Surprisingly, the candles rising out of the Lake in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical version of Phantom of the Opera (2004) wasn’t filmed backwards. They built special lighting systems that would self-ignite when they rose out of the water.
After 3:00 here:
When I first saw The Stunt Man, they ran one of the reels out of order. So you had Cameron saying something in response to Eli Cross that he couldn’t know, then later you see Cross telling him the words he answers with. I figured it out as I left the theater and put it together in my mind.
It must have been in other prints. When I saw it again in another theater, the movie stopped at a particular point and the correct reel was played.
In Christine, they achieved the effect of Christine repairing herself by filming the car being damaged (IIRC they pulled the body panels inward using equipment hidden inside the car) and then playing the footage backwards.
In Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, when Neal is returning to the L station after realizing that Del doesn’t actually have a home, the overhead shot of the train pulling into the station is simply the same shot of the train leaving the station from a few minutes earlier being played backwards. If you look closely you can see a man walking backwards on the platform.
Usually in movies where you see a vine, rope, monster tentacle, or such wrap itself around someone, especially in pre-CGI movies, that shot was done by having the object already around the person and pulling it away, then showing the film in reverse. An example from my recent viewing was in Burnt Offerings, where Oliver Reed fights with vines that try to stop him from leaving the house o’ death.
Excellent point. They did that in the 1982 John Carpenter version of The Thing, when the Norris-head extends a tentacle and pulls itself under the desk.
Perversely, the TV show Ally McBeal copied the move.
Often, sunrises in movies are just backwards sunsets, because they didn’t want to get up early in the morning. The telltale (unless they think to fix it, which they usually don’t) is that the Sun will be moving the wrong way: In the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun near the horizon (at morning or evening) is moving left to right.
Well, that, and geography, like the sun rising over the ocean on the West Coast.
The scene near the end of Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard rises from the steamy water with camo makeup on, hair dry, and eyes instantly open, must have been filmed the other way around.
(Whenever I do this at the pool, there’s a bit of spitting, blowing, slicking my hair back and rubbing my eyes. There just ain’t no way he could rise out of the water like that.)
There’s a scene in the original 1962 version of *The Manchurian Candidate *that must have been shot without enough footage for where it was to fit. It’s more of a background scene, a voiceover as we see Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) eating in the summer cabin with the Jordan family. But at one point the film reverses, and Raymond’s fork takes food out of his mouth that he just put in there. It was jarring enough that I noticed it the first time I saw it.
The 1910 versionof Frankenstein. They filmed a papier mache model being burned and reversed the film.
Something I learned about on this very foruma few months ago.
Here’s the clip of that scene, and I doubt they filmed it backwards. The steam on the water is clearly rising, and if you watch his chin, you can see droplets of water falling in the correct direction.
Which reminds me of a scene in a much later movie, done in a similar way. In the original Hellraiser, the reconstitution of Frank up out of the floorboards is done primarily with wax models, filmed as they melted, then run backwards to look as if all the gooshy stuff is coming together to form his body.
The beginning of Capricorn One has the sun rising in the wrong direction. FYI: North of the Tropics of Cancer, the sun is ALWAYS moving from left to right, not just when the sun is near the horizon.
In addition, there’s a scene near the beginning of Airplane showing a plane approaching the gate. The ancillary vehicles in the background are going backwards.
There’s something similar near the end of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. After Spencer Tracy has fallen off the fire ladder and landed in a pet shop, there’s a shot of a dog licking his face that’s pretty obviously just a single lick run forwards and backwards. I don’t know if anyone has dug deep enough to find out if it was planned that way, or just the best way to get the effect they wanted with the footage they got.
That’s one of my biggest pet peeves.
Mildly related to this, but not really responsive to the OP: In The March of the Penguins, there are two shots of the moon which are used to show the passage of time, one waxing and the other waning. Unfortunately, they are the same shot of the moon, just flipped left-for-right.
That’s a great effect!
In Batman and Robin there is a scene where Robin is struggling in the water and one of the shots is him surfacing and thrashing, and then the video freezes for a couple frames, then reverses to show him struggling and going down again. It was quite obvious and painful to see, but I guess it could have been intentional since Batman movies were in their campy stage they entered after the first Keaton one but before the reboot.
That is so weirdly bizarre to watch these days. A guy riding a dinosaur and powering his car with his feet? Sure no problem. But taking the family going to a drive-in movie, that’s just absurd.
Likewise, when I saw The Salzburg Connection ages ago, reels three and four were shown out of order. The end of two and the beginning of four were at a natural break so it wasn’t noticeable but then the protagonist complained about his apartment being tossed and I wondered what in the hell he was talking about. The break between four and three was much more noticeable and then we saw the bad guy tossing the apartment.
More on point to the OP, in The Prisoner, the launch of a Rover was obviously bubbles rising looped back and forth a couple times. You see it every episode during the opening, and a few times in the episode itself.
The Monkees’ Head has reversed footage as they fall; it’s how they bring it all 'round back the beginning again at the end.
Way back there was a peculiar Japanese film called Latitude Zero. I saw it at a film fest, with a supplement on how a particular effect was achieved, of a sort of volcanic eruption. Thick paints were poured carefully into water, and the spreading effect was run upside down, and used that way.