Has the "Found Footage" Genre gone too far?
Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2012 5:49 pm
I love "found footage" movies. I love them. For me, Paranormal Activity was the scariest freaking movie ever. I've seen a few good ones, a few bad ones, and I think I'm starting to see a pattern in where found footage movies go wrong.
1: Camera surgically attached to the protagonist.
The thing that made Paranormal Activity work was that the camera was plausible and believable where it was. It was set up on a tripod in the bedroom to record weird happenings. Cloverfield was pretty good but at some point I found myself asking "Why is this guy still hauling the camera around?" At some point the idea of the person in this unimaginably scary situation still has the presence of mind to hang on to the camera, keep it pointed at scary things, and not manage to drop, break, discard or deactivate it at any point.
Up until last night, the worst offender in this was Paranormal Entity (A ripoff of the title of Paranormal Activity)... Everywhere this guy goes and everything he does he's got that camera.
"I'm documenting all this."
But I have a new champion. Apollo 18. That's right, folks. A found footage movie that takes place on the Moon. Still there seemed to be more cameras in and around the lander than any other single type of equipment. Area 407 did this too. The girl with the camera is running from a man with a gun, but that camera just keeps right on rollin'.
Grave Encounters, while an excellent movie, did this as well. That camera must have had an AWESOME battery...
2: BWAAAAAA LOOK HOW SCARY IT IS!!!!!
This movie was also guilty of the second thing that kills good found footage movies. The "LOOK HOW SCARY IT IS!" syndrome. It's where a movie builds up some pretty good tension and uncertainty with little hints and flashes of something bad happening, and then rams it all in your face all of a sudden, almost like they're trying to convince you that yes, all that little stuff means the really big, bad scary thing is well... really big, bad and scary... instead of letting your imagination handle it.
It's why Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project worked. You never actually see the scary Big Bad. Your imagination goes nuts trying to fill that blank in, and whatever you're imagining is always going to be scarier than what the director comes up with. Cloverfield is an exception in that it sort of did that by obscuring the monster for most of the movie, and by the time you actually see it clearly it really is kinda scary because it met the expectations the movie built up to.
Apollo 18... well... fell on its nose. It hints at something scary on the Moon there... gives clues, but kind of threw up on itself at the end by taking the scary creatures only glimpsed before, and fills the screen with them. "HA! If you thought seeing a glimpse of one was scary... look! They're everywhere! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" (Well, th eones you could see through the violently shaking camera and the contrived interference.) And I went "Yawn. Not scary now that I know what they are." The director missed the fact that it's the imagination, not the SFX, that scares the audience.
It's why CGI hasn't really made scary movies in general any scarier.
3: Camera Shake means stuff just got real
Maybe this is an attempt at realism... to lampshade the improbable scenario in which the cameraman has somehow held onto the camera rather than dump it to get a little extra speed when fleeing from the monster/alien/ghost/whatever. The camera is violently shaken, you can't see a thing, you wish your screen was smaller because you're about to vomit, and none of it is particularly scary. Paranormal Activity 2 had what was probably supposed to be a pretty scary scene in the basement where someone goes down there trying to find out who's screaming (toting the camera, of course.) and in the darkness some sort of physical confrontation takes place. No idea what happens, because the camera flips around like a Mexican jumping bean, but at least it eventually lands on the floor where we can listen to all the screaming, crying, noise, etc. I guess that's supposed to convince us something awful is going on.
The Blair Witch Project did this too at the end when Heather is running into the shack, screaming. We have no idea what else is going on, and eventually she drops the camera. At least we could tell she was running into the building though.
Apollo 18 took this to a new level by having electronic interference whenever the creatures were near... which completely obscured the camera's view... so literally a significant portion of the movie was nothing but snow and electronic noise. How's that scary? What am I supposed to think about the monsters? They have EMP equipment? Radio jammers?
And then there's the last major category of issues these movies have:
4: How to we stop this thing?
The ending. It's like the writers had lots of good, scary ideas for how to get going, and have a decent midgame, but then can't seem to bring the film to an ending that satisfies. Sometimes they handle it by just.... stopping. Kinda like the ending to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sometimes the Big Bad quits messing around and just finishes off the characters. Sometimes the ending idea is ok but the story kinda jumps to it, like there was no elegant way to get there smoothly.
I love these movies, but maybe it's partly because I have to sift through a lot of junk to find the gold nuggets, and those make it all worth it. Has the genre gone stale? Have we been inundated with these movies because they tend to be cheap to make? Part of me is very eager to watch Chernobyl Diaries but... will it suffer from the problems listed?
1: Camera surgically attached to the protagonist.
The thing that made Paranormal Activity work was that the camera was plausible and believable where it was. It was set up on a tripod in the bedroom to record weird happenings. Cloverfield was pretty good but at some point I found myself asking "Why is this guy still hauling the camera around?" At some point the idea of the person in this unimaginably scary situation still has the presence of mind to hang on to the camera, keep it pointed at scary things, and not manage to drop, break, discard or deactivate it at any point.
Up until last night, the worst offender in this was Paranormal Entity (A ripoff of the title of Paranormal Activity)... Everywhere this guy goes and everything he does he's got that camera.
"I'm documenting all this."
But I have a new champion. Apollo 18. That's right, folks. A found footage movie that takes place on the Moon. Still there seemed to be more cameras in and around the lander than any other single type of equipment. Area 407 did this too. The girl with the camera is running from a man with a gun, but that camera just keeps right on rollin'.
Grave Encounters, while an excellent movie, did this as well. That camera must have had an AWESOME battery...
2: BWAAAAAA LOOK HOW SCARY IT IS!!!!!
This movie was also guilty of the second thing that kills good found footage movies. The "LOOK HOW SCARY IT IS!" syndrome. It's where a movie builds up some pretty good tension and uncertainty with little hints and flashes of something bad happening, and then rams it all in your face all of a sudden, almost like they're trying to convince you that yes, all that little stuff means the really big, bad scary thing is well... really big, bad and scary... instead of letting your imagination handle it.
It's why Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project worked. You never actually see the scary Big Bad. Your imagination goes nuts trying to fill that blank in, and whatever you're imagining is always going to be scarier than what the director comes up with. Cloverfield is an exception in that it sort of did that by obscuring the monster for most of the movie, and by the time you actually see it clearly it really is kinda scary because it met the expectations the movie built up to.
Apollo 18... well... fell on its nose. It hints at something scary on the Moon there... gives clues, but kind of threw up on itself at the end by taking the scary creatures only glimpsed before, and fills the screen with them. "HA! If you thought seeing a glimpse of one was scary... look! They're everywhere! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" (Well, th eones you could see through the violently shaking camera and the contrived interference.) And I went "Yawn. Not scary now that I know what they are." The director missed the fact that it's the imagination, not the SFX, that scares the audience.
It's why CGI hasn't really made scary movies in general any scarier.
3: Camera Shake means stuff just got real
Maybe this is an attempt at realism... to lampshade the improbable scenario in which the cameraman has somehow held onto the camera rather than dump it to get a little extra speed when fleeing from the monster/alien/ghost/whatever. The camera is violently shaken, you can't see a thing, you wish your screen was smaller because you're about to vomit, and none of it is particularly scary. Paranormal Activity 2 had what was probably supposed to be a pretty scary scene in the basement where someone goes down there trying to find out who's screaming (toting the camera, of course.) and in the darkness some sort of physical confrontation takes place. No idea what happens, because the camera flips around like a Mexican jumping bean, but at least it eventually lands on the floor where we can listen to all the screaming, crying, noise, etc. I guess that's supposed to convince us something awful is going on.
The Blair Witch Project did this too at the end when Heather is running into the shack, screaming. We have no idea what else is going on, and eventually she drops the camera. At least we could tell she was running into the building though.
Apollo 18 took this to a new level by having electronic interference whenever the creatures were near... which completely obscured the camera's view... so literally a significant portion of the movie was nothing but snow and electronic noise. How's that scary? What am I supposed to think about the monsters? They have EMP equipment? Radio jammers?
And then there's the last major category of issues these movies have:
4: How to we stop this thing?
The ending. It's like the writers had lots of good, scary ideas for how to get going, and have a decent midgame, but then can't seem to bring the film to an ending that satisfies. Sometimes they handle it by just.... stopping. Kinda like the ending to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sometimes the Big Bad quits messing around and just finishes off the characters. Sometimes the ending idea is ok but the story kinda jumps to it, like there was no elegant way to get there smoothly.
I love these movies, but maybe it's partly because I have to sift through a lot of junk to find the gold nuggets, and those make it all worth it. Has the genre gone stale? Have we been inundated with these movies because they tend to be cheap to make? Part of me is very eager to watch Chernobyl Diaries but... will it suffer from the problems listed?