Is what you CAN'T see really more scary?

Cafe Society
21

Definatly monsters that remain unseen or barely glimpsed are the most scary ones of all. I am pretty jaded to any movie monsters I have seen, only what is in my mind can scare me now.

And ** Zeldar ** I agree that all movies based on Lovecraft’s works have been pretty bad. I really wish someone would do a big budget * At the Mountains of Madness *, just keep the shoggoth in the shadows and barely glimpsed at till the very end. And ** Mr Tambo ** I love your idea of marketing a horror movie as some other genre, as that might actually be able to scare me.

22

godzillatemple & DreadCthulhu

Thanks for the backup on Lovecraft as a prime example of the point I feel is critical to this issue.

At the risk of a slight hijack, I’ve always wanted to see a scene from an otherwise comedy, love story, war movie, even western, where just at the height of the emotional arc, we suddenly see something like the Creature from the Black Lagoon or maybe Godzilla just walk into the scene.

Fair example: the beach scene in From Here To Eternity

(now back to the regularly scheduled thread already in progress)

23

I am not a screenwriter or anything, but I do have a few observations -

  1. I think the posters that put the viewers’ imagination in front of effects have it right - play upon our fears and have us do the scary work. No need for further comment.

  2. Just like there is a “screenwriter’s school” example of the ideal screenplay - for drama, there is Chinatown - for action, I have heard that Speed is cited because of its classic, three act (Keanu saves elevator, saves bus, saves subway car) structure and how the characters are introduced and interact - well, I would argue that there is the same type of “ideal” structure to a scary movie - best exemplified by Psycho and Alien:

  • Introduce the main characters and get to know them
  • Present some menace or tension in the beginning but don’t explain it - just use camera angles, music etc. to tense viewers.
  • About 30 to 45 minutes into the movie - SCARE THE LIVING SHIT out of the audience with something unexpected, sort of unseen (even the baby alien comes through John Hurt’s t-shirt, so only the blood is gory, and we don’t know what the alien will become), that kills a character we thought might live. Psycho’s shower scene famously shows no knife penetration and we don’t see the killer. Now, all bets are off (someone we know died!) the killer is loose, and you saw something very suprising and scary - you are now ready to flinch at the slightest provocation.
  • Spend the next hour with the other characters alternately dying off and learning more about the mysterious horror - leverage the flinch-ability of the audience to its fullest by showing the merest glimpse of the scary thing and the deaths.
  • Resolve as appropriate - unmasking, supposed hero dies, hero wins - what have you…

When done correctly, this “formula” does not come across as formulaic and plays upon our imaginations the most…IMHO…

24

Well, as much as I enjoyed Alien, it really relied too much on cheap shocks. The suspense builds and builds and then… the cat jumps out, or the shed skin drops from the vent in the ceiling. It wasn’t until they actually started showing the alien itself that things started getting really scary (in my opinion), the more they showed the scarier the movie became.

Remember the final scene with Ripley in the escape pod? Lot’s of shots of the monster there and, in my opinion, the scariest part of the movie. That was the scene that gave me nightmares, not the “suspenseful” parts where they’re stalking the monster.

Similarly, the scenes in the derelict spacecraft at the beginning of the film were certainly creepy and suspenseful and dread-inducing, but the movie didn’t become actually scary until the face-hugger leapt out of the egg and, well, hugged his face. That scene would have lost all its impact on me had they simply shown it in the darkness with suspenseful music and screaming, and left it to our imagination as to what exactly happened or what the face-hugger looked like. Ditto on the cafeteria scene with the chest-burster.

Yes, I agree 100% that not showing the monster is infinitely better than showing one that looks like a guy in a rubber suit. The “solution,” however, is not to just say, “OK, we won’t show the monster.” Instead, the filmmakers should come up with a monster that actually looks scary. And this is not an impossible feat by any means, unless you are talking about audiences who are simply too jaded as mentioned before.

Barry

25

Mmm… I think you could make a whole thread, in and of itself, of why Lovecraft has yet to be very well translated to the screen. And you could argue that “Re-Animator” did just that, considering that the original story was as funny and disgusting as it was terrifying.

Then again, you could argue that Dr. Herbert West was actually the monster in that story, in much the same way that Peter Cushing (not Christopher Lee) was the monster in all those old Hammer Frankenstein movies the Brits made. As a child, and as an adult, I found Cushing’s soulless, ruthless scientist FAR more terrifying than any of the guys stumbling around with a faceful of latex and putty.

I too would like to see a big budget “Mountains Of Madness,” but I suspect every time someone pitches it, some Hollywood dip producer says, "Didn’t Kurt Russell already do that one with “The Thing?” "

As to whether it’s scarier shown or unshown… I think it very much depends on how it’s done.

“Jaws,” for example. We hardly ever glimpse the shark until the end. Hell, the first victim is utterly terrifying, and we NEVER see the shark during that scene. And who could forget the scenes with the barrels?

We see very little of the shark because Spielberg didn’t LIKE the shark. He thought it looked fake, just like they thought the Alien looked fake, in the first movie… and, consequently, they worked around it.

Thing is, we know what a shark looks like, and we have a clue as to how a shark should behave. One of the scary things about the Alien was that we had NO clue what this thing was like, or what it could do. Hell, it grew from cat size to Shaq size in fifteen minutes.

The film “Anaconda” winds up being laughable, I think, NOT because we can see the snake… but because any moron knows that snakes simply do not behave in this manner. “Anaconda” was laughable because it was a crappy movie. It might have been improved if we had seen less in the way of snake acrobatics, but I’m unconvinced that would make it a better movie… simply a little scarier.

…but now, two other examples: “The Thing,” and “The Blob.”

The Blob is a creature you HAVE to show, simply because it’s amorphous, it’s indescribable. I personally found the 1988 version to be a very effective little movie, largely because we get to see a LOT of the damn thing, and exactly what it DOES to its victims. Gross? Gory? Sure. But who wouldn’t be scared of being dissolved alive?

Admittedly, one of the scenes I did find quite creepy was when the injured government technician is babbling insanely about how the Blob ate his partner, and he could see his buddy, INSIDE the thing, trying to scream… a scene we never actually see. We just hear the jabbering, terrified technician DESCRIBING it. Theatre of the mind is far from dead…

…as proven by Carpenter’s “The Thing.” We do get occasional glimpses of a horrible shapeshifting nightmare-thing. Hell, we get a GOOD look at it on several occasions, most notably the scene where one chap has a heart attack, and they try to use a defibrillator on him…

…but the horror in most scenes with the Thing is simply a matter of being creeped out by its appearance. Most of the movie is fueled by the rampant paranoia of the cast – the archtypical “one of us is a monster,” plot. And Carpenter and the cast make it work wonderfully. The scenes where the monster actually SHOWS itself are just the cherry on the cake… and I think it works very nicely that way.

…and I think that largely covers it. Show the monster? Yeah, I think so. Computer animation can literally show us anything anyone can imagine and communicate, these days.

…but Stephen King was right. Even Great Cthulhu isn’t very frightening if he’s just standing there when you open that door. “Well, Great Cthulhu is pretty terrifying, but I was afraid that he’d been nominated as George W. Bush’s running mate in 2004!”

It’s all a matter of what you DO with Cthulhu. And the rest of the movie. “Jaws” wasn’t really about a shark, folks… it was about this sheriff guy. “The Thing” was about a buncha guys trapped in the Arctic who allovasudden couldn’t trust each other. “The Blob” (BOTH versions) were NOT about amorphous caustic jelly from space, but about teenagers trying to become adults in a crisis situation.

THE MONSTER is NOT the star of the show. THE MONSTER is simply a PLOT DEVICE. ALL the best movies are about PEOPLE, not monsters… or about people who have BECOME monsters, and how they, as PEOPLE, deal with that.

Filmmakers, take note.

26

That’s sort of what Alfred Hitchcock did at the beginning of Psycho.

[spoiler]He starts the movie telling the story of Janet Leigh’s character, and her involvement in an embezzlement scheme. You find yourself engaged by the embezzlement plot. Is she going to get away with it? Where is her story going? Wow, this is an interesting crime drama.

And then the psychotic killer comes along and hacks Janet Leigh to pieces, and the whole movie shifts focus.[/spoiler]

Regarding the Op, I prefer a monster that is barely shown to one that is shown fully or to one that is not shown at all. So I guess I come down somewhere in the middle. Don’t give me a full-on shot of the Blair Witch in a big pointy hat. But DO at least give me a passing shadow, or a glimpse just at the edge of the camera’s range-- some hint of the monster’s physical presence.

Glimpses of a monster can be extremely effective.

27

It seems that you equate “scariness” with seeing something visually disturbing; if there’s not a monster or something else freaky shown, then it’s not really scary. Is there any way for you to be scared in a movie theater without a monster in a scene?

28

Of course, my argument really only applies to monsters that are supposed to be seen in the first place. Forbidden Planet featured an invisible, highly destructive monster that was scary because it couldn’t be seen (and therefore defended against). When they finally showed what the monster “really” looked like (as it was temporarily trapped in an electric force field around the ship) it was rather anti-climactic. That’s definitely a case where less would have been more (scary, that is) since the whole reason the monster was scary in the first place is because it couldn’t be seen. Once they showed the monster, it was like the great Wizard of Oz being revealed as a little old man behind a curtain (and please tell me I didn’t just spoil The Wizard of Oz for anybody!).

Monsters from the Id aside, however, glimpses of the monster are only effective to build the suspense until the actual monster is finally revealed and do not, in my opinion, provide any lasting scares. It’s the difference between a movie that is merely creepy or suspenseful and one that is truly scary.

Barry

29

RE if Lovecraft can be effectively filmed, I really defend, for its time, the 1969 AIP Dean Stockwell-Sandra Dee-Sam Jaffee version of THE DUNWICH HORROR. Also the RE-ANIMATOR films & most of all, the apparently little known Chris Sarandon vehicle THE RESURRECTED- which is actually “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” (somewhat effectively done in the 60s also by AIP starring Vincent Price with bit parts of Lon Chaney Jr & John Carradine).

Btw, PICKMAN’S MODEL (which would be a good movie) was also done fairly well on Rod Serling’s NIGHT GALLERY as was COOL AIR (HPL’s salute to Poe’s M VALDEMAR).

30

Well, my original post was about monster movies after all, and not simply “scary” movies. I personally think monster movies provide a unique form of “scariness” (perhaps even the ultimate in scariness) because they deal with what is unknown. The best ones take an every-day situation and skew it 180 degrees off kilter by throwing in something that we know just couldn’t possibly exist but is there nonetheless. I think Mr Tambo hit the nail on the head when he talked about the power of the unexpected.

Detop brought up George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as an example of how scary actually seeing the monsters can be. Yes, it could have been an effectively creepy and suspenseful movie if you never saw the zombies, if all the action occurred off-screen or in the dark, and people simply disappeared without the audience knowing exactly what happened. But what made it an honest to god[zilla] scary movie (to me, at least) was actually seeing the extremely well-rendered zombies rendering the flesh of the hapless characters in the movie, actually [seeing the little girl rise from the dead and attack her mother, etc.

Barry

31

Errr… make that “rending” the flesh :smack:

32

One thing that was so terrifying about these original horror films, though, was that you never saw the action. Sure, you saw the Wolfman. You saw him approaching a young woman on the street. But then, you saw them go off camera, you heard the scream, and what went on behind closed doors was up to the viewers imagination. What’s more frightening then? A shot of the wolfman swiping the person once with his claw hand and them going down, or the thought of him pouncing, tearing, gnawing, and rending flesh? That stuff was never seen on screen, and that’s what made those old horror films great. You saw the monster, but you never saw what they did, and that’s where the true horror came from. The later Hammer productions started to show more of the violence and gore on screen, but those movies paled in comparrison to their foregoers.

That’s exactly what they did in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I don’t think there’s a single critic out there that won’t say that that was one of the most terrifying movies of all time. They’d show Leatherface dragging the girl towards the hook, and lifting her up, but that was it. Still, without showing the actual event, it drove it home that much more.

And as has been pointed out, it also depends on the monster itself. Zombie flicks, and anything dealing with swarms, need to show the monster, because it’s not the monster itself, it’s the sheer number of them that’s terrifying. Night of the Living Dead had zombies, but you never knew exactly HOW MANY zombies there were. Was it just this little town, was it this city? This state? The whole world? And again, with zombie films, it’s not the actual monster that’s terrifying and brings suspence, it’s the scenario. A “monster” movie deals more with one monster, for the most part. Zombie movies are more “epidemic” films, where the monster isn’t the real deal.

Even slasher flicks try to pick it up sometimes. Friday the 13th did a great job of hiding the killer in the first couple of films. It wasn’t until about four that Jason started becoming more of a screen presence, and they really change him up at that point to help ad mystery to him. In 2, you see his face. In 3, they show it again. In 4, they turn him into a strange monster, and keep his newly deformed face behind the mask. He’s definitely become a much more terrifying character, and part of that his most terrifying aspect, his face, is hidden. There are versions of the Phantom of the Opera where they always hide the Phontom’s face. The only person to see it is Christine. This makes his disfigurement much more grotesque then what they can show, because now his disfigurement is as horrible as you want it to be (which is a MILLION times worse than Robert England’s face in that horrible 90’s version…oi!).

So yes, when it comes to singular monsters, where the creature itself is the focus of the terror, less is more.

33

Elvis: Apples and oranges. The question is whether it’s scarier when they show (or don’t show) the monster, not the actions of the monster. Even if they didn’t show all the “action” onscreen in the old films, they certainly showed the monsters themselves.

If we’re talking slasher/splatter films (which I wasn’t, just to let you know), I agree that showing too much gore is a bad thing since it quickly devolves into campiness, and you really don’t need to show how somebody is killed to know they died (a little blood splashed from off-screen to on-screen is usually sufficient).

For a monster movie to be truly scary, however, you actually need to show the monster. No, you don’t have to show it the entire time or show every thing that it does, but it can’t just be left to the viewer’s imagination what the monster looks like the entire film.

As an aside, I don’t really consider Phantom of the Opera to be a monster movie, although it is frequently included in that genre. The title character is, after all, just a man (albeit one who has been horribly scarred and driven insane as a result). That’s just me, though.

Barry

34

You mentioned Dracula earlier as one of these films. Were you really frightened by the way Bela Lugosi looked as Dracula?

I mean, I know at the time lots of women thought he was damn sexy. You can see a truly frightening looking vampire in the silent classic Nosferatu, but Lugosi’s Dracula (like that of Stoker’s novel) is a sinister but not monstrous looking nobleman. What makes him a monster is that, despite his appearance, he is inhuman. His motives, abilities, and limitations are not those of an ordinary man, and the team of vampire hunters must attempt to protect themselves and defeat him based on limited information. Although we see Dracula onscreen we never “see” inside his head, because that unknown quality is what makes him a monster and not just a Romanian guy with a dental problem.

It’s also what makes him scary. The killer you understand is much less frightening, and less dangerous, than the killer you do understand. It’s possible to show the monster and still have it be scary, but if you show too much (in terms of appearance, behavior, or motivation) then you’ll lose a lot of your ability to scare the audience. We can deal with the known, it’s the unknown that troubles us.

35

Well, I’m not a woman, but personally I found Lugosi’s fangs and eyes to be extremely scary. And yes, I found Nosferatu to be a much scarier movie primarily because of how the monster looked.

Barry

36

I think that not seeing TOO much of a monster, apparition, demon, etc. does, in fact, enhance fear and that overall “creeped out” feeling. This is partly why JAWS was so damned terrifying. They didn’t show much of the shark at all…a fin then a teenager gets tugged under…then a quick shot of the shark munching away…blood…and that’s it. I think that’s somewhat why those of us in the JAWS generation, were freaked out at the lake, the city pool, and even our own bathtubs.
Remember in the sequels when Jaws was this grotesquely large, obviously mechanical creature that would actually flop half his body onto a boat to snag a teenager? The movies became laughable at that point.
Movies don’t necessarily need to go as far as BLAIR WITCH PROJECT but only showing quick glimpses of some hideous Damned Thing causes the viewer’s mind to “fill in the blanks”
Those brief glimpses of monsters allow us to suspend our disbelief. Logic goes out the window. Most or our nightmares involve being chased by things unseen or we dream of a circumstance or a setting where things don’t seem right, it’s just a little “off.” That can be more frightening than dreaming of some horned monster with plaque laden fangs. Because our fears are of things that are unjustified in our reality construct but at the same time are somewhat plausible. I was more creeped out by BLAIR WITCH than FRIDAY THE 13th… PSYCHO scared the crap out of me…and THE EXORCIST had me nearly pissing my pants with laughter. (probably because I wasn’t raised catholic)
I don’t know about the rest of you obut my own mind has conjured up more frightening boogeymen than any movie has to date.

37

Hmmmm… This almost seems like a “Chicken and Egg” type issue to me. To wit, are the best horror movies those that reflect our collective fear of the dark and the unknown, or do we learn to fear the dark and the unknown because of watching horror movies? YMMV, but for me it’s definitely a case of too many scary movies as a child giving me nightmares and a fear of the dark that lasted well into my teen years.

I wasn’t even raised remotely Catholic, but The Exorcist scared the pants off of me. Funnily enough, a friend of mine who was raised Catholic found it to be hilarious. Go figure.

Barry

38

I’m inclined to think that humans instinctively fear the dark and unknown.

For  tens of thousands of years, we've had very little understanding of our world, so we've spent most of our history having no clue what horrors the world might spring on us next.   Those who tended to be wary of ANYTHING unknown were probably a lot more likely to live to breed.

We depend on our eyes to tell us what dangers exist in our immediate area. In the dark, our eyes don’t work well. There COULD be 500 extra-large wolves sitting around our camp, just out of firelight range, held back only by their fear of the fire… waiting.

Or something worse than wolves, something unknown… that only comes out when it’s dark.

39

You are scaring me Vlad. :eek:

And that is my point.

40

Well, in the case you describe the fear is of something known, that has been seen before, and that can be visualized (wolves, even if they are extra-large), not some amorphous “something” that is scarier than an actual wolf. The fear is based on a known threat and the possibility that this known threat might possibly be out there in the dark ready to jump out and grab you. The only “unknown” is whether the wolves are there, not what they look like.

From personal experience (not always the best way to argue, I realize), my fears of the dark were always based on something I had seen (whether real or in the movies) and wondering whether it was out there. In other words, I had a concrete image in my mind of what I was afraid of, and it was something that scared the bejeebers out of me. I didn’t have generalized angst or a fear of some half-imagined, amorphous bogeyman. Instead, I was afraid of that particular monster I had seen on TV the week before, or that huge spider I had seen on the woodpile the other day.

I don’t know – maybe I just never had enough imagination to be scared of things I had never actually seen. I certainly had enough imagination to be firmly convinced that a fictional character seen on TV was hiding in my closet, though.

Barry