Horror and action movies new cinematic style

Mem

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I am sick of the new style with the hand held cameras. It was not only in Cloverfield but also in 28 Weeks Later.

I am sick of the dark night scenes in horror movies. So dark that you can not tell what is going on.

I also hate the MTV style edit cuts where you can not tell what is going on.
 

Mem

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I just tried to watch the new Halloween movie. It started out good, but then the night scenes are so dark that I could not tell what was going on. At one point MM is in a drained pool full of leaves. Later on they show it again, but you can't tell if he is still there or not because it is so dark.

I've also given up watching horror movies online of from a download. I watched Hostel 1 and still don't know what happened.
 

hotbtminla

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Mem, Cloverfield had to look like it was shot on a hand-held camcorder... that was the point of the movie. :cool:

But I tend to agree with you on the preponderance of hand-held shots in action and horror films lately. I think filmmakers are going after a more chaotic and intimate connection with the audience - "you are there" sort of feeling. And instead they're inducing the wrong kind of nausea.

One film where I did think the style worked very well, however, was Children of Men. The sequence in the car with Julianne Moore and the long scene following Clive Owen while the army invades the slum (with shit blowing up and getting shot up all around him) in particular were visually arresting. Of course, that film was also well lit, didn't scrimp on special effects and had Alfonso Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki behind the camera. I can only imagine what a horror movie would look like if they made it.

But back to your rant. MTV-styled jump edits are soooo mindnumbing. Funny, a lot of guys with that directing style actually cut their teeth with music videos. So I guess it makes unfortunate sense.
 

SpeedoGuy

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Was it the "Blair Witch Project" that pioneered this kind of cinematography? I liked BWP because of its style and originality but I haven't seen any of the other films mentioned here. Certainly, the "home videocam" filming technique could be overused and get stale. That sounds like what is happening here.
 

hotbtminla

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Was it the "Blair Witch Project" that pioneered this kind of cinematography? I liked BWP because of its style and originality but I haven't seen any of the other films mentioned here. Certainly, the "home videocam" filming technique could be overused and get stale. That sounds like what is happening here.

It was, exactly. Of course with Blair Witch and Cloverfield the use of hand-held was crucial to the story. Blair Witch was supposed to look like the documentary film the main characters were shooting; Cloverfield is meant to be some random guy at a party's perspective on a monster destroying New York. So I give a lot of liberty with how awkward and jarring those movies were.

But I think (mem, correct me if I'm wrong) what this thread is about is the ham-fisted techniques being applied anymore in most action films and almost all horror films, that rely on a combination of hand-held shots, misdirected "mood lighting" and edits so severe they make your head spin.

The reality being that most of the best, and most effective, films of either genre rely on a great story. The Exorcist, Halloween, Alien, Jaws, Rosemary's Baby, the Parallax View, the Conversation, the Bourne movies... yeah their directors all have distinct styles and used tricks to shake you up. But none of them had to utilize over-the-top gimmicktrey to try to make it exciting. Whatever tricks they used enhanced, and more importantly never distracted from, the intensity of the story.

I actually fault my fellow screenwriters on this problem more than the directors.

Mind you I don't think the directors are all that and a bag of chips either. :cool:
 

hotbtminla

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One of the most visceral battle scenes I've seen in quite some time. Great movie overall.

Visceral. The only word that is appropriate for that scene. Or that movie, come to think of it.

Seriously, if anyone on this thread hasn't seen that movie you need to rectify that immediately.

Hand (great handle by the way) - glad you liked it too. The scene with Julianne Moore I was referring to... to this day I have NO IDEA how they shot that. A good friend of mine is a cinematographer and he has no idea either. Well, I guess he has ideas, we talked about that scene alone for about half an hour. But at the end of the day he was just as astonished as me.

But like the post I just made (sorry, I've got a couple in me otherwise I'd have posted once)... Children of Men benefited from having a great story and a director who's choices were made to enhance it.
 

ZOS23xy

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In EVIL DEAD, there are several scenes where they use a fairly steady mounted camera, and there are those that use a camera mounted on a board that was carried over the terrain (for all the low lying swooping into a scene shot). I think a good mix of the various forms of shots are better than just one.

BLAIR WITCH made me ill in the theater.
 

Mem

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Chris Rock was once amazed to learn that The Blair Witch Project had been made for 'only' $65,000. "That film cost $65,000?" he mused. "Where the hell did the money go? Some guy's walkin' around with $64,000 in their pocket!"
 

Mr. Bungle

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my bro nearly puked when he watched Cloverfield
I've heard that nearly happening to a lot of people. Remember the movie Perfect Storm? Came out around 2000 with George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg.. that nearly made me revisit lunch and gave me a GOD-awful headache, since half the movie was that little tiny fishing boat pitching around all over the place in that stom. ugh.

I never was a big fan of those choppy-camera, one shot per second movies.. my favorite horror flicks are the low-budget 60s and 70s flicks, such as Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween. One fairly recent movie, however, had one scene that really set me on the edge of my seat, and that was in House of a Thousand Corpses, when the one dude was pointing the gun at the cop(?), the camera panned backwards for what seemed like an eternity (and it WAS an eternity, by today's standards) before he finally shot the guy. WOW!!