More Movies, More Problems
Last night, I made a poor personal choice...I watched almost the entire remake of Halloween. No, this was not on my approved viewing list. And I paid for this stupid decision to watch this movie by having to actually have watched it.
The entire conception of the movie is weird: despite the fact that Halloween (the 1978 film directed by John Carpenter) had a kajillion sequels, someone (it was Rob Zombie, a heavy metal musician turned director) decided to remake the first film. In keeping with Mr. Zombie's (heh) aesthetic, the new Halloween creates a backstory for murderous, masked rampager Michael Myers so that the audience is forced (yeah, forced is the right word) to feel empathy for an ax murderer.
I'm not going to write too much about this movie, which is just god-awful from beginning to end. I will remark on two things (after the jump).
One, after watching this movie, I went to bed and dreamed about ax murderers. What's funny about that is that my dream was about an ax murderer loose in this big house with an escalator, with teenagers in prom clothes riding it up to the top level of the house where they were basically eaten by a huge set of shark's teeth. In most horror movies, so little creativity is extended to get the teenagers in harm's way...this dream seems totally in keeping with that. Just roll them on in to the killing room on a conveyor belt. Nobody would ask for their money back.
Two, this movie exhibited a major flaw which I have been seeing everywhere lately. Most horror movies employ the "final girl" structure. A young (usually) female character is set up as the person who will survive the movie, and kill or otherwise dispatch of the monster at the end. Jamie Lee Curtis was the final girl in the original Halloween (and is the illustrative photo in the Wikipedia page I linked above). Neve Campbell was the final girl in the Scream series. And so on.
The Halloween remake had a final girl, too, of course. She does battle with Michael Myers for probably the last half hour of the film, and here's the problem I had: she did not stop screaming for the entirety of that half hour, except for a couple minutes where she was (blessedly) unconscious. I mean this literally. She did not stop screaming.
This is a problem of direction, Mr. Zombie. For starters, it detracts from the reality of the situation. Her voice didn't become hoarse, even at the end. Also (and, as usual, I have no basis for knowing this, just a common sense guess), it seems that the human "fight or flight" reaction would override the impulse to scream. The final girl in this case both fights and flights, she's just shrieking while she does it. Wouldn't the body be conserving its energy and attention on getting away, or poking Michael Myers with a stick, and give the damn lungs a break? I mean, try out one of those full-bodied screams: it's physically demanding.
Oh, also? The screaming got so annoying. So fast.
And, sorry to keep harping on Spider-Man 2, but the same problem cropped up here, too: egregious screaming. In this case it wasn't the main actor (for all Tobey Maguire's faults...he did not scream) but rather the extras in every scene featuring some death-defying, computer-generated rescue stunt. The extras were all out of control, all the time.
Again, this is a problem of direction. I understand how it happens: I've seen Extras. You're a struggling actor, you're looking to get noticed, you're going to scream your ass off. Sure.
But a thoughtful director or producer knows how to work around this kind of grandstanding. I remember watching a "making-of" documentary on the movie Titanic back when it was new; Google tells me it was probably an HBO "First Look". Somebody (it may have been James Cameron, it may have been an assistant director, it may have been a producer; I have absolutely no recollection) described how the extras in that film were dealt with to combat this problem I'm talking about. I wish more filmmakers would do this.
Basically, each non-speaking actor was given a number between 1 and 10, and asked to panic to a degree corresponding to their number. So you had your 10s, who were freaking out, and you had your 2s, who were handling the situation gracefully and quietly, as some people just would, in a real-life situation. It illustrates natural human variance; it is less grating on the viewer's nerves.
Let's all try it, Hollywood!
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