Horror movies get personal
Posted: Thursday, October 09, 2008 6:00 AM by Gael Fashingbauer CooperMovies
I'm a horror-movie fan, and I know admitting this in certain circles is not cool. Scary movies are considered the Twinkies of cinema, it seems, cheap and bad for you, shunned by many in favor of subtitled black-and-white classics or complex art films.
Well, I love a good art film as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I'm not in favor of a good scare. It's October now, Halloween month, and the horror flick that's giving me the creeps based solely on its trailer is "Quarantine," opening this Friday. (Possible spoilers ahead.)
Sony
I mean, have you seen the trailer? (It's embedded at the bottom of this post.) A journalist and her cameraman tailing a fire crew end up at an L.A. apartment building for what seems like a routine call. A woman in an apartment is sick. Or is she? From the preview, she's either turned cannibal, or zombie, or vampire, or been infected with some other movie-monster virus. The clips of her are only all the creepier for being seen through the ghostly green camera light flickering through the dark.
Apparently the building gets -- duh -- quarantined, and now our heroine and her pals are trapped inside the infected building. The final scene of the trailer actually made me jump, although as an old-school horror fan I really should have known what was coming.
Apparently "Quarantine" is a remake of the Spanish horror film "[Rec]," whose trailer is even creepier for its lack of dialogue. [Rec] is from the abbreviation for "record" or "recording," as found on cameras. "Quarantine" and "[Rec]" join a host of other horror flicks (helloooo "Blair Witch Project" ) that use the old "victim records his or her own demise/descent into madness" trick.
And that trick works for me, every time. Once you accept that fact that any normal person would have dropped the camera after the first monster attack (I'm looking at you, "Cloverfield" ), the concept is chilling.
I firmly believe that the scene in "Aliens" where the Colonial Marines, with cameras on their helmets, go creeping through the seemingly abandoned colony, is one of the most chilling scenes in moviedom. We watch their footage as they explore, crack jokes, start to figure things out, are attacked, and eventually, we watch as their cameras, one by one, start to fizzle out. Few scenes build suspense and sheer horror like that one does, and the fact that we watch it through the Marines' own footage just puts the fear right over the top.
We're used to watching camera footage, but we're used to having it edited and packaged for us. Seeing the victims' raw footage gets me. I buy it. I suppose a bad movie could turn the concept into nothing more than a fake snuff film, but generally, the movies I've seen in this genre are enthralling. (Rent "The Last Broadcast" if you haven't seen it -- it came before "Blair Witch" and many say it's the superior film.)
These are my last moments, the camera footage in these movies seems to say. Here is how I got here, and maybe you would have made different choices than I did, but now you can see how I did what I did, and how I ended up dead.
Will you see "Quarantine"? What are your thoughts on fake camera footage in horror movies? Were you one of those who got sick at the shaky footage in "Blair Witch" or "Cloverfield," or does this horror-movie concept work for you?
