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The Evil Dead doesn’t have much of a plot. Compared to something really plot-heavy like Moneyball or The Avengers (the latter being absolutely stuffed wall-to-wall with twists and betrayals and drama), The Evil Dead doesn’t really seem like it has much going on.

What happens during the movie’s hour-and-a-half runtime?

Five college students travel to a cabin out in the woods. They intend to stay there while on vacation. They discover a cursed book, accidentally recite an incantation, and summon a few demonic spirits. These spirits attack them, posses them. They fight back. Most of them die. The End.

That’s really it. Of course, there’s some other stuff scattered around the film. At one point, they try to start a car so that they can drive back to town, but that doesn’t work out. A few of the characters are dating, so there’s a little drama there. But the vast majority of the movie is just violence and gore and tension as these twenty-somethings fight a losing battle against a number of hateful demons. If you don’t believe me, here’s a chunk of the movie’s plot summary from Wikipedia: “Shelly becomes a Deadite (possessed) and scratches Scott's face. Scott throws her into the fireplace, briefly burning Shelly's face. As she attacks him again, Scott bisects part of her wrist with a knife and then she bites off her own mangled hand. Scott stabs her in the back with a Sumerian dagger, apparently killing her. When she reanimates, Scott dismembers her with an axe and buries the remains. […] When Ash checks on Linda, he is horrified to find that she has become possessed. She attacks him, but he stabs her with a Sumerian dagger. Unwilling to dismember her, he buries her instead. She revives and attacks him, forcing him to decapitate her with a shovel.” I think you get the point.

So if this movie isn’t plot-drive… What is it? It certainly isn’t character-driven. While the protagonist Ash Williams is an icon of the horror genre, that has less to do with his portrayal in this movie and more to do with the subsequent films. Besides Ash, most of the characters are shallow and built on clichés. They also all want the same basic thing: they just want to survive. There aren’t any tangled motivations, alliances, or crisscrossing desires. Everything about the characters points outward. So, again, what is this movie doing?

The Evil Dead is often categorized into the genre ‘splatter’, which hints to one of the movie’s main draws: it constantly tries to shock and horrify you with outrageous amounts of blood and gore. Limbs are torn off, skin melts away, and faces decompose into leather. The visual spectacle of it all is likely why you and most Evil Dead fans paid for a ticket (or pulled it up on Netflix). The over-the-top, macabre, visceral explorations of the human anatomy ignite a simultaneous guttural revulsion and fascination within the viewer. And it’s all done with practical effects, so the ungodly sights occurring in that isolated cabin are strangely mesmerizing (although I did a fair amount of looking away).

It’s also just cool. Similar to the cult classic The Thing, the special effects used in The Evil Dead are both impressive and hokey. They bring out your inner sci-fi/horror film nerd.

The Evil Dead’s lack of plot makes it a good example of a movie that wasn’t really anything until it was committed to film. While the ‘book of the dead’ is a cool aspect of the fiction and some of the more memorable scares were certainly conceived with the script, this movie is memorable for what director Sam Raimi was able to with his camera and some fake body parts.

None of this is an insult to The Evil Dead, which I think is a great movie. I just want to use it to point out how far interesting, creative visuals can take a movie. In the case of Sam Raimi’s breakout hit, direction took it from 0 to 100.

Voice-Over Troubled Waters

I’ve watched a fair amount of amateur film criticism on YouTube, and by far the most frequent complaint I’ve heard about modern movies is that there’s too much voice-over.

There’s lots of people out there who really don’t like voice-over, and they especially don’t like it when films starts with voice-over, which is unfortunate because films really like to start with voice-over.

My guess as to why opening narration is so popular is because it’s an extremely quick and easy way to explain things to the audience. Let’s say your film is set in the future—how do you communicate this to the audience? You could build up a whole futuristic cityscape with flying cars and holograms like at the beginning of Blade Runner, you could show your main character using some sort of futuristic technology, you could follow two characters as they discuss what it’s like to live in the future, or… you could start your film over black with the main character’s voice-over saying, “The year is 2049.” Boom. Mission accomplished in three seconds.

But the benefits of narrated exposition are also the exact reasons why people hate it so much. They say that voice-over is lazy and unsatisfying. Movies are (obviously) very visual and communicate tone, emotion, story, character, setting, etc. through imagery—bad voice-over completely fails to take advantage of that. It’s almost anti-cinematic.

But voice-over remains popular, which isn’t a bad thing because voice-over isn’t inherently lazy or unsatisfying. To clarify: it's bad voice-over that sucks.

Good voice-over can be anything for a movie. Marriage Story has good voice-over. It even opens with it.

The first seven minutes of Marriage Story introduce us to the two main characters, Nicole and Charlie, through two separate monologues. Charlie first delivers a monologue where he talks about Nicole, and then Nicole delivers a monologue where she talks about Charlie. But it isn’t like these speeches formally introduce the two protagonists to the audience; they simply list very personal and specific observations like “She makes people feel comfortable about even embarrassing things” and “He is very self-sufficient – he can darn a sock and cook himself dinner and iron a shirt.” These lines are delivered over visual representations of these observations.

Why is this good voice-over? For one thing, it isn’t trying to force feed the audience. Instead of dumping backstory, this sequence slowly and sweetly eases you into the personalities of two characters who you’ll be spending the next couple hours with. It’s effective because it draws the viewer in instead of pushing them away. Bad voice-over is an easy gripe because it’s very noticeable. When a main character opens the movie with bland world building, it feels like the screenwriter is just lecturing the audience. Boring. Marriage Story instead delivers something that feels organic. The details shared aren’t economical, and they don’t merely pave a roadway for the plot. This voice-over takes its time in giving you an almost romantic sense of Nicole and Charlie. It feels as though the voice-over is adding something to the beginning of the film that a more straight forward scene could not.

Marriage Story’s voice-over is also effective because it doesn’t forget about visuals. By pairing each line with the mentioned character acting it out (“He’s very competitive” played over Charlie raging at a game of Monopoly), the audience subtly gets the feeling that they're experiencing memories. Every snapshot is short and pointed, and it matches perfectly and sometimes humorously with its respective narration. It’s as though the viewer is looking back on a long and lovely relationship with each of the two protagonists. The result is that Charlie and Nicole both feel familiar before their first full scene.

But the best part of Marriage Story’s short voice-over portion is that it’s charming. The music, the laughs, and the slight sentimentality all come together in a really lovely way. While certain specific functions and characteristics of film tropes like voice-over do tend to indicate whether or not it’s being used well, the main qualifier always boils down to this: Did you enjoy it? Everything else comes second.

Who Framed Mark Zuckerberg?

A ‘framing narrative’ is basically a storyline wrapped around another storyline. It’s super popular in literature – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, Ethan Frome – and also noticeably present in all sorts of famous movies, from Titanic to The Social Network. Using The Social Network (directed by David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin), I’d like to talk through what (I think) a framing narrative can add to a movie.

First of all, a framing narrative adds complexity… but not the good kind of complexity. When you frame your main plot with another plot, you clutter the script with all sorts of extra details, locations, time periods, and possibly even characters. At least in regard to mass appeal, simplicity seems to be a filmmakers best friend, so this is a bit of a drawback. In a worst case scenario, the framing narrative can subtract from the actual point of the film. In The Social Network, the framing narrative definitely adds a fair amount of complexity. The main story – Mark Zuckerberg’s journey from undergraduate to CEO – is presented to the audience through the lens of a deposition. In the hands of a less competent director and a way less competent screenwriter, the greater narrative of Zuckerberg’s lawsuits could easily confuse the focus of the film with extraneous legal nonsense.

But moving past the extra weight, there’s also a lot of potential benefits. For one thing, a framing narrative can add context and justify exposition. A really easy question to throw at a movie is: Why are we watching this? A framing narrative can answer that question. In The Social Network, the question is already answered with exformation – everyone in the audience has heard of Mark Zuckerberg, and we’re watching the movie to learn about his experiences founding Facebook. But the framing narrative adds an in-universe explanation as well. We’re watching to find out how Mark got to this deposition, and find out why he’s being sued by three of his fellow Harvard students (one of which is his former best friend). Another plus that goes somewhat hand-in-hand with the context of a framing narrative is that exposition can become far more natural. If the movie is built around someone telling the audience a story, then tools like voiceover and backstory don’t seem so jarring because, well, that’s just how people tell stories.

A framing narrative can also add tension to a movie. Since framing situations often take place in the future relative to the main events of the story, the framing narrative can create useful dramatic irony. If your movie opens with a spy dangling over a pit of lava and that spy turns to the camera and says, “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” then the explanation becomes exciting. In the main narrative, watching that spy do something as simple as getting out of bed is transformed into a captivating mystery because we know the stakes of his inevitable predicament. The Social Network utilizes this exact arrangement to keep the movie engaging. Watching Mark’s friend group work on their little social networking site is 10x more captivating when you know that they all end up at each other’s throats by the end of the film.

Finally, a framing narrative can target the audience’s psychology. People are hardwired to listen to someone tell them a story (see: books), and movies tend to lack that specific subconscious signal. Watching short intercut video clips obviously makes sense to people, but it doesn’t resonate in quite the same instinctual way in which a directly told story does. Adding a story teller into a movie can patch that hole.

Ditch That Witch

Here’s a paradox, sort of:

Movies are a ‘visual medium.’ The Blair Witch Project is a movie. The central (most effective, most memorable) element of The Blair Witch Project is the Blair Witch. The Blair Witch never appears on screen.

Then where is the Blair Witch? You don’t hear it, touch it, taste it (thank god), or smell it. At best, you see where it’s been and what it’s done—or maybe not even that. You don’t really know for sure if it exists, although you’re given pretty good reason to believe that something awful and unexplainable lives in those woods.

So the Blair Witch doesn’t exist, but it also definitely does exist. It’s in the title, and the first section of the movie is just talking heads explaining the witch’s lore. It’s also in your head throughout the entire duration of the film (and, in my case, for several years afterwards).

The Blair Witch Project is an excellent example of a movie that scares you by not showing you something. This is a pretty widely talked about concept in horror across all mediums; you’ve probably heard the phrases ‘fear of the unknown’ or ‘the scariest monster is the one you don’t see’. Stephen King talks about this in Danse Macabre: “Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. 'A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible', the audience thinks, 'but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.’ ”

How does this work in The Blair Witch Project and why is it effective? I believe there are three key ingredients to a terrifying offscreen monster:

1. Your imagination is pre-loaded. – As I mentioned earlier, the first section of the movie is devoted to telling you all about the Blair Witch. This is incredibly important to the movie because it primes the audience’s imaginations. If the Blair Witch was given no more background than “Hey there’s a witch out in the woods,” then the audience would either not think too much about what the witch looks like or, worse yet, use their currently existing archetype of witches to picture it. The general concept of a witch in American lore is really not that scary (no thanks to The Wizard of Oz). A witch is usually a green older woman with a pointy nose and a pointy hat and a big cauldron (if you need evidence of this, google ‘witch’). The movie doesn’t want this kind of witch; it wants a creature so horrible and unimaginable that it can’t even be visualized on screen. In order to get the audience to create such a monster with their own imaginations, the movie plants seeds—little details, rumors, and legends at the beginning of the movie are kept just vague enough to allow the viewer to envision something far worse than any special effects could render.
2. You know it’s out there. – While trying to seem clever at the beginning of this post, I said The Blair Witch Project was like a paradox when really it isn’t. As with most all horror movies, what you see is what scares you—the only notable difference is that this movie’s visuals scare you through implication, specifically the implication that there’s something horrible in the woods. The Blair Witch is effective because it’s constantly reaffirming the idea that’s just around the corner, that it’s hiding in those bushes, that it’s right behind you. When our three protagonists wake up in the forest after a night of strange and unexplainable noises outside their tent, they find that something/someone has placed little wooden symbols all around the camp. The witch was right there in their camp while they were sleeping. This point is crucial, as it differentiates the witch from a character like Godot—the audience needs to know that the witch is a physical presence and a threat, not some far away concept.
3. You almost see it – The trick to the ‘unknown’ being so horrible is that you’re always almost on the brink of knowing it. Heather, the main character and director of the eponymous Blair Witch Project, screams something like ‘OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT??’ when sprinting through the woods at night and catching a glimpse of something that was probably the witch. We don’t see what she sees, but we come so close that it’s agonizing. Sitting on the cusp of a horrifying revelation is sort of like a meta version of peeking around a corner. The tension of almost realizing our fears, of wanting to see it but also desperately not wanting to, elevates the terror of the monster to explosive levels.

The Blair Witch Project created its monster with a tiny budget and a whole lot of well executed creativity, and the end result was a solid proof of concept that the most chilling tool in a filmmaker’s kit can be simple exclusion.

Bringing Back The Cat

Stuart Gordon’s Reanimator and Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary—two horror films from the 1980’s with similar premises and wildly diverging tones. In both films, the protagonist is caught up with a method for resurrecting the dead. In both films, this method comes with a cost: the dead come back ‘different’, which is just the horror movie way of saying ‘evil’. But most the important similarity between these two films is that the protagonists are introduced to the realm of beyond-death in a very specific way… through the resurrection of a cat.

Yeah, I’m not sure if it was intellectual cross pollination, purposeful hat tipping, or just coincidence, but both movies contain the following ordered plot beats: Character A knows how to bring things back from the dead; Character B does not; Character B’s cat dies; Character A brings it back to life; Character B has an encounter with their newly reanimated cat and thus learns about the resurrection process.

I think it’s worth comparing the undead cat scenes in Reanimator and Pet Sematary because they both use the same ideas to accomplish the same goal (terrorizing the audience), but they do it in very different ways and therefore hit the audience in very different ways.

In Pet Sematary, it’s all about truth and realization. Louis, the main character, has to bury his cat after it was hit by a car. His neighbor Jud tells him that there’s a special place to bury it—a cursed and forgotten Indian burial ground out in the woods. Jud says anything buried there will return from the dead, and of course Louis doesn’t believe him, but they bury the cat there anyways. A few scenes later, Louis is working in his garage when who should show up to greet him…? The cat! But now the cat is acting different. Louis picks it up to see if he’s imagining things and immediately receives a nasty scratch across his face.

Compare this to Reanimator. Protagonist Dan’s cat just died (under mysterious circumstances), and his new roommate Herbert takes it down to the basement. Not long after, Dan hears strange cat-like sounds coming up through the floor boards. Dan goes down to investigate and finds Herbert frantically running around in circles with an angry zombie cat clinging to his back like one of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. Herbert rips off the cat and chucks it at a nearby cabinet, and just when you think it might be finished… It lunges out of the darkness at Dan! Dan frantically fights it back with a baseball bat and finally throws the cat so hard at a wall that its impact leaves a red stain. The cat is dead once again.

What do these two scenes want to accomplish? Well, they’re both trying to scare you, but the same general concept is being played for two completely different reactions. In Pet Sematary, horror is drawn from what is considered to be real in the universe of the movie. Like Louis, the audience (I’m assuming) doesn’t believe in revivification. It’s a myth, it’s fantasy. When Jud tells us about it, we shrug him off as some crazy old man. Maybe we know something spooky is going to happen because we’re watching a horror movie, but we remain skeptical because the main character is still skeptical and because we haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary yet… But then the dead cat actually comes home. The horror there is in the discovery. The realm of possibility in the movie has expanded into uncharted and unpleasant territories, and we don’t like being faced with something so unsettling being presented as now possible. It’s not that the cat is mean, per se, but really that the cat is there. Disbelief being disproven is scary. Being shown the impossible is scary. That’s how Pet Sematary tackles the cat scene: the movie isn’t trying to scare you with the imagery it presents on screen (it is, after all, just a cat), but with the implications it creates beyond the screen. Fear comes from the questions we start to ask about the film’s universe and from our own curiosity about this mysterious burial ground. The movie also wants to tap into our fears about death and what lies beyond death. It’s you, the audience member, that’s doing all the work here because you have to create terror through your own immediate thoughts about what’s presented on screen.

Reanimator is less interested in thoughts, more interested in what’s right in front of you. First of all, the movie has already established that the dead can be brought back to life. The process is shown to us before we even get the opening title sequence (followed by Jeffrey Comb’s awesome and cheesy delivery of the line “I gave him life!”). It’s not shocking when we see the cat brought back because, unlike the protagonist, we already know that reanimation is possible in the world of the film (it’s also in the title). The film is instead trying to shock us with absurdity and humor. Most of us know and love household cats, and now here’s one viciously leaping around in a dark basement and being relentlessly beaten with a baseball bat. It’s effective because it’s so unpleasant to look at. We don’t like watching a blood-covered cat being pitched at a wall, so the footage of it happening is outrageous, scary, and sadistically sort of funny. Reanimator isn’t all that interested in having you emotionally engage with the implications of what exists beyond the limits of our mortal existence. It would much rather gross you out with lots of blood and guts and uncomfortable nudity. The movie is well aware of the absurdity of its off-zombie premise, and it doesn’t want to convince you that this is reality. It’s perfectly comfortable with you remaining at a distance and cringing in your seat at the sight of a surgical saw ripping through a chest cavity.

So the difference between the two cat scenes is the difference between the implied and the explicit. Pet Sematary wants to suggest that the supernatural horror is possible and maybe just lurking right around the corner (‘curiosity killed the cat’), while Reanimator wants to take the goriest and most over-the-top manifestation of that horror and shove it right in your face (‘who let the cat out of the bag?’).

Consider The Lobster

I think that Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster is a good movie. I really like it.

My opinion of The Lobster is not radical or exceptional—lots of people seem to like it (my mom not included). It currently holds an 88% on rotten tomatoes, it won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 89^th Academy Awards. Not to say that awards and public opinion determine the quality of a film, but I think it’s fair to call The Lobster at the very least ‘well-made’. Of course, it’s not an objectively good movie because ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are subjective terms, and people who didn’t like the movie are just as valid in their opinions as those who did. There wouldn’t be any point in trying to argue that The Lobster is objectively good, but I think it’s possible to assert that certain aspects of the movie are just plain good without stepping on any toes.

I think the performances in The Lobster, especially from leads Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Olivia Coleman, and Léa Seydoux, were objectively good. Why? How do you qualify an objectively good acting performance?

One way would be to judge a performance by how convincing it is: if the audience believes the actor, then the actor did a good job. Obviously, that doesn’t work. None of the performances in The Lobster are convincing because none of them are trying to be. All the actors employ a really interesting deadpan delivery that almost seems accessible by the end of the film. It’s great, but not convincing.

So maybe acting should be judged by how enjoyable it is: if the audience enjoys the performance, then the actor did a good job. That doesn’t really work either. Asking about ‘enjoyment’ is diving right back into subjectivity, and also a good performance doesn’t necessarily have to be an enjoyable one. Javier Bardem is incredible in No Country For Old Men, but I would call his performance unsettling rather than enjoyable.

Another, simpler way to judge acting would be to just look at the intentions of the actor. If they were trying to deliver a certain performance and they succeeded, then their acting was good. The problem with that would be the question of whether or not the actor’s initial intentions were good, and how do you judge that? I personally think Jared Leto’s version of the Joker was terrible, even though he seemed to commit pretty well to his own vision of the character.

None of these work, and it might seem like the solution is back where I started… everything in entertainment is subjective, and there’s no point in trying to sort the good from the bad without purely relying on people’s opinions. This is an easy way out, but it ignores the clear trend of how certain types and kinds of movies do well with critics and audiences, while others do not. Certain factors like originality, authenticity, emotional resonance, sense of humor, tension, social awareness, etc. all propel a movie towards success. It seems like not all of these factors are purely up to the audience member—a film can be original, socially aware, and tense regardless of what you might think about it (see Get Out). So if the individual pieces can all be more or less quantified, then why is a movie itself still totally up to opinion? And why are aspects like acting and directing equally so? Why can I not say that The Lobster is objectively good?

Well, maybe The Lobster is a bad example. It’s a bit of an artsy-fartsy, absurdist piece of Art with a capital A, and I can easily see how a huge amount of people would find it boring or even annoying. And maybe that’s exactly the answer: movies are all about what you’re looking for. Franchises like The Fast and the Furious openly reject any and all criteria that might be applied when judging The Lobster, and yet they do really well and people like them. Quality of acting, directing, writing, and production design is only important insofar as it lands with its intended audience. Even though I have no interest in seeing The Fate of the Furious, it wouldn’t be fair to call it bad because it made $1.236 billion on a $250 million budget (Jesus Christ).

To wrap this up, I think movies can be ‘objectively good’ at doing certain things for certain people. 1917 was good at being an original and captivating war film, Avengers: Endgame was good at being a smart and loveable blockbuster, and Marriage Story—I don’t know, I didn’t see it.

I think The Lobster was objectively good at casting modern dating and relationships in a really weird, emotional, and memorable light—that's why I think it’s a good movie.

The Lighthouse, The VVitch, and the Wardrobe

Minor spoilers for The Witch and The Lighthouse

I watched Robert Egger’s film The Witch (The VVitch) a few weeks ago (I’ve been kicking myself since 2015 to rent it off Amazon, but then it popped up on Netflix) and dear lord what an amazing film.

So then I obviously went and rented Egger’s most recent film The Lighthouse, and honestly I’m not sure which one is better. They’re both so disturbing, so absorbing, so big, so boring (in a good way), so weirdly secretive, so silly for how serious they are.

I want to talk about one really stand-out aspect present in both films (and I know I’m not the first to point this out): the score and sound design in The Witch and The Lighthouse are incredible. All thanks goes to composer Mark Korven (both films) and sound designer Damian Volpe (The Lighthouse) for building so much suspense through a few key sound effects and two really crafty scores. There’s a few things that work so, so well: the jarring way in which the music shifts from whispering to screaming, the constant repetition of certain eerie sounds, and the combination of specific audio and imagery to create such uncomfortable atmospheres.

The Witch is limp without its music. The film is beautiful, but most of the emotion in the film is heard rather than seen. When the eponymous witch first appears on screen, we only see her back. She’s bent over a table, working at something, and even though we can’t see what she’s doing, WE KNOW what she’s doing (horror warning: it involves a baby and hammer). But the image is so dark (the film’s nighttime scenes were shot mostly using candlelight and moonlight) that you can barely make out anything beyond a suggestion of the events. What gets you is the music: a playfully hostile drumbeat paired with what sounds like a hacksaw carving through a block of wood. It’s the soundtrack of anxiety, the musical equivalent of passing a 14-wheeler on a two lane highway. It asks you to start biting your nails. Later in the film, we meet a very evil certain somebody who only speaks in whispers—whose dialogue sounds so physical that you can hear their tongue hitting their teeth as they pronounce the letter ‘t’. It sounds like someone is literally whispering in your ear. It’s unnerving. And the music isn’t afraid to build up to uncomfortable loudness for the sake of atmosphere. A lot of modern horror movies are incredibly lazy in the way they use loudness; when they want to make you jump in your seat, they let everything get really quiet and then they slap you across the face with a blaring sound cue. The Witch isn’t interested in wasting tension. It pulls you to the edge of your seat because it wants to drag you further into the film.

The Lighthouse does some really interesting things with sound (a reoccurring mermaid shrieks at the camera in such an unearthly, washed out way; the squawking of seagulls started to drive me up the wall). But one of the best parts of the whole film (next to Pattinson and Dafoe’s performances) is the constant blaring foghorn that sounds off every five minutes throughout the duration of the film. It’s such an otherworldly, bassy sound—you can’t really tell if it’s something you might actually hear coming from a lighthouse in the 1890’s, or if it’s a completely made up science-fiction noise. But it hits so well because the one sound says so much: its repetition makes you think of horror/insanity, the fact that it’s a foghorn makes you think of the ocean, and the singularity of it connotes isolation. Beyond that, it just sounds really, really cool.

Go watch The Lighthouse and The Witch.