David Gordon Green, super-genius director of All the Real Girls and this year’s terribly underrated Your Highness, gets fairly in depth with his plans to remake Dario Argento’s beloved Suspiria (via Complex).
It’s fascinating stuff and I’d love to see how he pulls it off (IF he pulls it off, I guess I should say, since the remake hasn’t secured financing yet).
Anyway, read the interview here.
Unlike most knee-jerky critics quick to deride the slew of faux-documentary “found footage” films, I don’t, by and large, mind the format. There have been some genuine gems, able to combine our current techno-lust with sharp, witty imagery that calls to mind actual disasters while conjuring up fantastical ones (movies like Cloverfield, [rec], Diary of the Dead, and, best of all, the little-seen Australian shocker Lake Mungo). But the format is quickly showing that it’s not a genre built for longevity, as things like last summer’s forgettable The Last Exorcism proved and this week’s Apollo 18 cements fully.
Which, it turns out, is sort of a shame because Apollo 18 has a clever enough conceit – it catalogs a secret mission, never fully acknowledged by NASA, ostensibly to set up technology to keep the Russians from spying on us but (of course) with nefarious undercurrents, launched in the early 1970s. So – three astronauts go up, with minimal backstory – and not much happens, save for some creaky space noises, spooky shadows, and, of course, some intergalactic critters that have a nasty habit of crawling up your space suit and making you go bonkers. (You can see a more explicit examination of this phenomenon in the Ren & Stimpy cartoon “Space Madness.”)
One of the chief problems of Apollo 18 is that it just isn’t science-y enough, by which I mean that the movie isn’t steeped in reality enough. After all, these movies are supposed to be actual footage, shot by astronauts (although most of the camera angles and scenarios are beyond improbable), in a very scary situation. So that gives you license to steep this film in the actual particulars of space travel – most of which are infinitely scarier than the creaky noises we hear and the questionably rendered computer generated beasties. Things like how cold the moon can get, the infinite vacuum of space, and the myriad of problems that can go wrong on these rudimentary missions, aren’t explored. They aren’t even given a cursory glance. Instead, the fantasy elements are amped up, without human or scientific backing… and what the fantasy elements actually are… whoo boy.
I guess I should post a spoiler alert here, although no one is actually going to see it, so… Here goes. The cosmic villains in Apollo 18? MOON ROCKS. That’s right: moon rocks are actually alien eggs or shape shifting space spiders or… something. Honestly, the astronauts have no clue what’s going on and neither does the audience, thanks to the general murkiness of the faux-documentary cinematography. And in the end, it’s pretty hard to care, especially when the nonsensical plot wrinkles bunch up in the final act (NASA and the NSA are going to leave the astronauts to die on the moon but send the guy in the capsule back home?) It’s not funny, it’s not scary, it’s not fun, it’s just… bad. You can only imagine how awful it would have been if you could actually make out what’s going on.
The Guardian did a great piece on horror movie music, when you can read here.
I talked to Fright Night writer Marti Noxon (she also had something to do with a little show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer). She was warm and smart and hilarious.
You can read my interview (for The Playlist/IndieWIRE) here.
If you haven’t seen the new Fright Night yet… GO. NOW.
After a seemingly endless series of delays, this weekend the much-ballyhooed remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark finally lands in theaters. Co-written and produced by certifiable genius Guillermo del Toro, it’s based (lovingly) on a well remembered 1973 ABC television movie. (If you’re curious and have never seen the original, you can order it from the Warner Archives, which recently put out a wonderful new edition, with re-mastered technical specs and a new commentary track. Get it here.)
The story, for both the original and the remake, involves a young woman (Kim Darby in the original, Katie Holmes here) who moves into a house populated by smallish supernatural creatures. (I’m tempted to call them goblins, but “demons” probably sounds scarier.) In this new remake, which has a sustained sense of atmospheric dread (although that could just be the muddy photography), there’s also a little girl, who connects with the creatures, along with her doubtful father (Guy Pearce).
As the little girl (named Sally, after the protagonist of the original), becomes more intensely terrorized by these tiny creatures, the movie itself becomes more and more frantic and terrifying and, honestly, there are some honest-to-god scares tucked away inside the sprawling Victorian mansion where the movie takes place (Australian subbing for Rhode Island). The creatures (designed and animated by Spectral Motion and WETA) are typically top notch (it is, after all, a Guillermo del Toro joint), intriguing and acutely menacing.
It’s just that things don’t built appropriately, and the movie could have used more humor and wit. There’s a sequence where a large group is invited over to the rambling manse to have dinner, which called for a scene where the goblins (deathly afraid of lights) cut the power and chew up all of the highfalutin visitors in various grotesque ways. But the scene plays out much more predictably, without the additional oomph.
The film was directed by Troy Nixey, a talented comic book artist, who frames key sequences with a painterly sense of composition. It’s just that all too often these same sequences are too shrouded in shadow; things become blurry and poorly defined. (You can make out Fright Night better - and that thing is shot in hazy 3D.) Of all the things a scary movie should make you do, squint isn’t one of them.
I just love this illustration of the monster from this summer’s outstanding Attack the Block. You can order a (brilliant) print here. I know I’m going to.
Shock Value author Jason Zinoman asked a bunch of genre filmmakers about their favorite scary movie.
The results, over at the New York Times, can be read here. I was surprised/saddened that no one cited my favorite scary movie, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.
It is, after all, totally fucking brilliant.
