Tonight I tried to get my "spooky" on by taking the missus to see Thirty Days of Night (N.B. I can't bring myself to type 30 Days of Night because you don't use numerals at the beginning of a sentence. Did you know N.B. is Latin for nota bene? That translates to "not important.") Anyway, I guess when it comes to horror films, I have a problem with the willing suspension of disbelief. Blood and guts stuff just does not creep me out. I was the kind of kid who would poke at road kill with a stick, and I was first in line to get my dissecting frog. I got an A+ in that. I once made the annual trip to the abattoir my grandfather brought his pigs to, and I was let down that we didn't get to go inside. I thought it was going to be like when my Dad brought us to the automatic car wash, where we walked alongside the car as it went through. In goes the pig, out comes the sausage, and every step in between. I don't particularly want to inflict harm on anything, but I am certainly not going to have nightmares about a simulated beheading.
I've always been more receptive to psychological thrills. Things that are out of place and unusual; things that should seem safe, but in unsafe settings. Like waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a child's voice when you know there are no children in the house. The Blair Witch Project was the big fright several years back, but most of that was hysteria. Sobbing and screaming and "oh my God you guys I'm so scared" doesn't do anything but annoy me. But the one thing that totally wigged me in that movie (and even thinking about it now sends a chill up my scalp) was the scene toward the end when they were in the house and the lights were going on and off and the camera was flying all over the place. The chaos was just more of the same, but then for one brief moment you see one of the "film makers" just standing there, facing the wall, kind of slumped over. It was a real subtle tie-in to the back story about the house they were in, and the subtlety and evocativeness worked perfectly.
Thirty Days was like that. Lots of blood and guts, but almost too much chaos to be scary. Lisa and I agreed that when it did work was when it was subtle and evocative. One of our favorite creepy scenes was at the very beginning of the film. The "messenger" character is crossing the frozen tundra, with a large ship off in the distance. The shot pans out as he makes his way to the town, across the ice. That sense of misplacement, of the contradiction of there being nothing unusual about a man walking across the snow, but not this man in this snow, made the scene spooky. But then I get back to that suspension of disbelief thing. The premise of the film is that the town gets completely shut off from the rest of the world for 30 days because the sun goes down. Half the population makes a mad dash for the highway and the airport as the sun is setting for a month. But, uhm, the sun goes down every night here in Boston, and the last time I checked, planes fly in and out of Logan all night long. Airports and planes have these things called "lights." And then when Josh "not Keanu Reeves" Hartnett makes his "we live here because we're the only ones who can" speech it was feeling a little too Northern Exposure meets Buffy for my tastes.
No comments:
Post a Comment