Paranormal Activity, Mockumentary Horror, and Simulated PTSD

I saw Paranormal Activity a couple weeks ago and, despite my reservations about all the hype, it seriously got to me. I think it's great that this whole "mockumentary horror" thing has become its own genre and we can no longer just dismiss them as Blair Witch knock-offs (see Cloverfield, Rec, Diary of the Dead). It's an extremely effective method of immersing the audience in a horror scenario and using their imagination against them. When done well, they can reach classic status, as we've seen, though they can be incredibly divisive films.

I've heard people coming out of the theater saying things like, "I want my money back," or, "That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen," and I can't understand it. Well, actually, I can understand it, I just can't agree. People see this being called the "scariest movie of all time" and go in expecting it to fail. Their expectations are so unreasonable they feel they don't need to do anything to engage themselves in the experience. A movie like this needs you to be willing get lost in it. If you fight it at all, it doesn't work. Sure, the same could be said for any movie, but with these, in particular, the fact that they try to simulate reality with a method that inherently carries the association of being "real" (handheld camerawork, improvised dialog, etc.) we tend to be even more critical of its verisimilitude than we would with a more traditional movie.

Personally, I don't really have to try very hard to suspend my disbelief for something like this. I've been a horror movie buff for as long as I can remember, and when I see something like this, I want to be scared. I enjoy the thrill of a simulated feeling of danger, so I put myself on the edge of the proverbial cliff, intentionally. All the movie has to do is give me that little shove and down I go. Though this does not mean that I'll fall for anything that calls itself "horror." The torture porn craze (Saw, Hostel, etc) lasted for about three movies for me, and even that was two too many. And the seemingly endless, over-budgeted wave of remakes (House on Haunted Hill, House of Wax, Last House on the Left) hardly get a passing glance.

The bottom line is, if all the elements are in place and it's a well-crafted piece of filmmaking, I will submit myself to its powers with vigor.

Paranormal Activity had all the elements in place. Aside from a few moments when the actors underplayed or overplayed scenes, this was an extremely well-crafted entry into the mockumentary horror genre. This much, I hoped for. What I did not expect, however, was the lingering fear that ended up ruining my night. I was jumpy and anxious, wary of dark spaces and couldn't be left alone without nearly being overwhelmed with panic. It sounds ridiculous, but on a purely physical level, it makes sense: when you're stuck in a dark room, staring intently at a screen for almost two hours, reacting to every strange sound, movement or reaction from the characters, you're guaranteed to be in that state of mind for a little while afterward. It's like an extremely mild, temporary form of post traumatic stress disorder.

Of course, having a wild imagination helps, and there are scenes in Paranormal Activity that leave much to the imagination; things you hear but don't see. These things did a number on me, too, because I just couldn't stop thinking about what those things could've been or what could've actually happened. It was hard to shake.

So if the natural progression of horror films over the years has led to the creation of the mockumentary horror genre, what is the next logical step? Will it rely on an entirely new technology to become more immersive? It seems so. What more could be done with a film or video camera to make a movie seem more real than this? The only thing I can think of would be sort of a Candid Camera, reality-TV kind of scenario; the people in the movie wouldn't know they were in a movie. But then there's all kinds of liability issues which would push producers to manipulate events and feign reality (just like the reality-TV shows of today) so that concept is out the window.

I can't even begin to guess what the next big technological leap in filmmaking will be. Some form of virtual reality? Probably. For the time being, though, a well done mocku-horror-mentary will do just fine.

Over-Marketing?: EA's Dante's Inferno

The fact that we can actually say, with a straight face, that there is a Dante's Inferno videogame coming out is something that seems a lot more silly and bizarre than it actually is. At first glance, it's as ridiculous as the idea of a Paradise Lost or A Christmas Carol videogame. It just feels strange to digest the idea that this antique pillar of literary history has branched out to such an unlikely medium of entertainment. When you look more closely at the situation though, you're quick to discover that its connection to the literature is essentially in name only. Aside from the references to each circle of Hell and the fact the main character's name is Dante (no other connection to the literary Dante at all), this is, for Christianity, what God of War was for Greek mythology. The gameplay also looks identical to God of War (which was very similar to Devil May Cry, which starred a character named, oddly enough, Dante), if that helps drive the connection home.

All that aside, Electronic Arts, the company producing the game, has come up with a fairly ingenious (though controversial, at times) marketing campaign to count down to the release of the game. Watch below to see what they sent to CHUD.com writer, Alex Riviello, to commemorate this specific circle of Hell:





I love how they forced this guy to actually engage in an act of wrath as part of their marketing campaign. It's a brilliant way to choreograph an engaging, interactive situation. It's definitely very memorable, too.

However, what does this actually say about their product? We know the artistry involved has to be top notch. Especially if their disturbing mini-books are any indication. But this kind of thing can backfire because it reeks so strongly of over-compensation. I'm sure the crew truly believe they have a top-notch product on their hands, but it just seems like an awful lot of hype before any substance. I predict it'll end up being a pretty solid action game with not much else to set it apart, except the visuals - something that every new videogame of this generation seems to emphasize over inventiveness and ingenuity in gameplay.

Nowadays, with so many avenues for companies to compete for our attention, big budget projects are pulling out all the stops to keep our eyes on them. Hence the viral marketing trend. Remember the Dark Knight's campaign, before Heath Ledger died? There were all these interactive web sites and Joker-themed scavenger hunts that kept people excited for the movie. Then, of course, Heath Ledger died and the marketing team didn't have to do much else. The hype was at its peak. But for a while there, they had the most potent viral marketing campaign I've ever seen. So how was the actual film? Passable. Enjoyable enough. Ledger's performance was legendary, but the movie itself? Merely decent, in my eyes.

That was a bit of a digression, but the point is that marketing campaigns for big budget projects have seemed to have more inventiveness behind them than some of the products/projects they're advertising. I guess the longer you're exposed to it, the more wary you get of this fact, because I know this can't be something that's cropped up in the last decade or so, it just seems like it has, because it's finally losing its effect on me.

Expectations and Movie Marketing: "Unbreakable" Retrospective

I've always been fascinated with movie marketing - what makes a good trailer, poster, and why. How much do you reveal? How much do you withhold? These things can drastically affect a viewer's experience with the film, because they create very specific expectations. There have been countless movies over the years that I've disliked simply because the marketing promised something that wasn't delivered. Though, there have also been many movies that I ended up loving in spite of the way they were marketed.

It seems that for ages the central tenant of movie marketing has stated that it's better to misrepresent the movie in favor of reaching everyone (or at least the largest demographic) than reaching the exact audience the movie was made for. Obviously, the reasoning is simple:

More asses in the seats = more $$$.

Marketing generally doesn't care if that means the audience comes out of the theater unhappy. They've already coughed up the cash, so marketing considers that a job well done. But there are cases that clearly show us how much more successful a movie could've been if it had been marketed to the right audience.


The best, and yet, most tragic, example of this is M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000).

Coming right off the heels of the massive success with The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan's next film had a lot of expectations attached to it before the first trailer even hit screens. When information about the movie finally started to reveal itself, people were confident that Shyamalan was about deliver yet another - if not classic - at least a solid, creepy, suspenseful film. The trailer showed us a man in a hospital (Bruce Willis) being told that he was the sole survivor of a deadly train wreck, and he didn't have a scratch. Cue the quick flashes of the disaster, accompanied by frantic clashing sounds. After some ominous slow motion walking and Sam Jackson talking like Lawrence Fishburne in The Matrix ("Are you ready for the truth?") the same thing was on everyone's mind. We wanted another Sixth Sense experience, and it appeared that Unbreakable would be more than capable of delivering it.

The problem was, Unbreakable wasn't scary at all. There was suspense, yes, but people went in expecting to be jolted out of their seats once in a while. It didn't really happen. What we saw was a very deliberately paced film about a man discovering that he was, essentially, invincible. Many of us recoiled at this, bucking the true nature of the film in favor of the empty promises of the trailer, and in a way, that terribly generic poster (more on movie poster designs, next entry), but then there were those of us who were floored at the revelation that we were actually watching a very elegant, moody, and by many accounts brilliant, superhero movie.

However, at the time, those disappointed were heard loudest. The box-office performance was dismal. Critics were lukewarm, and apparently continued to misrepresent the film, even after seeing it (Richard Corliss of Time Magazine said Shyamalan was adept at "balancing sophistication and horror" - again with the "horror").

All this because of the expectations perpetuated by the marketing campaign.

It's well-documented that Shyamalan wanted to market Unbreakable as "the story of an unlikely superhero," but met resistance from distributors at Disney, who wanted instead to portray it as a thriller. Last year, in a New York Times article entitled, "Shyamalan's Hollywood Horror Story, With Twist," Shyamalan mentioned his regret:

“I remember the moment that it happened, exactly where I was sitting at the table, the speakerphone,” he recalled in an interview from his office in a converted farmhouse near Philadelphia. “That moment may have been the biggest mistake that I have to undo over 10 years so the little old lady doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he’s the guy who makes the scary movies with a twist.’ ”

I wonder if this really was the moment that Shyamalan's career was sabotaged. This misconception of his affinity for "plot twists" has been nothing but a bane to his film career. Though, that's still no excuse for how terrible his films have progressively gotten (The Happening is one of the worst films I've ever seen - laugh-out-loud bad). Only two or three of his movies hinge on plot twists (The Sixth Sense, The Village, possibly Lady in the Water - haven't seen it) the rest simply withhold information from the viewer - information the viewer is actively seeking. A twist, on the other hand, is something that blindsides the audience. So if someone says the twist in Unbreakable was lame, they just don't realize what effect movie marketing has had on them. Dude, there was no twist.

Expectations and Comedy: "The Story of Everest"

It's been said that deconstructing why a joke is funny is a great way to make sure that joke will never be as funny again. In a lot of cases, this is true. Especially if you're right in the moment when someone's told a joke or something funny has happened, and somebody goes, "Oh my god, that's hilarious. Because we were all expecting ________ and instead ________ happened and wow, that is funny." Awkward silence follows.

But since this is a blog, far from being in the moment, and because we touched on the essence of comedy in class the other day, I've picked a personal favorite sketch that shows, rather blatantly, just how effective the manipulation of expectations can be in comedy. In a way, comedy is all about expectations. The comedian manipulates the audience to expect one thing, then either delivers just that, or sideswipes them with something completely unexpected, in such a way that forces them to laugh. Sometimes it's about diversion, other times it's about delivering exactly what you get them to expect. It depends on the context, of course. So, without further ado, Mr. Show's "The Story of Everest."




I have watched this sketch countless times and, in all honesty, I have not been able to watch it without laughing out loud, each time, and with progressively more gusto. It's slapstick, but it's very strategic slapstick.

It begins by exploiting the audience's complete lack of expectation. Thomas (played by recurring cast member, Jay Johnston) arrives, greets his parents, and begins telling his tale of conquering Everest. The audience chuckles at the folksy, super-cheesy acting of the cast, perhaps because they think the words will be the source of the joke. That's the diversion, right there. Like a magician, the writers divert our attention to something we immediately perceive, all the while carefully setting up the trick. The man is telling his story with full conviction, and his parents react to every word with gasps and awe. All the while, the man is stepping back, ever further...

When he falls, it's completely out of nowhere and our laughter comes from a very instinctual place. The pure physical prowess that Johnston displays in executing a rehearsed fall and making it look completely spontaneous and accidental is something to be admired, and it's the primary reason the fall continues to be funny for each of the SIX times that follow.

But there are other elements to be considered in the subsequent instances. The fade in/fade out, set to the same piece of music, becomes comical when repeated and allows us to recover from the last fall and sets our expectations for the next. The writers know we are expecting more falls, so they come up with different ways to surprise us, or make us wait longer than we expect. Personally, the fall that makes me laugh the hardest is probably the last one (4:29): the moment of silence right before the loud violence of the fall usually has me giggling before it even happens. The last two are the best because they're the most ridiculous, really. To fall that violently from a fixed position is pretty much impossible. Which, of course, is the most important element to the comedy: the absurd.

Mr. Show (created by David Cross & Bob Odenkirk) was all about the absurd and, at its best, it was a Master Class in Absurdity. If, unlike me, you were unimpressed with this sketch, I hope you can at least appreciate the craft of it and, further, I urge you to give a few of their other sketches a try. These guys were masters.

The Pre-Taped Call-In Show

The Audition

I'll Marry Your Stupid Ass

Mac's Trouble With Titles

First of all, I wasn't even aware there was already a Macintosh Operating System called "Leopard," let alone the new, even clunkier-sounding "Snow Leopard." This just seems out-of-character for Mac. I understand that they'd want to get away from simply numbering each of their new OS's and try something with a bit more zing, but I think giving them animal names is not a step in the right direction. I imagine they must be trying to evoke some kind of instinctual consumer response.

Some people hear "Leopard" and they think "fast," or "elegant," so in that most basic sense, it might be seen as an effective title.

But when I heard it, my first thought was an elementary school kid pretending he owns a big software company. His favorite animal is a leopard, so he goes up to his dad and tells him about his new make-believe OS (the kid probably doesn't even know what it stands for, but maybe his dad's a software engineer so he hears it around the house a lot) and says it's called "Leopard."

"Why Leopard?" asks Dad.

"Cuz leopards are cool and they're the fastest mammals on earth."

"Actually, cheetahs are the fastest. Why don't you call it Cheetah?"

The kid thinks it over a moment, and his eyes widen in excitement.

"... Yeah. Cool! Thanks, Dad!" the kid exclaims, and runs to his bedroom to draw a cheetah.

Then the Dad goes to work the next day and presents his idea for the new Mac OS title - Leopard - because he's a lazy thinker and stole the idea from his eight- or nine-year old son.

This is just an unnecessarily elaborate way of saying that I think the Snow Leopard title sounds really childish and totally unrelated to anything Macintosh. Maybe it's just me. I mean, I'm by no means knowledgeable when it comes to computer software and hardware. Nor am I more partial to Windows than Mac or vice-versa. I'm approaching this purely from a marketing perspective. For example, I think Windows recent OS, Vista, has a classy and appropriately innocuous title. Corporate-sounding, but just provocative enough to evoke some immediate feelings of peace and beauty.

Too bad that has nothing to do with how Vista actually functions.