What is the best word to use? Gimmick, cliche, meme, trope?
Nothing new under the sun. There are some gimmicks that been used so many times, some things have become cliche. Some are cringe-worthy. But they still use them, because they still work on some of us. Some make us laugh, cry, or scream.
There is a gimmick in horror films that has been used in lots of ‘haunting’ themed films. The mirror image! You can always see it coming. Person looking at the own reflection in the mirror, nothing new…yawn. But then the person walks away and the reflection does not. It does something evilly different. And the person hasn’t noticed.
I see it coming. And it still creeps me the fuck out. Sometimes I expect it and they DON’T do it and still creeps me out!* I scare myself*!
Or the person sees the reflection and doesn’t trust the reflection and starts to move in ways to test it. Off the top of my head, 1408. Where he sees himself doing the same thing in the apartment room across the street. All the same actions that he does in the hotel room. And then sees the other person. Gahhh!!!
In sports movies, I insist that the downtrodden, but still full of heart, underdog beats all odds and scores the winning touchdown, goal, homerun right in the face of the obnoxious, arrogant and favored individual or team of a-holes. If this cliche does not happen in my sports movie, I will ask for an immediate refund. I don’t want to waste 2 hours of my life for a damn moral victory.
When you’re driving, and you glance in the rear view mirror and see someone following you (the cops, usually, if you’re the bad guy), you have to say the same thing no matter what the movie: “We’ve got company.”
Actually, Secret Window had an even creepier variant: the main character looks in a mirror and sees the BACK of his reflection. Weirded me the fuck out, it’s just so WRONG.
My favorite horror trope is Nothing is Scarier. That is, where something is scary not because of some terrible creature or event, but because of the lack of one. A good example of this is the gas station scene in No Country for Old Men. The villain, Anton Chigurh, does a coin toss and has the gas station attendant call heads or tails. We know what Chigurh is capable of (he kills people without a second thought if he needs something from them), so we’re collectively pissing our pants…but the attendant calls it correctly, and Chigurh congratulates him and walks away. Nothing bad actually happens, but it’s still arguably one of the most terrifying scenes in the film.
I don’t know that I’d call that a cliche (because tropes typically aren’t) but it’s certainly not original. It doesn’t matter–it still gets me every time.
What also works? Black trenchcoats. They’re just so COOL, and I will probably never tire of them.
Back before the current resurgence of 3D, they really used to take advantage of the format, cheesily throwing things at or poking the camera/audience. When 3D “came back” I kind of missed that.
Something similar happened in another movie adapted from Stephen King, Delores Claiborne:
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a young woman who hates her mother, (accurately) suspecting that she had killed her father. When she’s just about to leave her mother (after the mother had been accused (this time wrongly) of another murder, she has a flashback to a time that her father had been sexually abusing her. To convey how staggering the realization is, that everything she had assumed was backwards, she looks in a mirror and there’s a scary musical chord as suddenly she’s looking at the back of her own head. In a movie devoid of any other supernatural-seeming elements at all, this was a real shocker.
When you can’t see what’s menacing the people on the screen that’s scary, because your mind/imagination can conjure up things that are worse than anything that could actually be shown.
The scariest scene to me, in Jaws, was the night time fishing scene. The two guys throw out a roast on a hook. Finally the chain starts playing out, and when it reaches it’s limit it tears the dock away and the guys tumble into the water. The dock keeps on going, but then it turns around and starts heading back to shore. The tension was awful, with me wondering whether or not they were going to make it. They did.
So, nobody got hurt, you never see the shark, and yet I nearly turned blue from holding my breath in fear.