Being a “failed” filmmaker, as in, having never completed a feature, though not for lack of trying, but for budget crises and the woes of normal life – the day job and the rent and the light bill, et al – you may just take what I write here with a grain of salt. Or walk away now.
But if you’re a horror filmmaker, and have that hunger to be considered a great horror filmmaker – a Hitchcock, a Bava, an Argento – I think I’m about to reveal The Secret To The Universe, so you may want to stick around.
I haven’t yet exactly had my turn to do it, but I GET it.
You are wondering how George Romero could turn about $25,000 into a penultimate horror film that people, decades later, still talk about, write about, hold seminars and go to HorrorCons about… Meantime, you’re about to sink another $10 million into FX do-overs and multi-layer re-renderings, and still unsure if anyone’s going to give a dead rat’s ass about your epic scare-fest, or how soon it winds up costing 99¢ in the Walmart DVD shit bin.
The one horror film in particular that got me on this rant, or more precisely, its trailer, is a recent offering called “The Bride.”
I didn’t need to worry if this film might jump the shark at some mid-point, because it jumped it at mid-trailer. And dare I say, it jumped the very same shark that most modern horror films do. I’d just never seen it jumped so hard before, with such apparent lacking of self-awareness, that I jumped from my chair and screamed “Really??? Serious?? What is WRONG with you kids today – stumbling into multi-million dollar production deals, per chance with a half-decent story to tell – and you do THAT???? AGAIN???”
The film actually explores a subject that I myself have always wanted to make a horror film about; the 19th and early 20th century custom of having photographic memento portraits made of deceased family members, just prior to burial. It may seem morbid on its surface, but in those days photography was not quite the digital democracy it is today. Having a family portrait done was a costly and rare commodity. In some cases the postmortem portrait was the only photo of the dead loved one that the family possessed.
Not uncommon was say, a husband and wife posed with the propped-up corpse of their dead child, in clothing and make-up designed to bring an illusion of life and family union. Or a group of brothers posed around the one sibling who wasn’t breathing, all of them dressed for formal celebration. Sometimes the deceased person's closed eyelids were painted over with open, staring irises.
Brides who’d unexpectedly passed into the next world shy of their special day of days, were posed formally in their wedding dresses, as if about to enter into a next room where their grooms waited. Their faces were remolded by the photographer to appear humbly joyous with anticipation, when likely they were about to be buried in the festive gown, within minutes in some cases.
Some were already putrid and melting in the posing-harness by the time the camera was brought in. But the memento was deeply wanted and dearly purchased.
The trailer for “The Bride” depicts one such occasion. A dead woman in her wedding dress, with eyes painted on her eyelids, is posed and reposed by a patient photographer. Her blank stare is enough to give most people the creeps, because of the conceit that she was once a blushing bride, but now an artificially blushed propped up carcass.
As the photographer tries one last time to pose her chin up, she suddenly… guess.
Suddenly CGI morphs into a pissed off mega-demon – a payoff flicker “shock” before a cut-away. Did you guess that? Good answer. Did it scare you? Me neither.
Because I knew it was coming, and I also happened to KNOW it would be exactly a pissed off CGI mega-demon. It’s ALWAYS a CGI mega-demon. How many films have you seen where something or someone looks harmless or at least docile, then suddenly explodes into a CGI MEGA-DEMON?
Hundreds? It’s like watching the faucet drip, knowing the next drip will look and sound exactly. Like. The. Previous. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
How much money did the producers spend on that three frames of SUDDEN EXPLOSION INTO A CGI MEGA-DEMON? You don’t want to know. They wish they could forget.
Because their expensive CGI Mega Demon is now resting with all the other CGI Mega-Demons, in the Walmart 99¢ DVD shit bin… destined for the even “bargainer” bin out in the alley. Which is where your career belongs if you keep making movies about CGI Mega-Demons.
Do you want to be a horror filmmaker with a respected legacy?
HERE’S THE SECRET, if you care to read it.
You created your CGI Mega-Demon why? Because you believed it would “scare the audience.” Did you ever take an extensive writing class, taught by a good writer (not a hack with a teaching credential because his/her actual writing career went nowhere)? What was the fundamental informal rule they promoted?
Write from what you know. Nothing looks or sounds more real from your pen, or camera, than your reality.
What – to me – would have been a hundred times scarier than another CGI Mega Demon? My own cooking, but that’s another blogpost for another time. What would have been scarier, was if the dead woman’s eyelids – with eyes painted on them – had merely opened. The photographer gets a load of dead eyes looking up at him, from a dead woman who suddenly no longer needs help lifting her chin.
I’m not talking zombie films. I’m sticking to mainline horror, here. She gets up, with the fixed stare now real, and it’s game on.
That would scare undigested frankfurters out of me. When I was a child and went with my parents to the funeral parlor to see my grandmother’s body in-casket, I watched with mounting trepidation as my father touched her hand one last time. If her hand had moved, or worse, touched him back, I would have been careening down the interstate, on foot, getting away. Faster than my Dad!
No CGI. No Mega-Demon. Just something you genuinely dread, gaining a pulse.
Don’t worry about what you think scares the audience. Make a horror film about something that scares YOU. That thing you’ve never fully disclosed – that makes you squirm and start singing Beatles tunes in your head to eradicate it. That which you wouldn’t sit still to watch, on a bet, in real life – create it on-camera.
Trust me – if you make it good enough to re-conjure that scare in you, it will scare an audience out of their acne. Every pimple will pop spontaneously.
Create what would give YOU the need to run. I’m betting it’s something other than another batch of screaming generic Grudge faces. It’ll take nerve, and courage, and the daring to share it with your collaborators – but more a challenge. Isn’t that what you want as an artist?
Isn’t that the "artist's journey" scenario that all the most interesting “making of” documentaries are about?
Leave the CGI Mega-Demons on your FX crew’s résumé, to impress some lesser filmmaker – one who wants that space in the Walmart 99¢ bin. The one that wants to film another Drip.
Film what would scare YOU. Dare to face it, to create it for an audience. You may just purge it, and be left with a horror film that people might just… talk about. In a year. Or two. Or ten.
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