By Wagstaff
The horror film excels at anticipation. An effective poster, trailer, or TV ad can spur our imaginations into a fearful run. Watching the actual movie might feel tame compared to the upcoming horrors we saw advertised. Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. It’s the movies we haven’t seen yet that often scare us most.
I remember a TV commercial that ran for John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy (1979), about a killer bear mutated by hazardous waste. We never see the monster, but its hideous noisemaking awakens a family of sleeping campers. The son hops up and down in his sleeping bag trying to get away. He's panicked and helpless – too terrified to know how silly he looks. The commercial scared the hell out of me. You’ll never catch me sleeping in one of those mummy bags!
So, tell me what movie ad frightened you?
Happy Halloween.
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39 comments:
There was one TV ad for the original Alien (1979) that was not only one of the scariest trailers I've seen, but also one of the most elegant. It was just a series of silent, quick-cut images from the film -- John Hurt in a spacesuit peering over the egg as it opens up; the facehugger leaping onto him and knocking him back; Tom Skerritt in the tunnel with the flamethrower; Ripley at the end of the movie in closeup, waiting for the right moment to turn and shoot the alien (out of focus in the background, emerging from that dashboad console hidey-hole) with her grappling hook gun; and scariest of all, a fleeting snippet of footage of Ash the android (Ian Holm), right after getting brained by Ripley, waving his hands in that jerky Mr. Roboto spasm while spitting milk and kind of rolling along that white padded wall. Not having seen the movie -- and not having discovered the Heavy Metal graphic novel edition of Alien -- I had no idea what any of those images meant, but the whole thing was supremely creepy.
What really made it -- what tied it all together -- was the audio track, an eerie abstract soundscape that consisted of what sounded like a sonar noise superimposed over some kind of repetitive glottal whistling. (It's hard to describe, but fans of the film probably know what sound cue I am talking about.)
This same sound cue was used in a very similar theatrical teaser for James Cameron's Aliens, which was cut in more or less the same way. Why mess with perfection?
I should also put in a word for last spring's online teaser for War of the Worlds -- the one with the suburbanites staring up at electrically-charged storm clouds before being obliterated by what appeared to be an aerial bombardment. I was impressed with it as as piece of advertising and filmmaking, but I wish I hadn't shown it to my daughter, who was seven at the time. It scared her so bad that it actually kept her up the entire night. To this day she is still reluctant to see the movie. I can't say that I blame her.
The trailer for Little Children is quite brilliantly freaky, though it certainly didn't (and won't) get me into the theater. Todd Field should stick to his day job, playing electric piano at bourgie orgies.
I remember the Red Eye trailer being pretty great, appearing to be a romantic comedy before it suddenly morphs into horror at 30,000 feet.
That's the exact ad I thought of, Matt. Of course, though, I was born two years after Alien's release, so I only found that trailer on the DVD. Still creeped me out quite a lot even though I had seen the film some ten times at that point. I still consider that to be one of the best trailers I have ever seen for the reasons you have already descrfibed.
The trailer for the first Japanese theatrical version of Ju-on (the second version overall) was pretty damn freaky, too. All I remember is a girl waking up to that powder-faced boy looming right over her, and the camera pulls back while she lays paralyzed with fear and we see a girl ghost on the other side of the bed looking over, standing at a weird angle. I kept my eyes shut very, very tight until I finally got to sleep that night.
The commercial/trailer for a movie I believe was called "Phantasm." The flying metallic ball with the switchbalde mechanism freaked me out. Neve brought myself to see the movie, I was so unsettled (and about 13 at the time) that I never saw it.
JJ sez:
--First of all: Matt, that Alien TV ad is also one of the trailers and on both DVD releases of the film. It is an elegant masterpeice of trailer cutting. We screened it last Halloween at the Harvard Film Archive--a vintage 79 copy, on film--and that screeching, "ErreeEEEE! ErreeeEEEEE! ErrreeeEEEE!" really starts to freak people out. The quick shot of Ash flailing around is chilling even when you know what it is; to a young person, who did'nt know what it was, it must have seemed like a glimpse of just chaos.
Ads that scared me as a child:
--Poltergeist II: The movie is horrible, but the trailer is almost as good as the Alien preview cited above. It's a slow pan across a child's bedroom at night as a toy telephone rings and rings and rings; finally poor Heather O'Rourke (RIP) gets out of bed, picks it up, listens to it, then turnst ot the camera, looks directly in the lens and says, "They're baaaaack!" The trailer then cuts to a screaming, flaming skull. What totally horrified me was that in the middle of the pan you see a clown doll slowly turn it's head torward the sound of the ringing. It's a pretty canny combination of elements from Once Upon A Time In America, Close Encounters and that Anthony Hopkins movie with the evil ventriliquest's dummy. Of course, the truly horrifying part of the whole exprience was, after having the shit scared out of me by the trailer, I still had to sit through Rocky IV.
--Silent Night, Deadly Night: It was'nt the killer Santa Claus, it was the idea that some people were unhappy and in pain during Christmas. I remember seeing a shot in the trailer of a police car screaming down a wet, black, cold highway at night, sirens wailing, and feeling very bleak and lonely.
--Oh, and it is'nt really an ad, but I remember seeing a clip from Silver Bullet on TV and being absolutely terrified: a p.o.v. shot emerging from a forest and crossing a yard, approaching a house; then cutting inside the house, Meghan whatsername, Anne Of Greene Gables, screaming and pointing at the window, then wip-panning over for a split second glimpse of the werewolf looking in. Growing up surrounded by New England forests, next to a huge state mental hospital whose (mostly harmless--mostly) escaped patients would occasionally peer in our windows, that shot was REEEEAAAL bad news.
Alien was a doozy but for me, maybe it was my age, the scariest was It's Alive.
Just that picture of the baby with the claw hand.
It still gives me the willies.
The TV ad showing they were about to piss on the Frankenheimer classic The Manchurian Candidate.
There was another one for Alien, a teaser trailer with no actual footage from the film, created by R/Greenberg, using that same audio track. It got R/Greenberg the job of doing the actual titles for the film.
Ah, here on YouTube is the later version of the trailer that combines the one-minute teaser with the footage Matt mentioned. Yeah, this got us in the theatres in 1979 . . .
And then, there was the trailer for Magic, which you can watch here. I once stayed up late, watching some episode of Twilight Zone on the little black and white TV in my room (WPIX, channel 11, NYC), under the covers, and THIS came on.
I know many of us were scarred by seeing this ad back then, but when you try to show it to people now, it just gets a shrug. In 1978, this scared adults witless. We're all just jaded now.
Looking at the poster illustrating this entry, it's interesting that both The Prophecy and Alien came out the same year -- was it even the same summer? -- and both used egg imagery on black background.
From JJ:
Magic! That was it! Wooooo yeah, THAT was a bad one! That's what I was referring too in my Poltergeist II comments--not the actual movie Magic (which is kinda lame) but the trailer. Thanks for linking to that, Ian. I was too young to see that ad when it first aired but Channel 38 here in Massachusetts used to show it to advertise their TV screenings of the film. Watching that as a child was like being trapped in a nightmare. I wonder if any of the success of Hopkins as Hannibal was due to people's (subconcious) childhood memories of his voice squawking out of that doll's mouth.
Any other NE area readers recall the 38 movie loft ads? They were great...Did anyone else catch their Taxi Driver ad back in the day? It was just a snippet of Bernard Herrmann's music, a few shots of De Niro driving, firing handguns, and talking to Harvey Keital and Jodie Foster, and Dana Hersey's Deep Announcer Voice over it all saying, "Saturday afternoon at three, see New York through the eyes of the Taxi Driver...You Won't Like What You See!" Barely 30 seconds long, but it worked great. Hats off to whatever anonymous editor cut that one togethor.
Vividly remember It's Alive and that baby's hand. I didn't go near my dolls or their crib for months.
I'm sure someone can help me if I am wrong about the movie but a close second for me was the TV ad for (I think) Suspiria when I was about 9 or 10. It started with a dark haired woman with her back to the camera, brushing her hair (again, I think) and humming. Then she swung around and her face was a skull!
I can't remember the voiceover, or the music, just that image. Also don't remember crying, screaming, etc. Just exactly where I was, what the room looked like and the absolute stupefying terror.
Good times. :)
The newspaper ad for Magic always creeped me out. It was probably the eyes. The movie itself, not so much.
Abracadabra
I sit on his knee
Presto chango
and now he is me.
Hocus pocus,
we take her to bed
Magic is fun;
we're dead.
I was an unusually sheltered child, so I didn't see a lot of horror movie ads until I was older, but, for some reason, a TV ad for The Abyss creeped into my weekly routine and freaked me out to the point that I refused to go see some innocuous Disney movie in the theater for fear I would see a full (God forbid) TRAILER for the film.
Sadly, I now realize I had to have been 8 or 9 at the time. I said I was sheltered.
I'm rather embarrassed to admit it now but back in the summer of 2003 the trailer for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake was one of the most unnerving pieces of advertising I'd ever seen. It wasn't so much all the white trash gothic and jump scares as it was an insane sound design where a non-diegetic metallic sound (possibly a saw being sharpened?) that whines across the soundtrack, punctuating the scenes and in a bit that still gets to me, the sound of Jessica Biel screaming over black as the surround track in the theater has her running from the left-rear speakers to the right-rear ones. Modern trailers are usually so cookie-cutter that the sheer, human terror of that moment really got to me. Of course the rest of the trailer is pretty standard and the film itself is garbage. But for a few months there I was really jazzed to see it.
The DVD of THE SHINING features a trailer I don't remember seeing at the time, but freaks me out now. Just an unbroken shot of the elevator door sequence; when the credits end, the blood gushes out. The kicker is the score, presumably a Wendy Carlos track not used in the film, a sickmaking rocking-horse rhythm with electronic timbres just the far side of irritating.
The infamous tagline for SCANNERS in both print and TV ads ("10 seconds, the pain begins. 15 seconds, you can't breathe. 20 seconds, you explode.") was really unsettling; the image of the guy on the poster on fire FROM WITHIN didn't help things.
And yeah, I doubt anything has unified my generation more than being freaked out by MAGIC'S trailer--then disappointed by the bloodless, boring film. With IT'S ALIVE a close runner-up.
"I wish I hadn't shown it to my daughter, who was seven at the time. It scared her so bad that it actually kept her up the entire night. To this day she is still reluctant to see the movie. I can't say that I blame her."
I wouldn't blame an eight-year-old, much less a seven-year-old, for not wanting to see WAR OF THE WORLDS. I wanted to see JAWS when I was 10 (back in '75), but my parents wouldn't let me till I was 13, figuring, not unreasonably, that the movie might scare me from the surf. [After that, there wasn't a horror movie that I didn't see.] My wife just got over her fear of JAWS and saw it, and loved it.
I remember the original HILLS HAVE EYES having an effectively pulse-quickening TV ad. The SUSPIRIA ad was great, too, as was one for THE LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET. Then again, any TV advertisement for a horror movie was OK by me.
And, yes, TCM 03 had a terrific trailer.
Thanks for the great comments everyone!
Matt, I wonder if we had the same Alien book. I was too young to see it, so I talked my aunt into buying me a big graphic book that contained darn near every frame of the movie. It was photographs, though. I poored over that book, so I was well prepared by the time I saw it. Incidently, I first saw the chest-bursting scene in the electronics section of a T,G&Y. It was just playing in the department store!
I was at the right age to scare easy back in 1978/79. And with movies like Alien, Prophecy, Halloween, The Brood( that was a frightening newspaper ad) The Amityville Horror, and Phantasm coming out, I think I spent the better part of a year crapping my pants.
I would broadly divide a lot of ads into two categories. Ones that show you almost nothing -- where the lurking evil is all implied, and ones that show you something so audacious and outright uncanny that your jaw drops, and you want to say "this can't be". I put The Shining trailer in category 2. I was in terrified disbelief watching it. So much blood comes out of the elevator that it overturns the damn furniture, for crying out loud. WTF? Brilliant!
Heh, Wagstaff and I share much the same memories of the summer of '79 ... though it's the smaller teaser of "Alien" that Ian W. Hill points out that I remember. (Note bene: the glottal whistling effect was created by composer Jerry Goldsmith using a slide whistle and probably some other things.)
I don't remember that particular "Prophecy" trailer but remember another one, all slow-motion, Talia Shire and company running through the forest from something we can't see but know is pretty damn awful. ("Prophecy" was one of those movies that seems in retrospect to have had more than one simultaneous campaign; there was the grotesque monster egg poster, but also a subtler one with sunlight through trees, still foreboding somehow; and of course, any number of TV spots.)
I remember the original "Hills Have Eyes" trailer cited above also; I'd also single out the first "Nightmare on Elm Street" TV spots, that shot of the silhouetted Krueger with his arms grotesquely long really freaked me out ... indeed, even my dad was disturbed by that one.
That "Magic" trailer more bewitched than spooked me, and that's a movie I still kind of like for reasons I'm not sure about; and the source novel by William Goldman is surely the best of his that I've read.
One that nobody brought up yet, but was sensational and promised much more than was ever delivered: for John Schlesinger's "The Believers," in which we repeatedly hear a child crying out for his daddy, who's spending much of the trailer trying to find him, and then at the close we discover it's this creepy-looking voodoo worshipper who's evidently a talented mimic.
Most recently I guess I was impressed, if not vaguely sickened (that strange brass music) by the Japanese trailer to Takashi Miike's "Ichi the Killer" (now that's a trailer that barely hints at the perversions ahead). His "Audition" got sold pretty well also (these are really strong meat compared to the average Japanese horror trailer, which often verge on the campy; teenage girls are actually the principal market for the genre there and I think the distributors are trying to sell the message "scary, but not THAT scary").
Oh, how could I forget (in fact it's amazing in retrospect that they even bought prime time ad space for this) ... the TV spot for Lucio fulci's notorious "Zombie," entirely built around what turns out to be the movie's final shot, while the word "ZOMBIE" is spelled out letter by letter in inserted cards.
And while I don't remember any TV spots for it, I do remember being constantly petrified by the subway posters for GRIZZLY (1977), which again promised us more than we got: a terrifyingly huge killer bear towering just behind an unsuspecting young lady at a campfire. Painted by Neal Adams, no less. The actual critter, when rarely we see it, turned out to be unmistakably just a plain ole goofy studio bear. (A friend of mine was an extra on the unreleased GRIZZLY 2 and had the feeling they were trying to rectify this earlier problem by building a giant mechanical bear, but it hardly ever worked; small wonder the picture was never released, Charlie Sheen's latter-day fame or no, though I hear there are bootlegs.)
Wagstaff,
I was 11 when Alien came out, and obsessed. So I remember all of the books that came out around it.
Matt referred to the Heavy Metal-published graphic novel version of the film (which, like the novelization by Alan Dean Foster included scenes that didn't wind up in the film). I also had the book you mentioned, a "fumetti"-style version of the film, shot-by-shot. There was also a good The Art of ALIEN book, with all the conceptual sketches and so forth.
Damn, there'd been NOTHING like that film before in 1979.
Oh, and another ad from around the same time that scared the hell out of me - Dawn of the Dead. There was a TV ad that consisted of the zombie head-logo slowly rising over a horizon (looking like the sun at first, then revealing what it was) as an announcer said something about Night of the Living Dead and that George Romero was back with Dawn of the Dead, then the image zoomed into the zombie head and -- and this was the JUMP TO THE CEILING scary part -- smash cut to the shot from the film of the elevator doors opening and the zombies rushing right at the camera.
Good times for scary movie ads . . .
Wagstaff asked:
Q: What movie ad really got you spooked?
A: Any ad for a movie starring Andy Garcia.
(But seriously, I'll second Bruce Reed's suggestion of that bizarre SHINING teaser, which must be one of the best in movie trailer history.)
Wow---surprised no one has yet mentioned, for my money, the most effective horror movie trailer of all time: The Blair Witch Project. I remember sitting in BAM, ready to watch Summer of Sam, when all of a sudden, the screen goes black. Then the titles about three student filmmakers going missing, and cut to that weird too-close shot of a girl crying like I've hardly ever seen anyone cry in a movie. "I just wanna say I'm sorry... to my mom... to Mike's mom..." By the end, everyone in the theater was both terrified and absolutely certain they had to see this movie...
The print ad for the original Willard scared me when I was 8 or 9--a partially glimpsed rat face and forepaws--all teeth and eyes--and the tag line, Where Your Nightmares End, Willard Begins. I couldn't tell what the movie was about, I couldn't quite tell what the critter was, but I knew nightmares were scary, and this was going to be scarier. I didn't sleep after seeing it.
And I second the vote for Suspiria's tv ad. I was several years older when that came out, and I was still freaked by it.
The Shining trailer resonated most with me. It was more disturbing than the film, which my parents inexplicably let me watch with them when it came on View.
Hard to believe no one has mentioned the trailer for Carpenter's remake of THE THING. I remember being maybe only 9 or 10 when i saw it at a movie and it creeped me out so badly. I remember the quick cuts, but also the voice on the radio at the end saying something like "Hello? We found something out here in the ice....Hello?" Creepy, Gave me nightmares.
that fuzzy bastard wrote:
Wow---surprised no one has yet mentioned, for my money, the most effective horror movie trailer of all time: The Blair Witch Project.
It's good you brought this one up. I'd be lying if I said it didn't immediately leap to mind as soon as I saw this entry. That trailer may well be the definitive horror movie trailer of all time - and yet it's such a cheat because the movie itself was just so freakin' lame.
Even its infamous final moments weren't nearly as great as many would've had us believe. Does anyone, anywhere today put BLAIR WITCH on the list of great horror movies? The weird thing is - and that trailer is so indictive of this - the marketing was just so damn perfect on every level. The marketing was scads more professional and perfect than the movie itself, which is a huge shame, because frankly I'd loved to have seen the movie that was marketed to me, rather than what I eventually almost fell asleep watching at the theatre.
Ross:
I confess that BWP worked its spook on me. Those final minutes slipped behind the curtain and caused more than one 4am wake up call.
While it isn't a horror film, I remember that the trailer for Fincher's The Game scared the daylights outta me. A taxi carrying Michael Douglas careens into the bay, then you see nothing but a black screen and hear Douglas screaming for help. Yikes!
Yet, like Ross w/ BWP, the film didn't really work for me at all. And I'm a Fincher fan.
Go figure.
Oddly, Dan, THE GAME is easily my favorite Fincher film!
that fuzzy bastard writes, "I remember sitting in [Brooklyn Academy of Music], ready to watch Summer of Sam, when all of a sudden, the screen goes black. Then the titles about three student filmmakers going missing, and cut to that weird too-close shot of a girl crying like I've hardly ever seen anyone cry in a movie. "I just wanna say I'm sorry... to my mom... to Mike's mom..." By the end, everyone in the theater was both terrified and absolutely certain they had to see this movie..."
I saw the movie opening weekend at BAM, and it did scare the hell out of me. I know there's a huge contigent of "It was all a marketing phenomenon, the movie sucked" people, but I am not among them. The sound design was the culprit; there were little stick-snaps and footfalls placed deep in the mix throughout, always somewhere behind you, off to the left or right; it really complemented the sense of unseen menace, a quality largely lost in modern horror films. Strange to say, but I was reminded of two seemingly incompatible creepfests, Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir's classic "What the fuck just happened?" movie) and The Innocents, based on Henry James' Turn of the Screw., then filtered through a student filmmaking sensibility -- and no, I don't mean that as a criticism. I thought it really worked. I even liked the visually and narratively incomprehensible final scene -- where the movie doesn't so much end as just sort of stop. But that's my kind of ending, so take that with a grain of salt.
That said, I don't blame anyone who went in expecting a more, shall we say, less participatory experience, and came away feeling cheated -- it's the kind of movie where you have to supply a lot of the goods yourself; at times it verged on radio, "theater of the mind."
Full disclosure also requires me to admit that I was half-baked when I saw it, and that about a third of the people who where there at the beginning booked before the final real, muttering derisively on their way out.
Another scary trailer worth remembering: The one for David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of The Fly, which ended with a black screen and Jeff Goldblum's hoarse, strangled voice saying, rather curtly and frankly -- as if trying to hold onto what was left of his dignity -- "Help me...Somebody please, help me..."
PS -- As far as I can recall, Goldbum does not actually say those lines in the film proper -- or if he does, they're not delivered in quite so theatrical a manner.
Oh Matt!!!! (Typed as if I were someone's disapproving grandmother...),
Please let me know what strain it was you were half-baked on that led you to compare BLAIR WITCH to THE INNOCENTS and/or PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
I need it for future viewings of Will Ferrell movies.
I remember seeing "Blair Witch" (with my mom no less, she's a horror fan), and did notice how impressively quiet the rowdy-seeming audience was ... until, as Matt says, the movie basically stops, and some junior goombah-type a few rows forward yelled "THAT SUCKED!" Yet I couldn't help notice the picture had drawn him in nonetheless, because it's inarguably the softest-spoken audience I've ever been in a horror movie with. *Something* was working.
I've seen that one three times without ever really liking it, yet I kept going back to it; I think the performances have a great deal to do with it (Heather Donahue's in particular), and these odd little grace notes, such as (this is what I remember as the single creepiest thing in the movie) Mike's sudden revelation that he's just plain thrown away the map. It's inexplicable and bizarre, and even Mike seems to know it; it's sort of a "Hell really *is* other people" moment. Actually a rather enormous portion of the picture sort of suggests as much, such as the other guy's filming a miserable Heather and taunting her mercilessly ... this feels real and indeed probably was, since relations between those two performers got so bad during filming, he was sacked earlier instead of Mike, as the outline had it.
And I too did like the suddenness of the finale, according to the rules they set up, nothing else would've worked.
One other great creepy trailer that I'd forgotten: "The Wicker Man." It's at the end of the Thorn/EMI VHS of George Romero's "Knightriders" and is a damned unsettling sudden contrast to the cheery and sentimental picture we've just seen, every time I rented it I'd forget that other thing was there and would have to go to bed all creeped.
Ross: "Please let me know what strain it was you were half-baked on that led you to compare BLAIR WITCH to THE INNOCENTS and/or PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK."
I believe it was called "Doobie Digital."
I leave for a few days to build a house and the talkback keeps going.
A quick weigh in on The Game and Blair Witch: I'm a Fincher fan and I liked The Game an awful lot. Like most Fincher films, it walked an absurd tightrope over a netless dreamscape adroitly to the very end. Very tricky, but I think he pulled it off.
I can't knock people that were scared by Blair Witch, no matter how baked they were. My pick was also a spooky scene in the dark woods. But this country boy just got frustrated when the kids panicked and couldn't walk a straight line through the woods for just a few miles and not come across something ...in Maryland no less. Plus I had to see it twice because the handheld camerawork made my wife sick the first time. If the above isn't coherent, "yes" to The Game, and "no" to Blair Witch, although I give it points for getting back to basics.
I don't know if this trailer for The Exorcist ran in theaters or TV. Crude but effective.
http://www.moviecitynews.com/
arrays/media/2004/exorcist.html
The ALIEN trailer mentioned above gave me fits when I was a kid. I was 7 when the film came out, and I had to turn down the sound or leave the room whenever that ad came on. One time I panicked and hid behind the sofa, but the eeeeEEEEEEEee soundtrack still haunted me. And how rare to say when I finally saw the film it lived up to my imagination 100%.
I agree with many, many of the comments already mentioned and want to add the TV spot for An American Werewolf in London (1981). I caught it late at night on Friday in the middle of SCTV Network 90 (as the 90-minute version was called on NBC).
I'm watching SCTV, laughing and having a good time, and all of a sudden this commercial comes showing a pretty nurse approaching David Naughton in a hospital bed in the middle of a forest. There's a quick close-up of his sleeping head. All of a sudden his eyes snap open, and he's turned into a demon with razor sharp teeth and awful, awful eyes.
Scared the Hell out of me.
As for some of the others, I remember seeing that bizarre Shining trailer at the movies for about six months before the film actually opened. The sense of anticipation it created was amazing.
What's nice about this is how many of the trailers are available on Youtube. Just do a quick search, and you can hear the awful ALIEN sound effect for yourself, or the creepy yowl of horror that accompanies the end of the It's Alive spot. All this stuff gave me terrible nightmares when I was a child, and I've loved them desperately for it ever since.
I remember the trailer for the 1rst "Nightmare on Elm Street" was pretty damn scary.
This is so late, but as something of a die hard on the matter I felt the need to weight in to Ross and co. Yes, I do hold BLAIR WITCH in high regards as one of the great horror films, possibly the best American one since THE FLY/SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (I can't decide between them).
Though I'm not blaming you for your opinion, I wonder what the original hype was like, I being too young to have known it as anything other than a passing presence in the culture, spoken on TV or glimpsed on a newspaper headline.
Once it was out on tape I got my hands on it and loved it to death, it being the first and still one of the only movies to actually *scare* me, make me feel physically and tangibly vulnerable physically and emotionally. And it's happened again to varying extents every time.
Matt hit the nail on the head with the description of the sound mix, which is muffled and real unlike any other -- the movie entire is improvisation perfected.
It's funny -- the early previews seem to stress the scary factor via a screeching noise, which is scary and intense, but wrong for this movie (if you want your ads tonally comparable to their filmic products). The previews make it sound like something comparable to the technical bombast (not nec. a bad thing) in THE EXORCIST, but BLAIR WITCH is more of an inversion (it has some of the most frightening silence in film, that is, until Josh starts crying...).
Something on my mind: I've always been dumbfounded that anyone actually believed the film to be "real" and its makers dead. I know this was actually insinuated in the marketing for the film online, but - to speak in cliche - COME ON.
Then I got to thinking.
Some of this footage was shown on TV to help fuel the reality angle, and people seemed to buy it. Check. Then they see the same footage in a theater, and it doesn't sit well - why is that any different?
One last thing I must ask: Do movies really have to be "professional"?
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