Two movies have recently run with very similar premises. CLOVERFIELD and DIARY OF THE DEAD are both horror movies filmed as documentations of situations we've seen more than a few times over the years. The big twist is that these stories are told by the characters rather than through the standard omnipotent eye of film technique. We aren't shown something unless the characters themselves experience or discover something. In one film, it is the destruction of New York City by a giant monster. In the other, it is the zombie uprising.
Neither film can claim ownership to their premise, as we have seen the mockumentary for decades, and the "found footage" narrative was box office gold for THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Neither film tries to, though. Both do what you're supposed to do with an interesting twist or variation on a genre: entertain us.
When BLAIR WITCH came out it seemed to fascinate film buffs more than it did horror fans. It lacked gore, jumps, a tangible villain to root for or against, or even a score. It primarily operated on the premise that we were watching something real, and let that be the guiding force. You may say that the film was a hoax, but that's not entirely accurate. The premise and back story were a hoax (or, as we sometimes call it, fiction). Much of the fear, confusion, anger, etc. are real. Instead of having funny actors improvise a comedy around an outline and notes, as is Christopher Guest's method, this film forces fright out of the cast. Mysteries were left, sometimes as clues, sometimes as red herrings. Random attacks in the middle of the night kept the actors on guard. Never knowing a cast member's motivations for the day kept everyone suspicious. The ending was always up in the air.
It was an interesting experience in concept, performance, and editing primarily. For every ounce of acclaim the movie got, it had a pound of detractors. Many people might not have liked it, but at least appreciated what it was. Overall, the typical audience was frustrated by the lack of answers, closure, or anything else they had come to expect from a film that everyone said was so good.
There were plenty of quick knock-offs of BLAIR WITCH, as there always be when a movie is successful. You know you've made it when you find a soft-core parody of one of your movies. Most of the BLAIR WITCH clones took the same path: "Let's shoot something in a spooky location, have people bicker, then randomly run around every so often." They thought the look and volume was the appeal. The dialogue was generally scripted, likely poorly, and delivered in a "loose" enough fashion to play like they shot before the actors were just barely off-book. Essentially people were trying to recapture what worked about BLAIR WITCH without stepping back to take a moment and analyze not what made it doable on a small budget, but what made it actually work.
With CLOVERFIELD and DIARY OF THE DEAD, they get what works about BLAIR WITCH. This is because they come from the same place at the core. Hell, BLAIR WITCH may never have crossed their minds while they were making these. Doubtful because of the pop-culture impact, but they didn't need to worry about looking like a rip-off, so it wasn't a concern. The core of each of these is the video camera culture we've been slowly turning into. BLAIR WITCH hit when reality shows were really taking over the airwaves, and more and more the news was buying up videos of incidents from citizens on the scene. Rodney King, riots, fires, car chases, the news didn't have to rush out with a camera crew. They just had to get out by 10pm with a check book. People saw having a camera as a chance of being important, and, more importantly, rich. Shows like AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS offered cash prizes, fifteen minutes, and so on as well. BLAIR WITCH offered the reality hook, but with the promise that the cast didn't survive. The disappointment people expressed about it not being real is worth a whole other discussion.
CLOVERFIELD comes more from the angle of perspective. Movies have gotten bigger, characters have becoming less important, and destruction (now so much easier on a grand scale thanks to CGI) has become desensitized. Cut one person's arm off, you'll likely get an R rating because of the blood. Blow up a few buildings and kill thousands, you can still get by with a PG-13. As long as you don't see the effects of death or violence, parents don't really need to shield their children from it, right? Anyway, producer J.J. Abrams saw a chance to take the giant monster movie, a la GOJIRA or MOTSURA, and make the audience feel like a part of it. We see buildings fall, but it's much more frightening to be the person on the street who could get flattened at any time. The one with no guns, crawling through a building that could crumble at any moment, trying to see if the people you care about are still alive. He used the camera culture as the tool to humanize a larger than life story that over the years had lost any scares it had the way it was.
DIARY OF THE DEAD takes a different approach. It's not any surprise that George Romero has a message with his latest zombie flick. He even has one character make a joke in it about how a good horror film is partly defined by the underlying social commentary. The statement he makes, sometimes broadly, sometimes just through the way things unfold, is that the camera acts as a wall. We watch more and more news, internet videos, etc. and forget after a while that we're watching real people. We distance ourselves through the lens, as do the people filming. The more people have cameras, and the more viewers they get, and the more the two feed off of each other, the less we slow down to think about what it all means. We stop thinking in favor of a constant input of media. The internet will tell me what is true or important based on the hit counts something is receiving.
All three films reflect the impact of video cameras in our lives. All of them make a caution to us that sometimes we need to put down the camera, stop documenting, and actually live life in person. All of them also tell a story. They show us characters that are real to us, as they need to be to pull off the conceit of the format. All of them are more than the gimmicks, genres, scenarios they present. We all have cameras, we want to have people see our stories. We want to be the ones with the next great idea. Well, the great new ideas are just the great old ideas put together in a way that was interesting to the film makers. Don't try and reinvent the genre. Use the new technology to keep it interesting and challenging to you.
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| Patrick Storck |
Patrick hails from Baltimore, MD, where playing by the rules is frowned upon. Only average things come from playing it safe.
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