Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
Clever theme title this week! I have to admit, but biggest fear, still to this day, is being alone in the dark. It's not as crippling a fear as it used to be, thankfully. When I was younger, it could take me hours to go to sleep in my own bed because of how scared I was of the darkness. The darkness is the unknown, it obscures what we know and twists it into something other. It can be difficult for movies to truly capture that, since a large part of the experience of watching a movie is... ya know...being able to see what's going on. But these movies do a good job of capturing the terror of the darkness and nighttime.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, et. al., 1937) In a deviation from my usual modus operandi, this whole movie isn't about this week's topic, or even mostly about this week's topic. BUT, the sequence above is about as perfect a depiction of being surrounded by darkness as it gets - it shows very artistically and VERY effectively how in the dark, things become something far more sinister than what they actually are, and how everything - EVERYTHING - has eyes that seem to follow you as you get more and more lost. This was the first thing I ever remember seeing in a movie that well and truly scared me.
The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) Sometimes, it's not about the things that surround you in the dark, but the darkness itself. The absence of anything, the inability to see beyond a few inches in front of you. No movie I've seen captures that feeling quite like The Blair Witch Project, which made my entire family so afraid of the dark that after seeing it, it took all four of us to bring one garbage can from our garage to the end of our driveway. By now, everyone knows the story of the three student filmmakers making a documentary in the woods of Maryland who disappeared, leaving only this footage behind (and how the marketing was so effective that many people believed it actually was a documentary). It basically created the "found footage" genre, and has all the positive and negatives one associates with films of that ilk. But as with so many trendsetters, it became famous for a reason, and that reason is that Blair Witch gets down and dirty with our fear of the dark, and what unknowns lurk just beyond our sight and our grasp. And because it knows that when shit hits the fan, most of us wouldn't serve up a clever quip and stand our ground; we'd curse to high heaven and run like hell.
Lights Out (David F. Sandberg, 2016) One of the movies I've seen as part of my 31 Days of Horror this year, and specifically with this week's theme in mind! I don't think I would have survived seeing this in the theater, although honestly the 2013 short that it's based on is maybe better. But that's only because in service of making an entire feature, there had to be, ya know, a story to build the concept around. And the story, which is a metaphor for depression, is a bit too obvious and the film sort of runs the metaphor into the ground. BUT. The scary scenes, dealing with the ghostie who only appears in darkness, are SCARY. Had I seen this when I was younger, there would have been NO WAY I would have been able to sleep with the lights out, which is surely the exact reaction the film was going for.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
Growing up, our house didn't have a backyard. Our backyard was woods. It was really beautiful when it snowed - it looked like a real winter wonderland with all the ice and snow coating the branches of all the trees, and it was fun to go wandering and exploring. But during any other time of the year, it wasn't a place you wanted to go. It wasn't often scary-looking, but sometimes, when it was particularly dark and the cicadas and crickets and whatnot were particularly quiet, it made it tough to take the garbage out to the end of our driveway.
This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're going into the woods, and.... well, there's one that immediately springs to mind, and the rest.... I REALLY had to stretch. Let's see how you think I did!
The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) Somehow, my family went to see this on a movie outing. I was 15 and my sister was 13. When we returned home from the theater, it was dark out, and pulling in to the driveway, we realized it was garbage night. It took all four of us to bring out one garbage can, because this movie had instilled such fear about the woods and the dark. I know it is now in vogue to dismiss The Blair Witch Project as solely a marketing gimmick, and/or to blame it for all the terrible found-footage horror films it spawned, but this is the REAL DEAL, dealing in genuine terror - the terror of the unknown, of the darkness, of what is lurking just outside your field of vision. It boils down an entire genre to its most basic elements - three people, investigating a legendary witch, lost in the woods, where there are creepy sounds and strange goings-on - and lets our own psyches fill in the blanks. The final scene of this is still the cruelest, most bone-chilling denouement of any horror movie I've ever seen.
The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012) It's nearly impossible to summarize Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's horror spoof without giving away it's big secrets, which are best left to be experienced while watching the movie, but it's another movie that boils down the horror genre to base elements: five horny teens, an old, semi-abandoned cabin in the woods and off the grid, and the dark of night. That it actually manages to be as scary as it is funny is pretty impressive... to anyone who didn't watch Whedon's TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer! The Cabin in the Woods is a total delight from start to finish, deconstructing the horror genre and satirizing it better, in a more serious and more loving way, than the Scary Movie series ever did.
Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009) You know what? I can't really in good conscience recommend this one. But GOD DAMN did it blow me away. The basic story is this: A nameless couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, both fantastic) are struggling after the death of their infant boy (he crawled out an open window while they were having sex in the shower). He is a therapist and she a scholar. After she becomes so grief-stricken she can barely move, he decides to take her to their woodland cabin, Eden, where he starts having terrifying visions and she starts exhibiting increasingly violent sadomasochistic tendencies. It terrible, ROUGH stuff, but cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle has created some of the most beautiful images ever put on a screen for this, and the performances hold absolutely nothing back. It's a hyper-violent, super-pretentious movie, one that is quite possibly not for anyone at all, really. But as an exploration of grief and the masculine/feminine dynamic, it's quite stunning, and totally singular. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
