Suspension of Disbelief and Mock-Doc Horror

I talked about how cheesy-looking gore can trigger a gut reaction of revulsion, but maybe sometimes the audience needs to do some work to appreciate a scary movie. A friend of mine told me that she went to see Paranormal Activity with a few friends and laughed out loud for the duration of the film. When I watched it in my apartment I nearly shit my pants. Am I really that much of a weenie? I ended up watching it again with friends, including this aforementioned friend, and realized that the two of us had very different viewing methods, the main difference being that I watched the movie. She would glance around the room, look at her phone every few minutes, strike up conversations with people. No wonder she wasn't scared - she wasn't absorbed (though my weenieness is still up for debate).

When you only glance at the screen for a little while before getting sucked back into reality, you’re unconsciously assuring yourself that what’s on the screen isn’t real. And when you have that disbelief, you won't be very thrilled. Maybe you can get through something like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle that way, but little else.

Suspension of disbelief is a fancy way of saying that in order for anything that deals with the fantastic to entertain you, you need to trash your notions of reality and accept anything the film throws at you. This is a major part of what makes horror movies effective and absorptive, but its up to the audience to willingly forget about reality. What's great about mockumentary horror (or POV horror) movies like Paranormal Activity is that they are designed to make suspending disbelief feel natural.

They feature no-name actors

When we can’t tie a name to the face it makes it easier for us to view them as real people. It’s just more difficult to picture Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox legitimately being haunted by demons. When The Blair Witch Project was released, it was marketed as an actual documentary with real people, and that uncertainty made it all the more thrilling. At this point we know better, but even with the knowledge that it was a hoax, it still works.

Nothing scarier than nothing

Again, the men and women behind The Blair Witch Project realized this. What’s genuinely scary is subjective: when we can’t see the beast that’s antagonizing our heroes, we can picture it to be as creepy as we can possibly imagine. And, when considering the budget these films typically have, its much better to have nothing on film than a monster that looks like a Garbage Pail Kid reject.

Letting the audience let their guard down

This tactic isn’t exclusive to mockumentaries, but it’s definitely worth mentioning since it's put to use with the daytime/nighttime shifts in Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project. In my opinion, though, no film pulled this off better than REC, a Spanish horror mock-doc about a late-night TV crew who become quarantined in an apartment complex infested with rabid residents. You spend ninety-five percent of this movie thinking “Rabies, I get the picture. This isn’t so scary,” and then, once you feel safe and secure, BAM! The scariness factor is amped up nine levels. Pretty sneaky - and definitely effective.

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A Tale of Two Sisters

You can’t ignore horror from the East. “J-horror” and “K-horror” have changed the landscape of horror movies in the past ten years; films like Ringu and Ju-On flaunted an intensely creepy atmosphere that more recent Hollywood horror attempted to exploit. With the slew of Asian films coming out within a small frame of time, it’s easy for one that’s truly worth watching to slip under the radar. A Tale of Two Sisters features a lot of the conventions that we’ve come to expect from this subgenre, but there’s more to this Korean film than just a spooky ghost story.

I’m actually a bit torn writing about this one, since I don’t consider it straight-up horror. It’s got definite horror elements - an old house that creaks and groans at night, ghosts that crawl with disjointed movements, some jump scares here and there – but A Tale of Two Sisters is definitely a psychological thriller and drama before anything else.

The film itself is allegedly based on an old ghost story, “Janghwa Hongreyon-jon,” though not much is adapted. In the story, the two sisters are ghosts who kill whoever dares enter their accursed home, whereas in the movie, they are less murderous and incorporeal and more just two sisters. They depend on one another a great deal: Su-Yeong is taciturn and non-confrontational; Su-mi acts as her protector. The two move in to their father’s massive lakeside home, clasping hands tightly as their stepmother, Eun-joo, greets them with forced enthusiasm.

The house’s aesthetics help create the atmosphere: The deep reds and blues; stark color contrasts; the gothic-goes-to-japan architecture - it’s all very lovely in daylight. But when bedtime rolls around and shadows creep in, the empty house feels grim and foreboding - like Korea’s answer to The Shining. Su-Yeong’s door opens, creaking louder and louder (this is the loudest creaking door in existence). She pulls the sheets over her face as pale fingers inch out of the darkness. Down the hall, Su-mi hears a shambling at the foot of her bed. She peeks to see a white figure dragging her body across the floor. With a jerk, the figure pulls herself up the bed post and positions herself, hair obscuring her face and mouth agape, over a cowering Su-mi. Su-Yeong crawls into bed with her sister, and after these horrific visions, the two sleep together. The entire cast of Predator would be kept awake by that sort of thing, but they manage to go to sleep.

As the story progresses, Eun-joo’s actions become increasingly excessive: she constantly and viciously harasses Su-Yeong and has an outburst of complete insanity at a dinner party. All the while the father is distant, never uttering a word of his wife’s bizarre behavior. The characters motivations and many plot details are a mystery; hints are dropped with clever directing, but the film is intended to keep the viewer in the dark until its closing moments. Although it may get confusing, and though there is a supernatural element, ultimately everything falls into place.

In the end though, you won’t walk away from this movie feeling scared or grossed-out or any of those other feelings you probably associate with horror movies – A Tale of Two Sisters is tragic. It’s gorgeous, artful, atmospheric and none of the things that you would expect a horror film to be. It definitely should not be passed up. (If you have something against foreign movies or subtitles, you can watch the Hollywood remake, The Uninvited, though I wouldn’t because I hear it’s a real turd of a movie.)

-Also: The main theme fits the tone of the movie perfectly.

The Stuff

I'm almost embarrassed to be defending the merits of this movie. Most aspects which make great movies great - the relatable characters, intriguing dialogue, immersive visuals - are all horribly botched in The Stuff. But I can say without a hint of irony that I love this film, and I'll explain why.

The movie opens with a group of miners ready to leave their arctic digsite and return home. One strays a bit from the group and notices an eerie white substance bubbling and popping and inching about in the snow. To his surprise and delight, the mysterious substance tastes like a delicious confectionery treat! They can make a fortune selling this stuff! Let me back track a bit: A man spots a splotch of gurgling slime on the ground, PUTS IT IN HIS MOUTH without showing so much as a semblance of reluctance and decides to market it. Clearly, when it comes to the characters' intelligence in this film, the bar is set pretty low.

Criminal stupidity is part of the charm - as is the case in most B-movies that came out of the cultural vacuum we call the 1980's - but that's not why I especially love The Stuff. On the surface it’s an absurd tale about a malevolent space pudding, but underneath its skin is a story built on challenging adversity in a society brainwashed by mass-marketing. This movie features as much hacky, gut-churning dialogue as it features biting commentary on hyper-consumerism.

Practically overnight the gooey white dessert is rushed through the FDA and distributed en masse. "The Stuff" is plastered up on billboards, benches and bus sides; TV personalities are endorsing it as the new ice cream; every supermarket in America is stocking their shelves with it - it's everywhere. There are only a few left in the country who are impervious to this sort of omnipresent mass-marketing: Enter our nauseating hero, Jason.

When Jason (portrayed by fumbling 12-year-old Scott Bloom), is perusing his fridge for a late-night snack, he notices some unsettling squirmy movement from an open Stuff tub - Good lord! The Stuff is ALIVE! The seemingly harmless dessert is actually a sentient parasite, taking over peoples' bodies to fulfill their own agenda of world domination! Hundreds of thousands are now host to this parasite thanks to the evils of corporate greed. When the host is all used up, The Stuff abandons their desiccated body in an intensely horrific manner.

Underneath the hokey acting, dialogue, directing, and visual effects is a great movie that has something relevant to say about consumerism and really warrants a remake.

The Style of 80's Horror

The horror genre has developed drastically over the past few decades, but is the glitzy effects of newer Hollywood horror pictures like Hostel or the Saw series a turn for the better? Obviously more realistic effects look more believable – we see horror movies (often) to experience thrills and chills, and what’s more thrilling than seeing exploding heads that look utterly real? Maybe splattered brains that look like pink cottage cheese.

Here’s my gripe with the deviation from more raw, make-up driven horror. The effects which were really exploited in the Evil Dead series look grotesque. Sure they also look like a pile of shit, but that’s what makes them effective. They’re grittier. We have a visceral sense of repulsion when we see something that features all the parts of a human, but just doesn’t look quite right - it’s a psychological concept called The Uncanny. The audience feels disgust right off the bat, without needing to think about what they’re looking at – doesn’t that make a good gross-out picture?

Effects like this, which were revolutionary in their time for instilling dread, remain effective today for their camp value. Troma Entertainment knew this better than anyone: The Toxic Avenger series is still hugely popular, and rightly so - it’s hysterical. Davie and Goliath style claymation is used for head smooshing scenes with the added sound of someone squeezing a fistful of Nickelodeon Gak; Seven gallons of bright red corn syrup will erupt from a single wound; and perhaps best of all its rife with completely awesome one liners. (“You fat slob. Let's see if you've got any guts.”[The Toxic Avenger punches the mayor in the stomach and rips out his guts]Officer O'Clancy, take care of this toxic waste.”)

With movies like Grindhouse, Machine Girl, and Drag me to Hell forgoing the concept of stylized horror in favor of a more barebones approach, it seems the genre of silly gore flicks is still kicking.