex and drugs...sex sex, and drugs.....: We kind of actually fail at this category, but thats because we were filming with our friends, who were mostly under the age of fifteen. We couldn't really have nudity, we definitely couldn't have sex, we could barely imply drugs. Like i said, they constantly talk about sex, but there is no actual physical contact. Lotus does some cuddling, and at one point kisses another character (i won't give spoilers,) but the sex scene literally consists of two characters sitting multiple feet apart from each other, with "implied" sex about to happen. We do have nudity though! Full frontal..above the waist...male nudity! But it's pretty random. And a shower scene, so...

Don't judge us. We were sophomores.

Did i just justify not having an element in the movie that would have been gratuitous and lowered the quality?

Pretty terrible writing: It was very intentional to base this movie off of the formula. But it gets tiring. We came up with a big back story, and it didn't come through very much in the plot, so a deus ex machina comes in three quarters of the way through the movie and just explains everything. Characters provide helpful exposition at random times: "Your sister's dead. Now you have no one to take care of you .You were a mistake!" ..."even if you did make out with your lab partner in the janitor's closet..." "you know Lotus and Donovan dated freshmen year..." "mary jane, that girl you used to have dance class with was killed!" It's not subtle, but it's in there. There is complexity behind the weird plot holes. 

Don't i recognize..?: Guess how many of our characters have played a lead in a school play since then? Three. Thats right. We are a jumping off point. 

Quoteable quotes: We have a lot of these. Jock saying "the best defense is a good offense!" is pretty fantastic, as well as "there's no way I've been hanging out with a bunch of homosexuals..." Zane's "I have to get this blood off of me!" is classic, Lotus's cherry lollipops...the list goes on. Cheesy films=quoteable quotes. 

OFF SCREEN:

Low budget: No budget. 

Really, really good intentions: This film is backed by brilliance. Each character has a complex back story leading to why they act the way they do, including the mysterious, totally random killer. Every rip off from every other slasher movie is a direct reference on purpose to honor our precedents. Each bit of satire is not meant to be stupid, but clever. 

Nobody else gets it, really, but it's brilliant. Pure brilliance, and I know it's there and I love it to death.

Also, a lot of unintentional things come out of our opportunistic cinematography. Donovan and Rachels' character foil and her eventual motivation is preceded by a lot of two shots of them, as well as their matching costumes (what!? why didn't we do that on purpose!?). Also the paralells to our lives now, but you all don't care about that.

Who am i kidding, only people who were in the movie will read this...

Filmed in a weird setting or situation: This movie was four months in production, from conception to premiere. We filmed from six to eleven for two nights in between doing a history project and going to dances. 

Ketchup bottles: SO MUCH KETCHUP IN THIS MOVIE. 

So do we qualify to be the next cult hit? I hope so. Getting in Trouble is bad enough to be mocked profusely but also good enough that it's more funny than brain melting. It's justifiable. It's art. 

And as much as i may say bad things about it, it really is a short film i would watch and enjoy. Like i said before, i love it to death, right down to our lack of ability to include background information and Donovan's dorky sneakers (Zoe's only regret.) And someday, I hope that we've all grown unrecognizeable enough to put it on the internet. 

Does anybody mind if i share the trailer? 

Did I just send this to a college? Lolwat?

 Please take note that I penned this short essay after writing another essay, which I also submitted, about the fact that one of my favorite aspects of the school was the drug/alcohol awareness program. 

The question: Please share something about yourself that you have not addressed in your Common Application and which may not be revealed in a recommendation.

            

            This is embarrassing. This is something that I subconsciously tried to avoid in my Common Application. But I trust you, [potentially my first choice school,] to hear my small confession.

            I love slasher movies. Not in a visceral way, not for the monsters, not for the suspense and fear, but because I think these films represent our society at the most basic form and therefore the creative things that directors do with them most simply represent what we fear in society at the time they are made. They are not bloody gore fests for low budget, low quality teenagers to enjoy—they are in fact subtly veiled morality tales, warning us against sin and ill in society.

            I spend a lot of my time watching these low budget, low quality films, and then analyzing them on my blog about scary stories and knitting.

            I have, in fact, co written and directed two extremely low budget, (no budget, one might say,) slasher films with my best friend, full of all the unconvincing special effects and terrible acting that one expects from such a film. They are formulaic, something that makes more high-brow film audiences see them as base, without intellect, solely based on the desires of audiences. But wasn’t Shakespeare a formula writer? Aren’t all films formulaic?

            My realizations about these particular films—Psycho all the way up to Paranormal Activity 2—are what led me to realize that, even with all of the humanities out there, I belong in the field of film studies. 

Not really that scary at all

So i was thinking about writing a little bit about this, but didn't think I could really post it on here because it doesn't have to do with fear or knitting.
But it does. It is a thing that many people in our society fear these days.

I'm talking about homophobia.
More specifically, the portrayal of gays in the media.

I was thinking about this watching modern family, and i thought about it watching project runway this season too, and a little bit with the one episode of Glee that i put myself through. Not scary movies, but they've been dealing with scary issues--anti-gay sentiment, HIV, etc.

Let's start with Modern Family, because i was just watching it. If you haven't seen this show, it's about three family units who are all related, one of which is a gay couple.  If you haven't seen this show, watch it now.

First off, i love the gay couple in this show. They are hilarious and lovable. But while i was watching it today, i realized: they are very very stereotypical.
And is that what the LGBT community wants? Sure, it's easy for the average american person to enjoy watching these guys, but for some people--who live in tiny towns in southern new england, like myself, where there's only one openly gay person who hasn't moved to New York or London--this might be the only exposure to gay people that viewers get, or, potentially, allow themselves to get.

And hey, I'm certainly not one to say that all gay people aren't like that, since i only know, like i said, like four people who have come out of the closet. (note, i'm almost positive all gay people aren't stereotypical. I mean no offense by this.) And even if they were, that's fine with me--like i said, these stereotypical characters are so lovable.
But some people love them not for their character and their senses of humor, but simply because they fulfill the stereotype. Take for instance, the made up character I'm about to discuss (cough, my father, cough) Mr...Jones.

So Mr. Jones doesn't know a lot of gay people (or doesn't think he does,) and also listens to a lot of conservative talk radio. As a result, he thinks that he doesn't like gay people, because, "he doesn't like watching men kiss." (no word yet on how he feels about women kissing, but when his teenage daughter brings home her black/hispanic/muslim girlfriend from college, we'll find out.)
Whenever Mr. Jones imitates gay men, he adopts a terrible rendition of a stereotypical flamboyant voice, leading people to believe that he thinks all gay men talk that way. In Mr. Jones' mind, he doesn't like people who talk that way (they are foreign, he doesn't understand them: they scare him,) so he doesn't like men who are attracted to other men.

One day, Mr. Jones says something in that voice in the context of telling a joke about two men who live together. The following conversation goes like this:

Mr. Jones's one liberal relative: not all men that live together talk like that!
Mr. Jones's mother in law, who hasn't left the house in six weeks: Yes they do! That's how they talk on TV!
Mr. Jones's daughter: *apalled*

That conversation happened. There is at least one person in the world who thinks that all gay people are exactly as they are portrayed in the media. And when there is one adorable and sweet, but sheltered and close minded old woman, there are a thousand. Maybe.

Project Runway, unfortunately, portrays gays--and fashion designers-- often in much the same way, but this is a reality show. My father, i mean, Mr. Jones, refers to all the male contestants and Tim Gunn and Micheal Kors as "that wicked gay guy."
As it is a reality show, it deals with some more realistic and scary issues than Modern Family does. (Not to criticize Modern Family, i know that it's purpose isn't to address realistic issues in hard-hitting ways, it's a satire.) I thought it was incredible that this season they got into the personal aspects of Mondo dealing with his  very religious family, his sexuality, and his HIV. That was intense. Tim Gunn discusses his sexuality more this season than any I can think of, and i think the show really represented the climate of the LGBT civil rights movement that (thank GOD) is so prevalent right now.
Yet still, people can be insensitive. I very nearly was sobbing when Micheal Costello got kicked off, yet during one of the floating head interview things, maybe in the preceding episode, my parents laughed at how affeminite he had to be to be getting so emotional over the show. Terrible. Terrible stuff.

And of course, i probably shouldn't get into the ending (i haven't even watched the finale.) Here's one way to not get ratings: Having the bitchy single woman beat the gay guy with the catholic family and HIV during the height of a LGBT civil rights movement. Way to go Lifetime.
So still, the theme is conflicting messages. We want to accept gays, they have a hard time, they are people too--but look at those weird clothes they wear! I'm a conservative New Englander, I can't interact with people who are that creative and brilliant!

Last, and actually probably most importantly, Glee. I'm not much of a Gleek, but I watched this episode, one, because i've seen "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" so many times, and two, because i adore Rocky Horror.
Now, i love some of what Glee is doing. Having an openly gay character (no matter how stereotypical,) is a good thing, and addressing this issues is important. Most importantly, they've been massively helpful in the advent of the It Gets Better project in light of the recent suicides, and i love the It Gets Better Project. More on that later.
Since Glee is coming off as such a trailblazer in the world of portrayal of diversity in the media, I'd expect a pretty uncensored Rocky Horror portrayal. There is some pretty racy stuff in that movie. Like "Creature of the Night." Which they recreated. Shot by shot.
However, they edited out some key "inappropriate" words. Heavy petting became heavy sweating. (What?) Bed wetting became bed fretting (wait, do these sound worse to you?) Most importantly, though, was the way the edited "Sweet Transvestite." Give it a listen:


If you didn't see the episode and don't feel like clickin' about, the gist is that Mercedes is a sweet transvestite (wearing girls clothing, replacing every time she says "man" with "girl," so...cute? but..no?), from sensational Transylvania. Not transsexual Transylvania, which is how the song really goes, but sensational.
This edit doesn't make sense on so many levels. Not the least of which, transsexual isn't a bad word. It's just...a thing. That some people are. It's not a derogatory term or even something that the legality of is up for debate. It's just...a word. Not to mention, Transylvania is not a person. So we're not even talking about a person who's transgender, we're talking about a country or, more accurately, a made up planet that's being described as transsexual for no apparent reason other than to be whimsical. It's basically the equivalent of saying....The amputee planet Geneva. It has no relevance to anything. Are amputees offended by it? no. Are people who hate amputees offended by it? Not with any good reason they are.
The only effect of this edit is to offend people, as far as i can see. I haven't talked to any trans-gender people about it, because i don't know any, but it at least upset me quite a bit. As far as I'm concerned, fox can do whatever it wants, but if you're going to be a show that makes it self out to be in full support of teens trying to discover their sexuality, for god's sake, don't do something like this.
"We support you, who ever you are. If you're confused about your sexuality, come out of the closet. If you're confused about your gender, you can maybe become one of those..things. That we aren't allowed to say because it's too racy. But we support you!"

I feel like after all that jibber jabber my thoughts aren't portrayed entirely accurately. I am in full support of any and all homosexuals. I have crazy amounts of respect for them, and I'm honored to be part of the generation that seems to finally be making some headway on this anti gay nonsense. And I'm certainly not opposed to gay people who are open about their sexuality, and i wish we lived in a world where everyone could express themselves without automatically being stereotyped as sacreligious or whatever.
Thus, i'm in full support of portrayal of "stereotypical" gays in the media, especially if that is realistic (i certainly am not one to say whether or not it is.) I hope that this portrayal leads to an acceptance of these personalities, but i have my doubts and i think it deserves some thought.

In writing this, i was trying to think of a place where a gay man wasn't portrayed as affeminite or flamboyant: i could only think of one, but it's a darn good one.

If you're immensely bored and really love Sweeny Todd....

Yay formal film analysis!

*******            

           Sweeny Todd has been horrifying people for ages. The story was first told in the mid nineteenth century, about a barber who killed and ate his customers to satisfy his appetite for flesh.

            It became a folk tale of the London streets, and it is difficult now to say if there ever was, in fact, a demon barber on Fleet Street. Regardless, it has endeavored—the tale went on to take the form of plays at the Grand Guignol in Paris, early British comic books, an eighties TV movie, a Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim, and, most recently, a 2007 film directed by Tim Burton.

            The film is based most closely on Sondheim’s play, using its plot, music, and characters. Sweeny Todd returns home after spending years in the prison camps of Australia, only to find his daughter adopted by the judge that unfairly convicted him, and his wife presumed dead. Mrs. Lovett, the woman that now owns the building where his home and barbershop once were, takes him in and allows him to keep shop above her meat pie emporium. Before too long, Todd’s anger gets the best of him, and he goes into the business of killing his customers—both to get revenge against society and the judge, and to provide the meat for Mrs. Lovett’s pies. It is fair to say that this adaptation, with a screenplay based on Sondheim’s play by John Logan, brings the most complexity to the story. Each of the fully developed characters has his own clear motive that drives him through the plot of the story. While the themes of the movie are largely focused on horror, it is the subtle parallels and contrasts in characters that make the movie so impressive. Tim Burton uses brilliant cinematography to get this across, particularly in the use of foreground and background. Color is also manipulated brilliantly, through costumes, scenery, and color correction, to create contrast in the mise en scene during the scenes that characters with differing motives dominate.

            Of course, an extremely important aspect of the film and the play from which it was adapted is the music, which, while adding greatly to the mood of any given moment in the film, also emphasizes the differing motives of the characters. The lyrics to these songs also reveal the nature of these ends to the viewer. In fact, it is rare that any goal is directly stated in dialogue—they are nearly always said in song. Furthermore, many of these songs are duets, and in many cases characters sing the same words but with entirely opposite meanings.

            Burton’s innovative cinematography is large in part responsible for our understanding of the characters even though they do not always voice their thoughts. The relationships in this film as well as the motives are very important, and through the various shots and angles, we are able to identify the mood of a relationship between characters without either of them saying a word about it. Burton extensively uses a sort of over the shoulder shot—a close up of one character in the foreground, off to the side of the screen, with a blurred long or medium shot of another character in the background, occupying the other half of the shot. These shots usually function as shot/reverse shots, and many conversations occur without the actors ever looking at each other. Particularly enhanced by this technique is the relationship between the films’ leading lady and man, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeny Todd. Lovett is in love with Todd, and when he returns to London from his time as a prisoner in Australia, she takes him in, sets up his business, and eventually goes into a corrupt partnership with him, running their joint barber shop and restaurant. Because of this partnership, Todd is dependent on Lovett, despite his lack of emotion towards her.

            Lovett’s goals are mainly monetary—when she realizes that she can use the meat from the bodies of Todd’s victims to make her pies, it is a purely financial plan. However, she also wants a family. Todd is the only one who can provide her with either of these things. He depends on her meat pie business to dispose of his bodies, and on the facilities of his old barber shop—now owned by Lovett—to kill his victims. His main goal is revenge on the man that adopted his daughter after driving his wife to poison herself—but because that revenge depends on having the judge as a victim in a long line of murders, he depends on Mrs. Lovett to eventually obtain that goal. Their motives are interdependent, but conflicting.

            Therefore, in the sense that they are dependent on each other, they are partners, and, especially in Lovett’s mind, they are a couple. In one song, it is even implied briefly that they are lovers.[1] However, they are almost never showed in a direct two-shot. All of their conversations and interactions take place either in the aforementioned foreground-background format, in shot/reverse shots, or in a window or reflection. We never see them make eye contact, we rarely see their faces both in focus in one shot. We are shown through cinematography that, though in plot they are together, they are essentially alone.

            Unsurprisingly, Todd’s motives also differ greatly from the other characters’, but again, they are closely intertwined. The goal of Todd is to regain possession of his daughter Joanna; Antony, a young boy that he met while sailing home from Australia, also wants to pull her from her current home, but wishes to marry her and run away. The judge, who has adopted Joanna, and whom Todd wants to kill, wishes to marry her himself. Joanna wishes to marry Antony, but really, not knowing her father exists, just wants to escape her unhappy and sexually abusive home with the judge.  Lucy, Todd’s presumably late wife who now walks the streets, a crazed victim of self-induced arsenic poisoning, wishes to destroy the business that Todd and Lovett have created.           

            While all of these conflicts are revealed through the normal plot devices of dialogue, lyrics, and flashbacks, the paradoxical contrasting and parallel nature of them are further emphasized through two things: color and music.

            Tim Burton has been using up-to-date CGI technology brilliantly and innovatively since the beginning of his career, and this film is no exception. Green screen and color correction, as well as costumes, make up, and mise-en-scene, make the bulk of the movie seem almost black and white. Though the film is not actually in grayscale, only a few colors exist in Sweeny’s world. There are shades of dark gray and black—in his hair, his clothes, the walls and floors in Lovett’s home, and most importantly, the sky of the “great black pit” that is London. Lighter shades of gray and pure white show themselves occasionally, in the high contrast light that shines in through the large window of the barbershop, in the barber cloak, the shaving cream, and Lovett and Todd’s very makeuped skin. Yellow exists in small places—mainly in the streetlights, a rare flit of the color of Lucy’s hair that Todd remembers so well and recalls so frequently. Most importantly, Todd’s world is accented in red: in the outdoor lights at Mrs. Lovett’s meat pie emporium, in some subtle details in Lovett’s clothing, in the meat that fills her pies, and, of course, in the highly stylized blood that soaks Sweeny’s barbershop each time he kills a customer.  Through some magic of editing, almost no other colors stand out or are even visible in Todd’s world.

            In contrast, the world of Todd’s past in the exposition flashbacks in the beginning of the film is filled with overly saturated bright colors. Almost every thing is on the lighter shade of the spectrum, a theme radiating from Lucy’s white-blonde hair. The color theme is only disturbed when the officer that comes to drag a falsely accused Sweeny away enters the scene, dressed entirely in over-dramatized dark black.

            Back in current London, Joanna, in seeming unconscious homage to her mother, is the only character who dresses in light colors, the sole hue that she will wear. She also spends all her time sitting in a window with white curtains, watching a bright yellow canary sing in a literal cage that parallels her own metaphorical one. Though her situation is every bit as dark as the other characters, by nature of her identity she brings light to the screen.

            The world of the judge is as dark as Sweeny’s at most times—after all, he spends his life in the same gloomy weather that dominates Todd’s London. Somehow, though, his world is often a big brighter, a bit more well-lit. His hair is white and his skin is less ghastly than Todd’s, his visage is in shadow less of the time, his face becomes the location of the pure white shaving cream, the lightest colored material in Todd’s world. This lightness vaguely represents the judge’s position in society. As a judge, he is known to be lawful and pious—but the audience, and Sweeny Todd, know that this is not the case. Even though Sweeny Todd is the one killing people, he is the protagonist, making his enemy, the judge, the antagonist by default. It is different and plays with our views of the characters to have the hero all in black and the villain all in white.

            Of course, these colors mean nothing out of relation to each other. Left over chronology from the play puts different characters in nearly every scene—almost no consecutive scenes follow the same plot or sub-plot. This drastically emphasizes the color contrast in the mise en scene that follows different characters. Burton translated these transitions, which would take some time on the stage, into quick, sharp cuts between scenes; by doing this, he keeps the movie fast-paced and interesting, but also directly juxtaposes the contrasting scenes. Our mind has no time to stop thinking in black before it is plunged suddenly into whiteness. This contrast, of course, follows the contrasting personalities and motives.

            The music is also brilliantly crafted by Sondheim to match exactly the nature of the characters that sing it. All the music relating to Sweeny’s goals is either very dark, lyrical, orchestral music in minor keys, or quick, suspenseful, angry music to accompany his revenge. The songs that Lovett sings about her imagined future life are light and happy, her soprano and the poppy tempo of her tunes, of course, match the vision of happiness she has. Antony’s serenades to Joanna are hopeful and poetic, as are Joanna’s musical musings of freedom.

            Again, these themes mean very little until they are compared to each other. The most clever pieces of music occur during the duets. It is common in musical theater for two characters to sing the same song, lending the lyrics to entirely different interpretations, but Sondheim takes this to a new level. Again with Todd and Lovett: their first duet, “My friends,” is an ode from Todd to the razors he finds--the tools he once used to earn a living, and will now use to exact revenge. However, when Lovett joins in, the song takes on an entirely different meaning. She has found a past love, (she reveals in the song that she "always had a fondness" for "Mr. Todd,") and says that she wishes to have a life with him using the same lyrics that he uses to express his future plans of murder and vengeance to his weapons. Later, Todd sings a duet with the judge, his enemy, about "Pretty Women." From the judge’s perspective, the song is a lyrical waxing on the nature of beautiful women, particularly his ward (Todd's daughter,) whom he is about to marry. Todd, while singing the same song, is sardonically and bitterly veiling his resentment for the judge's situation; while they both sing the same words--"Pretty women, are a wonder, even when they leave you and vanish they still are there--" the judge is referencing the satisfaction he has gained from sexually abusing Sweeny's wife and daughter, while Sweeny is referencing the pain he has experienced from the judge's taking the women in his life, the only people he cared for. Later, Antony sings a song entitled Joanna, expressing his desire to marry the girl and his hope for their future; Todd sings along on alternate verses, expressing his regret at loosing the life his family potentially could have had and resigning himself to the fact that they will never be reunited. In Lovett and Todd's infamous duet, "A Little Priest," in which they formulate their plan to cook corpses into Mrs. Lovett's meat pies, though they do not sing the same words, but their respective lyrics, set to jovial music contrast their goals; Todd expresses his need for revenge in a dissonant shout, (“I’ll come again when you have judge on the menu!”)  while Lovett is inspired by the idea due to her lack of money to buy meat, (“With the price of meat what it is, when you get it, if you get it…”). The music in this movie is packed with double entendres and is, in fact, often a double entendre in and of its self.

            The entire movie is packed with double meanings, and each carefully crafted word can lead to parallels between the motives of the different characters. Luckily for us common viewers, we do not have to analyze each word for what it can mean for every character in the film—Burton shows us the subtleties through his brilliant cinematography and manipulation of color. Each mise en scene presents a different personality, a different sub-plot or goal, and the characters, whether originating in Sondheim or fables in the streets of London, are complex and developed enough to match them.

            

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

---

[1] In fantasizing about their future wedding, Lovett sings, “me rumpled bedding legitimized.” It is unclear whether or not she is referring to a current sexual relationship or one she imagines in their future. 

Halloween!

Guys, (two or three people who might read this, until i become a famous blogger,) i haven't posted in a while. I apologize. I have a draft for a rant about movies/murder, but it needs work. I've been busy.

And tonight is no exception. I've got a psychology essay to write, colleges to apply to, a movie to edit, a room to clean, an english worksheet to do, a poem about this girl i recently walked into floating around in my head.

But tonight is also Halloween, tomorrow is senior skip day, and gosh darnit, even if i don't write a blog entry any other day this year i will write one tonight.
I must. 

Since I don't by any means have time to watch a movie, I'm going to do this equally obligatory post: my top five favorite scary movies this very moment in no particular order. Ok maybe in order of how much I like them.
Really, it should be ten, but I'm going for quality.

5) Burnt Offerings: My best friend and I watched this one night, after having a specific craving for a bad horror movie, from the seventies. Of course, we didn't think it would be hard to find something to satisfy our appetite--is there any such thing as a good horror movie from the seventies?
The answer is YES. And this is it. Predating Amityville Horror by three years, this is the best haunted house movie I've ever seen. And, even though haunted house/possession movies aren't my MO, I feel pretty confident in saying this is a fairly important and fairly scary movie.
And really, movie's don't scare me very often. Even though this film has its silly moments of terrible acting and weird effects, it's overall very chilling. The storyline is about the same as Amityville, a family moves into a house for the summer, and slowly the family members act stranger and stranger until deaths start occurring. The ideas that get presented through this plot--the father's traumatic and horrifying memories of his own father's funeral, and the way that makes him treat his son, the mother's need to be needed by something and her resentfulness towards her husband's aunt, the couple's strained relationship as a result of their respective problems--are much deeper than the film seems it should go.
In this film, the house is the real villain, and the motifs and cinematography do a good job of presenting this. Photographs of the house in various states of disrepair line the walls of the interior, and important scenes--such as the husband assaulting his wife after being rejected--are overshadowed by the house in the background. The quick zoom in close ups on the smiling hearse driver that the father remembers from his childhood are terrifying, and the ending, (spoilers!) where the house sheds its skin, does extremely well with the special effects of the decade.
I actually saw this film before I saw Psycho, so at the time I did not recognize homage in a shot in the ending of the movie, where the husband walks up to the attic where the "sick mother" of the house's wintertime owners is said to stay. He enters the room--usually locked--to see an old woman sitting in a rocking chair with her back to him. You know how it goes from here, he approaches her slowly, turns the chair around--and there is not an old woman or a corpse, but his wife, aged fourty years and with a familiar malicious grin on her face.

Well that was long! On to the next one!

4) Psycho: I'm not going to say too much about this one, because how much could i say? This is the best horror movie ever made. This was the grandfather of the slasher film.
Not to mention, this film has had the life analyzed out of it by every prominent horror analyst since 1960. Alfred Hitchcock actually asked Stanford to do a study on its popularity (unfortunately, it never happened under his watch--when he was told the estimated price, he said something along the lines of, "well, i'm not that curious.")
In truth, I haven't seen this movie enough times to really analyze it right here and now spontaneously, but i can tell you what i do love about it the most: Norman Bates. Definitely one of the scariest and most lovable characters in film ever. I might be risky in saying that he's the beginning of serial killers that warranted our sympathy, but come on. How could you not love this face.

3:) Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Two words: Wes Craven. I love Wes Craven. More on that later.
This is the first movie i watched after i realized that i was meant to love slasher movies. (The realization occurred with a documentary, not included on this list on technicality, called Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film.) I watched it on demand for free before my second date with my second boyfriend. He thought I was crazy when i soon after related him how much i enjoyed it.
(Side note--that date was to see the second narnia movie, which, after watching Nightmare on Elm Street, was a pretty terrible film.)
Anyways, this movie came at a fun time in the slasher craze. It's the latest of the big three, (Micheal, Jason, Freddy,) and it had an air of self-satire more than any of the other films did. I like this movie because it is at once very clear and very confusing. We don't know who Freddy is or where he came from at first, but we get what the movie is saying to us--have sex, die.
Thank you Wes Craven. Imagine how many teen pregnancies there would be without Wes Craven.
I love the bad special effects in this film especially much. Freddy Krueger's face? Fantastic! Johnny Depp being sucked into a bed and producing as much blood as there is water in Lake Michigan? Beautiful!
Not to mention it's lovely connections to the fears of the time. The film was actually based around a story that Craven had read where a kid in the far east wouldn't go to sleep, and his family and doctors and such got all upset at him, and a few weeks after the ordeal started the found him dead in his closet with tons of caffeine pills. Apparently the whole movie has a lot of ties to eastern philosophy, but i can't recall them at this moment. So don't quote me on that. Also, the fact that the whole movie is sort of based around a fear and mistrust of authority (guess who was in office at the time?) is pretty fantastic.
That leads me to address something i must address with this movie: Nightmare on Elm Street, 2010. I actually loved it, even though survivorgirl's boyfriend did drugs and lived. They did the original proud, i think. The story was updated with the background that modern horror audiences apparently want, and i think the distrust of authority was a good thing to bring back into horror for this time. We're all pretty upset at authorities right now, right? (my dad is?) A scary thing about the new one is how much it goes into the backstory, because my elementary school janitor actually went to jail for being a pedophile...
but we never tried to kill him by lighting his home under the preschool on fire, so we're safe from an Elm Street situation in lil ol' southern new england town.

2.) Scream: Did i tell you how much I love wes craven? I love Wes Craven so much. I really hope i meet him someday.
I might do a blog on horror satire someday, so i won't rant about this too much, but this is the epitome of horror satire. (And i've never seen Scary Movie 1, but is it really making fun of Scream? That's the stupidest thing ever. You can't/shouldn't make satires of satire, guys. Not classy.) There are so many references in this movie that if you played a drinking game with that as the theme, you would die of alcohol poisoning really badly. (joke credit). And the impressive and really, really classy thing about this satire is that Wes Craven directed it. Wes Craven. One step down on the ladder from Hitchcock in horror. So he's really entirely making fun of himself. While being hilarious and not taking itself to seriously, Scream also has some really interesting things to say about the nature of the horror genre and it's formulaic nature, it's potential negative influence on people, the lessons it teaches, and character archetypes. Not to mention, it has some of the best quotes in horror history, a mon avi.
"Movies don't make psychos, movies make psychos more creative."

1) Behind the Mask: The rise of Leslie Vernon: To this day this movie wins the race for my favorite film ever every time. It's half mockumentary, half slasher deconstruction, and entirely amazing. The acting is fantastic--the dual performance of Nathan Baesel as a funny, friendly guy and a traditional slasher serial killer is incredible, Zelda Rubenstien is beautiful, Robert Englund's cameo is perfect, and Angela Goethals makes a fantastic heroine. This movie is like slasher 101--if you aren't ready for the Fruedian analysis implicit in most analytical literature on slashers, this is a great movie to watch. Really, this is always a great movie to watch. The jokes are hilarious, the cinematography is creative and effective, the scares are scary and the characters are relatable. Like Scream, it is a satire of itself, but it has some brilliant things to say. Leslie Vernon, the main character and a serial killer, tries so hard to explain to Taylor, the documentary maker, the entire time through the film why he does what he does, and she never gets it. Nonetheless, she has sympathy for him. But when they get to the actual night of the killing, she can't go through with her objective reporting--and we find ourselves asking why we were on Leslie's side the whole time. (I never stop being on his side when i watch this.) The twist in the end is placed perfectly--it is revealed at the exact moment you figure it out yourself. I could get into more in-depth analysis-- like how we're put into a personal relationship with Leslie in the beginning with a lot of close and medium shots, and how in the end during his killing spree we see him only in long shot, until the climax, where his humanity is revealed once again in extreme close up. But i don't have too much time to spend on that right now.
Really though. A genre piece, but a great one. Watch it now.


There are two other movies which i cannot in good conscience leave off of this list entirely--Sweeney Todd, and (egoegoego) Getting In Trouble, the child of my best friend and i. However, i have in mind very specific blog entries for them, and they will, must be saved for another time.

Happy Halloween, all. Screw homework and go watch a scary movie until it's November.