I’m surprised that nobody’s mentioned the perfect “don’t show the monster” movie, which is…Silence of the Lambs. Well, to a certain extent. In particular, the early scene where the evil Dr. Childress shows Clarice a photo of that nurse who Dr. Lecter attacked – you never SEE the photo, but can imagine how bad it was by his description: “They were able to reset her jaw, more or less, and save one of her eyes. His heart rate never got above 85, even when he swallowed her tongue!” NOT SHOWING THE PHOTO had a MUCH higher :eek: factor than if they actually showed it. And then there’s the “ambulance scene”…which I can’t go into more detail since I don’t want to use a spoiler box, but those who’ve seen the movie will know exactly what I mean. 
But the filmmaker’s role isn’t to make a grotesque monster. It’s the director’s job, through the shots, to make an effective film. The monster is just mise en scene; the strength of a film is in its form.
Take Psycho. (Spoilers to come, but I guess anyone who’s in this thread has probablyl seen it.) In one of the last scenes, after Sam and Lila have checked into the motel, parallel action occurs. That is, the action alternates between Lila exploring the house, and Sam and Norman talking in the office. The camera never shows you everything; instead, it leaves you wanting more. When Lila opens up a title-less book, the audience doesn’t get to see what she’s perusing. And similarly, we only see fragments of the conversation between Sam and Norman. Not showing the audience everything makes them uneasy, wondering what will happen.
And Hitchcock went to great lengths to make sure we never saw “Mother” (her face, at any rate), and to ensure no one questioned why. In contrast, the book describes a lot more, and is much weaker by comparison.
Furthermore, in my English class this year, we read an essay on Freud’s idea of the uncanny. This applies here, too. Showing the audience a monster is what they expect, which makes it familiar and formulaic. But something familiar in a strange guise is scary. Like when a sweet old lady spoons your eyes out and guts you in her kitchen. When someone you trust turns out to be a cold-blooded killer/mentally disturbed (i.e., Psycho, or many, many books and films). The idea of a bloodthirsty fiend running around and axing beautiful heroines isn’t a nice thought, but it’s an old, cliched one, isn’t it? If you can take the killer, make the audience like, trust, even sympathize with him, then it’s all the more shocking when the truth is revealed. In a case like this, it really makes little difference if the audience sees a lot of gore. In fact, it’s better that the viewer see as little as possible.
Ahah see your imagination does fill in the gaps.
I’d suggest you watch that scene again. In the scene where The face hugger attacks you don’t really see it.
You see a shadow move inside the egg. Hurts reaction
You see the egg opens up we see Hurts reaction again, there is a close up POV shot of the contents which is indistinguishable. Next something fast and blurry leaps up and you see something (you can’t make it out really) hit the visor and down Hurt goes … end scene.
See you do fill in the gaps. They could have made it a long shot where you see it leap out in full view and a long shot of it on his face but it did not. You filled in the spaces and when they show the dead version of it later (even then not too long and not absolutely distinguishable) you fill in the gaps from before.
The hugger is shown later but not in its full glory when it is on his face. Even then you get one quick look at it in whole, most of the shots are in close ups of individual pieces like teh “digits” and the “tail” thiose shots are more disturbing and frightening than the creature as a whole.
Apparently Del Toro, the Director who did Blade 2 and is working on Hellboy, wants to do a true to the book version once he finishes with hellboy.
Hopefully he can keep some studio suit from turning Danforth into a beatiful woman and making them have sex in the catacombs when they are being chased by the Shoggoth. Maybe do it like a Mockumentary?
I’ve seen two versions of Pickman’s Model at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, OR. One was a night gallery episode while the other was an adaption called “Chiliean Gothic”.
Both had their good points, but the Night gallery version suffered from having a fakey looking monster that you saw quite clearly(another reason to why showing the monster is very much a bad thing sometimes) that looked like a guy dressed as a giant rat, while the other one was far too long for it’s own good without much happening.
The problem is, Pickman’s model, done as a film, would need to learn from those two versions by A.) Keeping it short, because the story is only 13 pages long and B.) Showing the creature as little as possible except during the Photograph at the end. Otherwise, have some talented artist draw up the ghouls in a disturbing but vague way like Lovecraft described to serve as Pickman’s infamous paintings.
I think, as kingpengvin tries to illustrate, that you may be filling in the gaps with your imagination more than you realize. For example:
In fact, Lugosi’s Dracula didn’t have fangs–at least, not any that could be seen by the audience. That you remember them being there, even though they weren’t, says something about the power of the imagination to help produce a scary image.
I think, to an extent, that you’re right. A movie that never shows its monster can end up just being a let-down. Some films have done it–The Haunting, for one, has already been mentioned–but it’s extremely difficult to pull off. I wonder if you’ve ever seen any of the films Val Lewton produced for RKO in the forties. Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Isle of the Dead, and the like. Lewton was one of the early pioneers of the What You Don’t See Is More Scary school. Cat People, for example, is basically a werewolf movie where you never see the werewolf. His films are very effective–I was wondering what you think of them, if you’ve seen any.
The horror film director, I imagine, has to strike a delicate balance between never showing anything scary, and showing so much that it becomes laughable. And there is something to be said for knowing your own limitations. If you know your budget won’t allow you to create a convincing monster, you’re kind of foolish if you try to do it anyway. But if, despite that low budget, you can still scare the audience with the clever use of shadows, of sound and silence, and a vague glimpse of the monster here and there, that makes you a good director, and one whose films I want to see.
OK, so maybe that one particular scene wasn’t the best example (what about the other scenes I mentioned?). Still, I don’t think it disproves my thesis. The moment when the face hugger actually leapt out of the egg was another one of those “BOO!” moments that certainly shocked for a moment. The reason you didn’t see the whole creature as it attacked, however, had more to do with the limitations of the special effects technology/budget than it did with an active decision not to show the critter at that time because it would be more scary not to.
Yes, my mind filled in the gaps to visualize the actual attack, but that worked because they then did show what the creature looked like on Hurt’s face after they cut away his helmet. If they ONLY showed the blurry attack scene without revealing what, exactly, attacked him, I still maintain that the movie would not have been as scary. Full of temporary shocks and cheap scares, perhaps, but nothing lasting.
Barry
The “show or not show the scary thing?” question was discussed in this thread a few months ago. I’ll just reproduce here my first long post from there, since it addresses many of the same issues.
My key point is in that last paragraph. Some people have to see the monster and have the threat spelled out for them to be scared; some people need to have the freedom to fill in the blanks to be scared.
Check out the low-budget werewolf movie Ginger Snaps for both approaches in the same film. There’s a werewolf attack early in the movie where you see absolutely nothing of the creature: you hear snarls, and the victim screaming in the dark (while somebody else looks frantically around), and occasionally you get a blurry view of the victim being flung about. Then, at the end, you get a full view of another werewolf, nose to tail. For my money, the first scene is far more effective, but some would disagree. Neither position is right or wrong; it’s all about personal preference.
I also discuss the two different horror-story approaches in this thread, in a comparison of Stephen King’s novel The Shining with Kubrick’s film adaptation.
Oh, and I also meant to mention that HPL is correct: Guillermo Del Toro wants to make At the Mountains of Madness, but his current Hellboy project will need to be financially successful to give him the clout. In my world, AtMoM is the scariest thing Lovecraft ever wrote; my favorite chilling passage is toward the end, where the hero is fleeing the depths, and happens to glance behind him. The text is something like, his mind could barely comprehend what he was seeing, it was beyond description, it was a shambling thing that froze his intellect, etc., etc. The language is perfect: It communicates just how scary the creature is, but it uses your own imagination to do it. Very difficult to pull off the same effect in film; still, I know how I’d shoot it if I were making the movie. It would piss off half the audience, but it would be one of the the scariest scenes ever for the other half. As I said above, no single approach works for everybody.
Cervaise Because you bring up my boy, Guillermo, I’ll add that the ooky has it’s place in horror.
Seeing blood and guts and rollign heads is unsettling and disturbing and contributes a great deal to the mood.
That said, my reply to the OP is still that the unseen is more scary.
Proving yet again that there simply are no original ideas to discuss around here. sigh
Ah well, I tried!
Barry
Aaaaand, he’s back…
Having given it a bit more thought (always a plus, I know), I’ve come up with two recent examples that illustrate my point. The first is Jurassic Park. The scene where the T-Rex attacked the jeep was one of the scariest scenes I have ever seen in a movie. Yes, they built up the suspense and terror by first only telling you about the T-Rex, and then you saw the missing goat so you could imagine the T-Rex on the loose, but finally they showed the monster in all it’s glory and it was every bit as terrifying (if not more so) than I had imagined. Had it ended up looking like a claymation figure or a guy in a dinosaur suit, I would agree that they should have left it to my imagination. In this case, however, the filmmaker was able to create an image that was truly terrifying (and it wasn’t just the way it looked, but also the way it acted and sounded). The same is true for the raptors, which were first only hinted at to build the tension but were finally shown and scared the piss out of people.
The second example, which I just finished watching for the tenth time, is Pitch Black. Yes, it had scenes early on where somebody was killed by an unseen something. And yes, they built tension by only showing the monsters in quick glimpses for a while. Eventually, though, they revealed the monsters fully and they were damn terrifying. My favorite scene is the one where:
Paris wanders away from the group as the lights fail completely. He is attacked by something in the dark and can feel the blood. He then takes a swig of alcohol and blows it onto his lighter, briefly illuminating the scene to show all the monsters that are surrounding him as they move in for the kill.
Yes, they could have done the same scene entirely in the dark, with only the sounds to let you know what hapened, and yes, that certainly would have been scary as well. But actually showing the monsters was, in my opinion, much scarier than had they left it to my imagination, simply because the monsters were so well done.
And I still stand behind the other classic monster movies I mentioned, such as The Mummy, The Wolfman and Frankenstein, as examples of films that showed the monster completely and still managed to scare audiences silly when they were first released. No, they didn’t show every thing the monster did, and some of the deaths were off-screen. But the monsters themselves weren’t left to the audiences’ imaginations.
I guess the bottom line, at least for me, is that yes, what you don’t see can be much more scary than what you do see, but only if the filmmakers don’t create a monster that looks, acts, or sounds scary. Steven King may think that they should never have shown the 20-foot-tall T-Rex in Jurassic Park since the audience will go, “Oh, well at least it wasn’t a 30-foot-tall T-Rex.” And he’s certainly entitled to his opinion. I think, however, that this does a disservice to those filmmakers who are actually able to depict things that are genuinely scary instead of having to rely on the audience’s imagination to provide the scares.
Cervaise, I’d be interested to know whether you saw Jurassic Park or Pitch Black and, if so, whether you found them to be scary. If you did see them and didn’t think they were scary, then I guess it really is a matter of different people being scared by different things after all.
Regards,
Barry
I don’t generally watch a lot of scary movies, and the ones that tend to scare me the most are ones where the “monster” is a person (and therefore isn’t inherently scary).
But “The Others” scared me witless. I was squeaking.
That’s the best evidence I have that not seeing can be, well, a little scary.
Julie
godzillatemple:
See, I disagree with your analysis of that scene in JP. To me, the scariest point is when the kids look out the window and see that the lamb is gone. THIS is the height of tension: When you sit there thinking of the terrible, horrible things this could mean. When you realize just how wrong the world is. To me, the revealing of the T-Rex is the denoument: Its the release of the tension.
Ultimately, though, I agree with your final statements that it really depends on how well the filmmakers create the monsters. More often than not, the monsters/aliens end up just looking cheesy and ruining the movie; I’d rather just not have seen them in the first place.
In 28 Days Later, they show the “monsters”/zombies/people/whatever. They show them very well, and they are frightening in both their looks and their behavior - absolutely terrifying. But even scarier, to me, are the many scenes in which the characters are wandering around, looking at things, and the tension builds up and you just KNOW that a baddie’s gonna get 'em… Whether the baddie gets 'em or not, that tension is just horrible.
To answer the title of this thread, in a word, yes.
Imagine you’re camping. You hear twigs cracking outside your tent. HOLY CRAP WHAT WAS THAT?
If you knew it was just a raccoon, you’d be able to sleep easily…but you don’t know. It could be a bear, it would be a deranged killer…it could be anything.
That’s why Signs was so much scarier before you saw the whole alien. The little glimpses were great, but the whole alien just…sucked.
Signs wasn’t suck because it showed the alien, it’s because the alien design looked like a guy in a costume (well, and that the entire movie sucked). If they had come up with a better design, I have no doubts it’d be scarier (but the movie would still suck).
Signs didn’t suck because it showed the alien, it’s because the alien design looked like a guy in a costume (well, and that the entire movie sucked). If they had come up with a better design, I have no doubts it’d be scarier (but the movie would still suck).
Forewarned is forearmed. 
Imho, the best example of this comes with the book/TV adaptation of King’s very own IT. In the final approach to kill It, the monster comes to represent the characters various fears… IIRC, it appears to Richie in the shape of an eye (Richie has a thing about eyes, you see), to Beverly in the shape of her father, etc. When they got to the end, Ben shout’s “It’s a spider!” or something, so the image of the spider becomes fixed and a spider it is. Because of your imagination, the rest of the book makes perfect sense (the deadlights?) and you feel a sense of relief when it’s all over.
But on TV, it all goes horribly wrong. I can’t remember if the various incarnations appear to the band, but when the spider appears you stare at it with incredulous eyes, howls of laughter bursting from your lips.
Which was the point of the book - the monster you imagine is always worse than the monster you face. Sadly, that is WAY to subtle a message to send across American TV.
In short: Sometimes unseen is better.
It isn’t just movies. This started with literature. I must say, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre came to mind as soon as I saw the thread title.
Recall that J.R.R. Tolkien penned some masterful scenes of horror, or rather the element of horror worked into the narrative of The Lord of the Rings brought to the forefront in certain scenes. This writing worked because often Tolkien didn’t really show us the monster. Exhibit A is the Dark Lord himself, who never even puts in an appearance, except as the suggestion of a roving eyeball and as a wraithlike cloud rising from the wreck of Barad-Dûr after he’s vanquished. That cloud blown away by the western wind is one of the most chilling things Tolkien ever wrote.
Moria is the most concentrated horror spot in the story. The Watcher in the Water is a classic horror beastie, and Tolkien showed us just enough of its tentacles to give us the creeps—and no more. Likewise, the cave troll that attacks the Fellowship only sticks its foot and arm in the door before being driven off; it remains scarier that way. The Balrog isn’t fully described; its appearance is only sketched vaguely, leaving you to fill in the rest with your imagination. (Ralph Bakshi’s imaging of it continues to draw hoots of derision. Old Tolkien knew what he was doing.)
Shelob is the exception to these baddies, because she was pretty well described. I think she was quite horrible enough that her horror survived a fuller description.
Notice how the Orcs, Trolls, Uruk-Hai and Olog-Hai are not really described. Tolkien gives the reader some work to do on this. By contrast, Treebeard gets a pretty detailed description as a benign being. Ultimately, by making the readers invest more of their own personal imagination, Tolkien brings his world and creatures more vividly to life than just about anyone.