HopkinsCinemAddicts

Production Blog #6

All Over But the Crying

Artistic projects are never finished; they are abandoned.  Well, I’ve finally abandoned my short film after a long, exhaustive editing process.  I’m writing this as my film is burning to a DVD and I feel a bit like a parent on their child’s first day of school, fighting the instinct to grab it back before it get into the world, saying “Maybe he’ll be ready next year”. 

Upon completing a project, any humble artist will look back on a project and reflect on what could have been improved upon or altered meaningfully.  Now, I will never call myself an artist, but as a college film student, I do look back reflect on all the stupid, stupid, stupid things I did.  Someone once said that we are in the business of creating greater and greater failures.  Well this is definitely my greatest failure yet, and I think it’s a good idea to review some of bigger lessons I learned the hard way. 

Being a director and a director of photography at the same time is like being on a date with two women simultaneously, and neither date is going well.  I am, in fact, exactly one person and, probably because I am a man, I multitask poorly.  Whenever I am setting up a shot and getting the composition exactly right, I’m losing time with my actors, making sure they can connnect to the choices their characters are making and understand their actions.  When I'm working with my actors, I can't be communicating what I need to the crew.  It’s exhausting and unfair to both the cast, and crew, and to me.  If possible, this will be the last film where I occupy both roles.

There is no "make my film look better" button.  On set, it’s easy to get into the “Oh, I’ll fix it in post” mindset.  And a lot of times, you can, especially if you oversee, or in my case, perform, both shooting and editing.  If you have a cohesive idea of what you want, you can usually get close to that.  For example, some of the stuff I shot at night is supposed to take place in the day.  Even being inside, during the day, sunlight bounces around and makes the image bluer than if you shot just with artificial light.  You can add this blue in color correction to make shots look like they took place during the day.  Unless you totally forgot about the giant window in your shot and that shows that it’s clearly night outside. Oops.  This being said, sometimes what you shot is just crap.

Checking your equipment periodically is always a good idea.  I recorded roughly 180 different tracks to use for post-dubbing purposes.  Basically recording sounds to get exactly what I want and syncing it up to the video and no one knows the sounds were recorded seperately.  Unfortunately, I never checked the audio files outside the recorder so, while they sounded fine on the recorder, they were incredibly quiet when I imported them into my Final Cut Project.  So the majority of what I spent a solid six hours recording was essentially useless.  The price for stupidity is always high. 

Don’t edit films to your favorite music.  It’s common for me to listen to a song and thing Oh man; I want to use that in a movie.  You might think it’s a great idea, that it fits the film perfectly, and that’s awesome, but I’m telling you it’s a bad idea.  It’s a bad idea because you will never, ever want to listen to that song ever again after you’ve cut a film to it.  It’s one thing to listen to a song on a loop; it’s another to listen to the same seven-second section a dozen times while cutting it into a scene.  So long “Jesus Flag American Fish” by Cuckoo Chaos; it’s been nice knowing you.

So now the film is as finished as it will ever be.  I didn’t prepare any real cathartic final statement to wrap all this madness up, but I’ll give it a shot.

Filmmaking is arduous, thankless, deprecating and filled with frustration, heartache, and disappointment.  It’s also inspiring, enlightening, elevating, and filled with laughter, excitement, passion, and love.  If you look at the first list and get excited, you’re a masochist.  If you look at the second list and get excited, you’re an idealist.  If you look at both lists and can’t wait to get started, you might just be a filmmaker. 

Go make movies.

Cheers,

John

 

Production Journal #5

Editing 

I always give myself at least a week between filming and editing.  When you’re shooting film, this buffer is built in to your schedule because you need to wait for your film to be processed and digitized at a lab, but when you’re shooting digital, there’s nothing to stop you from immediately hopping into the editing booth.  So even though the film just sits on my hard drive for a week, I let it sit.  There are two reasons for this.  The first reason, this is the one I tell everybody, is because it’s virtually impossible to look at what you’ve shot objectively when you shot it hours earlier.  You need a breath of fresh air before you come back and look at what you’ve got.  My second, and more palpable reason for waiting a week, is that I’m scared shitless that I’ve screwed everything up.  

Editing is a strange, purgatorial experience.  When you’re writing, the possibilities are endless, and working on set everything is organic and kinetic and has life, but when you’re editing, to a certain extent it feels like the film is already made and you’re just pulling it apart and piecing it together.  This is, of course, not true.  And while it may give you vertigo to go from sitting in a tub filled with fake blood to sitting in a small dark room with large computer monitor, you need to be equally creative at doing both.

The first thing you need to do when editing digitally is transcode your video.  While this might seem unnecessary, as the Canon 7D and Mark IV, both save the to .mov files, which is an incredibly common file type that can be read by Final Cut Pro, it is actually a crucial step.  All .mov files are not created equal.  Video files need to be read by something called a codec that decodes encrypted digital information, in this case it turns the digital information into video and audio.  There are dozens of different codecs for .mov files, and while the one used for the Canon camera files can be read easily by virtually every media player, it’s a disaster to edit with.  So you have to transcode.

Transcoding takes a very long time, it works at a ratio of about 1:1, as in it takes a second to transcode every second of video.  While you can batch files together and let this run overnight, I like to stay in the room while my files transcode, not only because I enjoy the sense of progress, but also because if one file has a problem, the entire process stops nothing gets transcoded until you fix it.  So the first four or five hours of my “editing” process were spent reading a book looking up ever so often to make sure things haven’t gone awry.  Nothing went wrong. 

My fears during the filming have been realized and I’m finding myself unable to wake from the nightmare that is sync sound.  To put it plainly, I’m finally being forced to reconcile all the mistakes I made while I was bumbling around, not knowing what the hell I was doing.  For example, I completely forgot to tell the PAs to call out the scene and take number before slating, so I now have a huge collection of audio files, and I have no idea what video files they match.  Oops. 

Some of the recordings are so low that they’re unusable, but others seem okay.  For now I’ve decided to not worry about it.  I organized all my clips by scene, which makes the whole editing process just so much more enjoyable, as you don’t have to constantly hunt for clips.  I’ve been going through and picking my favorite takes, and crudely editing them together, just so I have everything in the right order.  Once I’ve got my favorite takes in the right order, then I go back and snip them to the proper size and make everything fit.

So what else do I have look forward to besides long hours in a tiny editing suite?  Post dubbing and foley.  Once I’ve done the best I can with the unholy mess of audio that I collected during filming, I have to go back and add additional sound effects and music.  This additional audio is often the difference between you having a very pretty home movie, and something you can ostensibly call a film.  But more on that next time.

Cheers, 

John

Photo Credits

1. Flikr - SirronWong

2. Flikr - Average Jane

Production Journal #4

Shooting

There is nothing more exhausting, frustrating, backbreaking, and incredibly rewarding than directing a film.  At the independent level, filmmaking is all about long periods of frustration punctuated by moments of artistic and emotional euphoria.  It took me three incredibly long days, but the film is in the proverbial can.  I would reccomend giving yourself as many days to shoot as possible, but when your cast and crew can only come together for three days, you shoot your film in three days. 

For this film, I experimented with not rehearsing anything ahead of time with my actors.  We had a little dinner party to get to know each other, so everyone would be comfortable enough to get on set and start playing off each other, but that was it.  I wanted to throw them into the space and let them settle into the material in front of the camera.  Not giving your actors a lot of time to rehearse can get them to do some really interesting, creative things, but it can also make them second guess themselves.  Two of my actors, in particular, had a problem breaking character and asking to start the scene over again.  Unfortunately, what actors often think isn’t working really is, and many times they end up ruining perfectly good takes. 

Shooting with a DSLR camera made me bold and I thought I could put the camera anywhere.  While this is msy be true, on the first day of filming I soon discovered that I, unlike my small camera, cannot fit everywhere.  A lot of this shoot was comprised of me contorting myself into various tiny nooks, car trunks, closets, and bathtubs.  My style of directing is not sitting in a chair, drinking a latté, and issuing orders; you can’t do that on a small shoot, especially when you aren’t paying anyone.  Also, how are you going to get an actor to trust you if there is always a camera between you?  But even if I could sit back and watch, I’d still choose to wrap myself up in a giant garbage bag and contort myself in a tub for a shot.   

While directing is a lot of work, I had an amazing crew and I am indebted to Abby, Andrea, Alec, Avidan, Emily, Janice, Michael, and Will, who all were essential to making the film work.  Crewing on a shoot like mine, everyone does everything.  Sometimes you run sound for a shot, sometimes you slate, sometimes you need to clean a couple gallons of fake blood out of a tub.  There is very little glamor on my sets.  The key is to believe in the end result so much that you don’t care. 

Working long days with subject material that is somewhat dark, it’s important to keep the mood on set lively.  I do this two ways, one by giving my actors and crew enough room to be creative and offer suggestions and ad-lib.  Some of the best shots in this film were the direct result of suggestions that weren’t mine.  As I wrote my script with my actors in lines, I encouraged changing things up and cutting lines that didn’t work.  I don’t have an attachment to the script, so much as I have a commitment to making the final film as good as it possibly can be.  The second way to keep people happy on set: buy them food.  After four hours of filming, they joy you get when two crewmembers arrive with Subway is unparalleled. 

This film marks the first sync sound film I’ve ever made, so I currently have a lot of video and audio files sitting on my computer that I’m nervous to look at.  I have a lot of syncing, post-dubbing, and editing ahead of me.  But, for now I’m taking a few well-deserved days off before I go through the hellish experience of post production.  More on that next time. 

Cheers,

John

Photo Credits

1. Production Still 

2. From personal collection of photos of me in trash bags

3. Flikr - Like_the_Grand_Canyon

10 Horror Films You Probably Aren’t, But Should Be Watching

10 great, original horror films for those of you who are tired of remakes, reboots, rip offs, and other disappointments.    

Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, Dir. Scott Glosserman) What may at first seem like a run of the mill mockumentary is actually a very smart, very funny little film that follows a team of graduate students as they document Leslie Vernon’s quest to become the next horror icon.  Wonderfully subversive, well acted, and with a fun little cameo from Robert Englund, this film isn’t really scary, but well worth watching.

Black Christmas (1974, Dir. Bob Clark) While true horror fans know this film well, it seems to have slipped through the cracks of the slasher cannon.  Before Bob Clark directed the holiday classic A Christmas Story, he painted the holiday black in this tale of a sorority house terrorized by a mysterious caller who begins murder the sorority sisters.  Combining American conventions with Italian giallo sensibility, Black Christmas is the sadistic older brother to the slasher Godfather Halloween.

High Tension (2003, Dir. Alexandre Aja) Two friends, Alexa and Marie, travel to Alexa’s country home for a vacation that turns into a nightmare when a mysterious man shows up, bent on killing everyone.  Few films are as simplistic as High Tension.  The film guns it right out of the gate and never lets up.  It’s ending may seem a little slapped together, but if you’re in the mood for 90 minutes of blood soaked tension, Aja’s French thriller will do the trick.

Inside (2007, Dir. Alexandre Bustillo) This French shocker is for everyone who thinks that American horror films have become just a little too safe and predictable.  On the eve of giving birth to her first child, a woman is visited in the middle of the night by a woman intent on taking her unborn child.  Visceral, unforgiving, and downright surreally violent, Bustillo’s breakthrough film is everything horror should be, if you can stomach it. 

May (2002, Dir. Lucky McKee) This unsettling little indie film tells the story of May, a young woman finding it increasingly impossible to interact with those around her, who decides to create her own perfect friend out of the best parts of people.  Angela Bettis gives an amazingly creepy, and surprisingly empathetic performance as the title character.

Pieces (1982, Dir. Juan Piquer Simón)  Falling into the category of "so bad it's good" films, Pieces follows a chainsaw wielding killer as he saws his way through a college campus, steal body parts along the way.  This film is the Citizen Kane of tasteless, talentless slashers.  Watch it with friends.

Pontypool (2008, Dir. Bruce McDonald) Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, this uncommonly intelligent zombie flick changes up the formula by having the infection spread, not through blood, but through language.  Strong performances all around help flesh out this great premise and turn an interesting film into a great one.

Thirst (2010, Chan-wook Park) The director of Old Boy tries his hand at the vampire genre in this tale of a priest turned vampire.  The amazing performances of Kang-ho Song and Ok-bin Kim elevate this twisted, bloody love story into something really worth seeing.

Torso (1973, Dir. Sergio Martino) This Italian giallo slasher follows a mysterious killer with a knack for strangling American exchange students.  While the first 45 minutes are almost incomprehensible pedestrian it all comes together and the film’s final act builds more tension than most horror films can dream of creating. 

Trick ‘r Treat (2007, Dir. Michael Dougherty) This horror anthology is probably the best Halloween film since John Carpenter changed the way we think about Halloween in ‘78.  Dylan Baker, Anna Paquin, and Brian Cox all give great performances in this celebration of the holiday.  The film also introduces Sam, the Spirit of Halloween, one of the best horror villains in a long time. 

Happy Halloween.  Go watch something scary.

 

 

Production Journal #3

Pre Production

Conceptually, pre-production is probably the least glamorous portion of the filmmaking process.  In reality, there is in fact, no glamorous portion to the filmmaking process, particularly at the college or independent level.  But I can understand the allure of the bustling film set, or even the romantic notion of crafting a great screenplay on a typewriter in the early hours of the morning.  No one romanticizes about breaking down that screenplay into structural components and turning it into a shooting script.  

This is something you must do if you have any hopes of running a smooth set.  You need to walk onto set, knowing what you want.  You also need to be able to throw everything you were thinking about away, but that’s a whole other subject.  I start by taking each scene, and breaking it down into shots, the way I see the film being made in my head.  Camera angles, lenses, movements, things of that nature all come into play.  While making my shooting script, I’m also making a storyboard of sorts.  A storyboard is basically a pictorial version of the shooting script; it looks a lot like a comic book.  Unfortunately, I can’t draw.  It illustrate, here’s me with a self-portrait. 

So, instead of drawing my scenes, I create video storyboards.  I take my camcorder, go to my sets, and walk through the scenes shot by shot.  This is a very odd ritual to watch, my roommate was lucky enough to get to watch me attempt to have a conversation between three people in my kitchen all by myself.  Video storyboarding is helpful for two reasons. First, you get see what the shots could potentially look like, just like you would in a storyboard.  Second, you get to feel out the space you will be filming in.  Obviously you won’t always be able to set foot on your set before filming, but you can find substitute spaces that help you get ideas.  I am shooting in my apartment, so I didn’t have to travel far. 

All of this is theoretically supposed to get your ready for your first day of filming.  And it does.  But that won’t stop you from feeling totally unprepared.  Someone once told me “the realities of filming become really real really quickly”.  While I cannot actually successfully speak this sentence aloud, I agree with its sentiments completely.  The realities of film hit you immediately, the first being: you need equipment. 

Today, you can shoot movies on pretty much anything.  Chan-wook Park, the director of Old Boy, shot an entire short film called Night Fishing on an iPhone.  The story is almost always more important than what you film it on.  That being said, if you can make your film look nice, no one is going to complain that you didn’t film your movie with something you found in the dumpster behind a 7-Eleven.  I’m filming my movie with the Canon 7D and 1D Mark IV.  The 7D is pictured below, and the Mark IV looks very similar.  These are DSLR cameras, capable of shooting 1080p at 24 frames per second.  They may be small, and while they certainly have their disadvantages, they deliver a great image.  They are also small enough to give you the creative freedom to put the camera pretty much anywhere, and are less intimidating to actors. 

So, this Friday, I picked up my equipment for my shoot over the weekend.  Because I felt like being an idiot, I forgot to notify any of my crew to help me move any of the equipment back to my apartment.  Thankfully, the folks at the Hopkins Digital Media Center are awesome a couple of people clocking out helped me carry everything back.  When I got home, I took every single piece of equipment out and made sure it worked correctly.  There is nothing more frustrating on set than having equipment not work properly, and taking an hour or two to double check everything can save you so much grief.  

So now I’ve got my shooting script and my video storyboards as guidelines, and I’ve got all my equipment ready for my first day of shooting.  We’ll talk about how that goes next time. 

Cheers,

John

Photo Credits

1. Photo from personal collection of sad, self-taken photographs

2. Photo from Scott.Symonds (flickr)

Production Journal #2

Casting and Writing

Casting a student film is remarkably different from casting a professional one.  Working with a budget of whatever is in your pocket, you rarely, if ever, have the money to pay actors.  My pockets are on the small side and so paying actors is not an option.  Holding an open casting call for an unpaid student film is daunting and often unfruitful, so I decided to do what many young filmmakers do: I cast my friends.  

Casting your friends has pros and cons.  It changes the filmmaking dynamic, but usually not in a bad way since you have an established level of trust to work with.  However, for this film I cannot speculate on this, as I obviously have yet to shoot anything.  What I can speak on is its effect on writing.

I approach writing scripts for my own projects differently than I do scripts that I write when I know that I will not be imminently making the film.  And that’s probably not great from a writing perspective, but it’s practical from a filmmaking perspective.  When writing screenplays on spec, I have free reign to write about whatever I want, with as many locations, characters, or special effects as I want.  When I write for projects that I will be making, I have to take into account my budget (or lack there of), what actors I have access to, what locations I can shoot in.  All these things put limitations on the writing.

For example, one feature-length script I wrote with dreams of selling one day is a post-apocalyptic western.  In that script, characters ride on horseback through open plains, gunslingers wield a wide array of firearms, and I burn down not one, but two houses.  I do not have access to any horses or guns, and I can’t think of even one person who would let me burn their house down.  So when I write, I work with what I’ve got.

Which brings us back to casting.  I wrote the outline for the film and knew that I needed four actors: three men and a woman.  Instead of writing a final draft of the screenplay and then finding actors, I first sent emails out to people who I wanted for the parts.  Once I had my actors confirmed, I went to work on a first draft. This allowed me to write the script with them in mind.

I’ve done stage work with one of my actors, another I have seen act several times, and another is my roommate; I’ve seen him lie before which is basically acting.  Having an idea of their acting styles, I was able to shape dialog and mannerisms in ways that accentuates their strengths.  The female part was harder to cast.  The part requires little acting, as she is dead when the film begins, but I needed an actress who could put a lot of trust in one of my actors.  I ended up casting that actor’s girlfriend.  So it all worked out.  

Under these circumstances, writing the script was not difficult.  Especially using Final Draft.  Pardon the shameless plug, but for screenwriters it is truly an invaluable tool.  So I sent the script to my actors and now I’ve got a couple days to get my act together before I meet with all of them and we start to break things down and set shooting dates.  

My next big task will be to turn the screenplay into a shooting script.  This is difficult and tedious, but saves lots of time on set.  The big difference between a screenplay and a shooting script is that in a screenplay, the camera is never mentioned, nor anything else outside the world of the film.  A shooting script breaks down scenes into shots and adds technical components, like camera angles.  I will discuss my shooting script and other preproduction nonsense next time.  So look forward to that.  

Cheers, 

John 

Production Journal #1

Who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing?

These are two questions I recommend asking yourself daily.  They are much harder to answer than you’d think.  I will attempt to answer these questions the best I can, at least insofar as they pertain to filmmaking.  So here it goes. 

Who the hell am I?

I’m not going to bore you with a biography; of no use to anyone.  But I do think it’s good to find out where I’m coming from, as opposed to just trusting that I know what I’m talking about because I convinced someone to let me write for this website.  I’m going to let you in on a secret: I very rarely know what I’m talking about.  But, any 20 year-old who claims to know what he’s talking about is a liar.  So at the very least you know I’m not that.

I’m a third year film student at Johns Hopkins University.  I spent my first year here discovering that I wasn’t going to make a student film that would change the world.  Even if I believed a student film could change the world, I didn’t want to make it.  I spent the first half of my second year asking myself what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be.  I spent the second half of that year deciding that was a stupid question.

I made my first short film last year.  It was a three-minute ghost story, but in reality, it really was just an excuse to drown someone in a tub on film.  And since I am an overachiever, in the span of three minutes I drowned not one but two people.  Was the film great? No.  Was it bad?  No.  Was it a lot of fun to film?  You bet it was.

It was so much fun, in fact, that I sought out an internship as a cinematographer’s assistant.  So for the next three months, getting up at 5 a.m. for ten to sixteen hour shoots became a way of life.  The food was bad, the hours were long, the pay was nonexistent, but the experience was invaluable.

What the hell am I doing?

I have no idea.  I’ve got it in my mind that I’m going to make a movie this semester, but right now that’s about it that is set in stone.  At the moment, I’m at the glorious stage in the process called brainstorming. 

Now, everyone’s process for brainstorming is different.  Mine involves taking about six-dozen half-baked ideas, throwing them against the wall and seeing which ones stick.  Then I take those ideas, throw them in the oven and let them cook a little while longer.  After that comes the taste testing.  This is when you remind yourself how terrible a cook you are.  Out of all the ideas you’ve sampled, there is going to be one that doesn’t make you want to vomit.  That’s the one.

The rest of these journals will deal directly with the writing, planning, shooting, and editing of this short film.  It will be an adventure.  Until next time, enjoy this picture of a cat.

Cheers,

John

"I always wanted to be a gangster." Perspectives on the Crime Film

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”  Henry Hill tells us this at the opening of Goodfellas (1990), and it’s easy to understand his draw to the mob life.  Film history is filled with iconic, tragic gangster figures.  From the first gangster cycle in the 1930s to today’s mafia movies, all crime films work on a sort of sliding scale of realism, some pictures choosing to depict gang life with realistic grit, while others take greater creative license over the subject matter. 

The first gangster cycle was born just before its legs were cut out from underneath it by the Hays Code in 1934.  It’s iconic films: Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) provided an escape for the struggling workers trying to keep afloat in the Great Depression.  The first half of any of these films follows a character from rags to riches as he claws and kills his way to the top; a fantasy of breaking the rules and getting wealthy.  But just as important as the rise is the fall, the audience’s reaffirmation that crime does not pay.  The films followed a simple formula, but they developed the language that all crime films speak through and defined the genre. 

In the 1970s, after the code broke down, filmmakers began taking these conventions and applying them in new ways. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather is perhaps the prime example of the romanticism of the crime life.  Coppola opens on the Corleone family, a sort of crime monarchy in 1940’s New York; business runs out of cigar parlors and is discussed in easy chairs.  While the film is not without it’s violence, it handles it with more style and less grit.  Coppola focuses on the family instead of the violence, choosing to examine the way the Corleones’ business functions within a family structure.  The film provides a somewhat distorted view of the mafia, trading in realistic grit for lyrical beauty.

In 1973, Martin Scorsese exploded onto the scene with his first major feature film Mean Streets.  The film stripped the romanticism away from the mafia and examined the life of crime in a violently gritty way.  That is not to say that Mean Streets is not a beautiful film, it is simply showcasing an uglier, perhaps more realistic, view of the mafia.  Throughout the film, Scorsese cuts to films like The Searchers and The Big Heat, juxtaposing their scenes of seemingly tame violence with the horrifying, realistic violence of his film, suggesting that what we’ve seen up to his film is fiction and that his film is reality, which is far more frightening. 

Both The Godfather and Mean Streets have contemporaries that run the scale from gritty realism to romantic lyricism.  Some objectify the life of crime, attempting to capture brutal reality; a modern example of this would be Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah from 2008, which tears through the crime-ridden streets of Naples with horrifying violence and realism.  Other filmmakers choose to skew reality and create wholly personal visions employing the conventions of the crime film.  A particularly adept example is Jacques Audiard’s 2009 film A Prophet.

 A Prophet chronicles Malik El Djebena’s six year stint in a French prison.  Malik first appears an illiterate, naïve nineteen year-old Arab, and over the course of the film rises in the ranks of the Corsican mob while slowly becoming a mafia kingpin.  The film is a fascinating look at life behind the walls of prison and is an even more magnificent character study. 

Tonally, Audiard strikes an effective balance between reality and surrealism.  Set almost entirely behind the walls of a penitentiary, the film exists within the drab, claustrophobic corners of prison, pushing these characters together towards unavoidably explosive conflict.  These setting are kept muted and understated to accentuate the innate beauty of the outside world in the few scenes where Malik is allowed to go on leave.  The contrast between life inside and outside of the prison creates a wonderful opportunity for artistry and Audiard absolutely capitalizes on it.

Much of this beauty comes through the playful, surrealist view of reality through Malik’s eyes.  At several points throughout the film, Malik has visions of, and sometimes conversations with, the first character he is forced to kill in prison.  While perhaps undercutting the realism, these scenes call for a richer, more layered study of the film as a whole.  Audiard is, in many ways, more interested on crime’s impact on Malik than on the crime itself.  We see his character change in subtle and overt ways over the course of the film.  In one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking scenes in the film, we see Malik go through airport security and immediately perform the security procedures he learned in prison.  In some ways these small shifts in idiosyncrasies are more haunting than the shootings, stabbings, and other acts of brutal violence displayed in the film.

The crime film is one of the most well established genres in film and as such has one of the most identifiable sets of conventions.  It is the careful, educated play with these conventions that allows for a rich variety of films. There is something that compels us to sit in the dark and experience horror for two hours to emerge from that darkness enlightened somehow.  Whether we are looking the reassurance of society’s moral code or a fantasy of violent empowerment, we will keep searching, keep returning to probe the dark, forbidden corners that these films provide gateways to.

The Future Is Now: Pivotal Visions of Tomorrow

Since the beginning of cinema, filmmakers have been fascinated with the future.  The medium has the ability to showcase tomorrow in a way no other art form can.  Directors have utilized the fantastic possibilities of the mise-en-scene as backdrops for what are often abstract or introspective conflicts.  To suit the needs of the story, these visions of what lies ahead often contrast each other starkly, and more often build upon the visions seen in other films. 

Georges Méliès’ Trip to the Moon, the first science fiction film, made in 1902, is impossible to ignore because of its importance to the genre. However, it is not certain whether or not the world that the film exists in is actually the future.  The astronomers who go to the moon are dressed in archaic robes and the rooftops that they launch the bullet-like rocket ship from do not suggest anything exceptionally futuristic.  It is perhaps more acceptable to postulate that the film has no time period in relation to the present and therefore can be considered neither the past nor the future.

This brings us to an important, if somewhat implicit, point about all the futures this article pertains to.  They all potentially exist in relation to the time period in which the films were made; they are projections of reality in years to come.

Now, if Trip to the Moon is the father of the science fiction film, than Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis is the more popular and successful son.  Heavily influenced by German expressionism and Art Deco, Fritz Lang and his team of set designers crafted one of the most influential visions in cinema.  The sprawling, cold, and sterile cityscape of Metropolis became the blueprint upon most directors built their futures. The film is infamous for the fantastic city shots created with miniatures, often aided by the Schüfftan Process with spectacular results.  However, Lang is not so much interested in the city, as much as the man’s relationship to it.  Metropolis is all about dehumanization; blurring the line between man and machine.  Fritz Lang’s future is a place where workers are virtually fed to the machines in order to keep the city moving.  It is the perfect setting for the class struggle that the movie catalogs.

Production photo of the stop motion process used in Metropolis. Creative Commons¹

In the 1950s, science fiction was ruled largely by what would be considered campy, pulp stories set against worlds that seem to be made exclusively of cardboard and Christmas lights.  However, there was an important shift in science fiction: the idea of space became an obsession.  Space and the idea of terrifying, dangerous, new civilizations; a lot of this stemming from paranoia spawned by the cold war.  This period was not, however, devoid of good pictures; the 1950 film Destination Moon dealt with the realistic problems that occur during space travel.  More fantastic, and perhaps more captivating, is the 1956 adaption of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet, the film famous for it’s iconic Robby the Robot.  This vision of the future is indicative of the era; it is showy and false looking, ironic since the most fascinating aspect of the film is the exploration of the invisible and terrifying power of the human id.

The beloved Robby the Robot set a new standard for awesome robot buddies. Creative Commons²

This phase of science fiction was wiped away in 1968 when Stanley Kubrick created his science fiction epic about exploration and evolution: 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Kubrick and his director of photography Geoffrey Unsworth created some of the greatest in-camera effects, meaning done practically and without blue screens or mattes, ever attempted.  2001 exists in a sterile, white, delicate future, not completely unlike Metropolis.  However, unlike Fritz Lang, Kubrick is not interested in the workers; man and machine work seamlessly together for the majority of the picture in a visually arresting ballet of technology.  It is not until HAL 9000 begins to terminate the crew of the Jupiter Mission that man must prove his mastery of all this machinery.  2001: A Space Odyssey has one of the most influential visions of the future that has been emulated countless times, but never replicated with the same majesty. 

In 1979, one filmmaker finally rejected the sterility of this future and created an equally captivating, but completely different view of the future.  Ridley Scott’s Alien takes place almost entirely aboard the commercial towing spaceship Nostromo, a dirty, rundown, clunky, and massive piece of industrial metal.  If Scott’s future ever looked like Kubrick’s, it was a hundred years of grime and rust ago.  Everything is heavily used in the world of Alien; Scott liked the idea of truckers in space.  When the alien quite literally bursts into the film, the dark, dripping, steaming, endless corridors contribute the primary source of tension that runs through the rest of the film.  This was an important transition to a more accessible, and arguably more human future.

With Alien, Ridley Scott turned space from the beautiful stage it was in 2001 into a nightmarish sea of dirty blackness.  In 1982, he created his own endless city in Blade Runner.  The film depicts Los Angeles in the year 2019; it’s what the slums of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis might like if you turned the lights out and caked it in endless rain.  With Blade Runner, Scott fused together the science fiction and noir genres, creating a hard-boiled detective story that takes place in a masterfully created tomorrow.  Yet, for all its visual splendor, the film is remarkably introspective, posing questions that call the nature of humanity into doubt.  This helpless, inescapable, and eerily convincing future impacted the science fiction films of the last thirty years to an incalculable degree.

Concept drawing for the city of Los Angeles 2019. Creative Commons³ 

All science fiction films attempt to put their own stamp on the future; no vision is completely the same.  Most make liberties in order to accommodate the plot, because if the films didn’t deal with things unique to their future, what would be the point of creating them?  A film that takes place in a future simply replicated from aspects of other films is an opportunity wasted.  It is, however, almost impossible to watch most sci-fi movies without seeing a stamp of at least one of the four films discussed.

Visions of the future are constantly in flux.  As technology, social interests, trends, and political climates change, so do filmmaker’s movies.  The fascinating thing about science fiction is the films’ source material.  I have attempted to pinpoint four archetypes of the genre, and they were absolutely influential.  However, the true foundation of the genre will always be reality, and as the world we live in continues to change, filmmakers’ dreams of tomorrow will too.  

Photo Credits

1. Photo from Foxtongue (Flikr)

2. Photo from Wikipedia Commons

3. Photo from Topgold (Flikr)

Fairytales of a Darker Nature: Slasher Films as Morality Tales

In the early years of cinema, the horror genre was populated by monsters and mad scientists, and was set in the shadows of gothic castles, tombs, and other innately macabre locals.  It wasn’t until the 1970s when films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Black Christmas (1974) began to bring horror into the modern era.  Suddenly horror wasn’t looming in Eastern European crypts, but right in your backyard.  The protagonists weren’t scientists and explorers, but unsuspecting youths.  Horror films began directly targeting the fears of their target audience.  This culminated in John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween.

 

"Death has come to your little town, Sheriff." Creative Commons¹

Halloween was certainly not the first film of its kind; the cinematography borrows from Italian cinema and its plot was not remarkably different from other American horror movies like Black Christmas.  Yet most mark the film as the father of the modern slasher genre. Why?  The universal nature of the story and the mythology behind the film’s iconic killer Michael Myers.  John Carpenter’s Halloween exists in a world where sex and drugs equals death, the virgin can stop the killer, and evil never really dies; in essence, the film is a morality tale.  

These themes struck a chord with audiences and after its release in 1978, Halloween spawned dozens of cheap, forgettable attempts to cash in on the films success.  Films like New Year's Evil, Prom Night, Terror Train and April Fool's Day, were all attempts to do Halloween again.  There were, however, a few successful children of Carpenter's work, the most famous being Friday the 13th, directed by Sean S. Cunningham in 1981.  Friday the 13th functioned under the same moral code as Halloween but was far more overt, both in its message and its gore. While Michael Myers’ reasons for slaughtering teens remained terrifyingly unanswered, Pamela Voorhees, the killer in Cunningham’s picture, has a clear motive and back story to justify her murderous moral code: drunk teens having sex were responsible for the death of her son. 

  "Doomed! You're all doomed!" Creative Commons²

Cunningham insists that the film is not a morality tale, but instead a fairytale.  “As children we get fairytales, and the purpose of fairytales… is to take a child’s fears and put them in the safety of a story.” says Cunningham.¹  While the film was originally intended as a sort of stress release for a teenager’s fear of untimely death, Friday the 13th is insistent on presenting Voorhees’s deranged motives for revenge as we watch her slowly off a group of dissolute teenagers.  Playing the film as a revenge film against immoral teenagers makes the message difficult to miss and more understandable, or justifiable.  However, the film is ultimately less effective than Halloween.

 

John Carpenter’s film is so terrifying and iconic because of the anonymity of the setting, protagonist, and killer.  Halloween takes place in Haddonfield, Illinois, a town that is representative of a thousand just like it.  “It’s every town, it’s every place, it could be your town…”.²  The universality of the location creates a fear that is disturbingly close to home.  Laurie Strode and Michael’s other victims are also strikingly anonymous.  The idea of the babysitter is where the film becomes incredibly identifiable to a young audience.  Everyone has had a babysitting job or is friends with a babysitter, which is what makes the basic premise of the movie scary.  The entire movie was pitched to its executive producer, Moustapha Akkad, as “the babysitter to be killed by the boogeyman”.²  But what makes Halloween so terrifying is the boogeyman: Michael Myers.

 

Michael Myers is what makes Halloween work, and what makes Michael Myers work is his simplicity.  Unlike Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th, Michael has no real motive. In Carpenter’s original script he is referred to simply as The Shape, not a man, but a force.  The flatness of his character is incredibly effective in stripping the message down to its essentials.  Sex equals death.  Drugs and alcohol equal death.  Immorality of any kind equals death.  Any motive would dilute that potency. 

 

And, after the original 1978 masterpiece, the Halloween series has lost it’s potency, primarily due to decision Carpenter made while writing the sequel that he blames on “a late night and too much alcohol”: He made Laurie Strode Michael Myers’s sister.²  Laurie is the object of Michael’s obsession and suddenly the rest of humanity is safe.  The original was frightening because of the idea that it could happen to you, there was no reason for Michael choosing these kids and that was scary.  Now, there is a motive: to kill the sister.  The number of people with estranged psychopathic brothers is a lot smaller than the entire teenage population; the universality of the terror is gone.

 

The Friday the 13th sequels, on the other hand, retain some of that potency and build upon it with the character of Jason.  Jason, a deformed child who saw his mother murdered by one of the young camp counselors at the end of the first film, has vowed revenge on every drinking, drug-doing, sex having, teenager he can find.  The child-like simplicity with which Jason views humanity makes him dangerous.  Teenagers killed his mother, so they all should pay for it.  Suddenly, terror is universal again.  The problem with the series is that the terror becomes derivative and laughable over the ten sequels, making them more fun than frightening.

   "A curse on Crystal Lake, a death curse. Jason Voorhees' curse." Creative Commons³

For the past three decades, dozens if not hundreds of killers have stalked the silver screen, tearing a bloody hole into the culture of American youth.  While few are as terrifying as the man who, in 1978, changed the face of horror, all of them have come baring the same message: If you do bad things, I will do something worse to you.  This is what makes them fairytales, they are fun little stories that remind us to be good.  And as long as kids enjoy being bad, they will keep filling the seats.

Works Cited

1. The Friday the 13th Chronicles. Dir. Donald R. Beck. Paramount Pictures, 2004.

2. Halloween: 25 Years of Terror. Dir. Stefan Hutchinson. Paranormal Films, 2006.

Photo Credits

1. Photo from Chris (Picasa)

2. Photo from Double Feature Podcast (Flickr)

3. Photo from Darren (Flickr)