Things That Go Bump In The Night.

My father and I watched the movie "The Relic" tonight. A monster flick we hadn't seen in a number of years and thought would be fun to watch again. The monster genre of movie is really an interesting horror sub-genre in that it plays upon our own (childhood) fears of creatures in the closet and under the bed.

The movies that have been successful in their manifestation of beasties are ones like Alien (and Aliens, which was arguably an action movie, not a horror), Mimic, Cloverfield (which I'll explain further on), The Descent, Pitch Black, The Fly, 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. The reasons these movies work is that they are first and foremost movies about humans and their struggles. They don't fall prey to lame stereotypes and formulae like other horror movies.

Now I mentioned Cloverfield. It's a movie that many people felt was a lame attempt at copying Godzilla or The Host (a Korean monster movie). The hand cam style was difficult to watch (I even got sick in the theatre from motion sickness), and the acting was pedestrian. What it did do well is allow the viewer to feel helpless and uneasy about a creature we weren't really shown until the end of the movie. This is one of the key elements to a good monster flick. With a few exceptions the list I mentioned above features our villains in either partial or flickering light, passing quickly through a frame or any other number of film techniques to limit our seeing the creature. The human brain is vastly more superior at scaring itself than any director could. We get scared at a primal level making it so that the scare is deep in our subconscious and therefore more effective.

Two other movies I feel are worth mentioning while on the topic of Cloverfield are Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity. These three movies belong to something known as Fourth Wall film making. They seek to make the events going on as legitimate as possible, bringing the audience in one step further to the action on screen. For the last two we never actually see the creature at all. Are terror is produced primarily through sound effects, simple lighting tricks and the actors response. In the same way a multitude of people laughing can enhance a joke, so too can the actors palpable fear make the audience more afraid. A movie that attempted, but failed in this style was The Fourth Kind. While the premise was good, it faltered in that it used known actors (Milla Jovovich for one) in their "recreation" of events. We know she's an actor and immediately that fourth wall is raised again and we're very aware we're watching a movie, not a documentary.

One thing I'd recommend you find is a short movie called "Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County". This Fourth Wall piece sparked some controversy when it was aired on TV without any prior warning or caption stating the film's validity. Of course a small panic ensued and message boards were alight with people wanting to know what they hell the just saw. It's one of those pieces that's quiet clearly false, but it has a few elements that are so legitimately unsettling that it works in being a scary movie.

While not a purveyor of horror movies specifically, I'm always appreciative of any piece that can elicit a response from me just long enough to cause me to tense up, or feel my pulse race.