Rant - [REC], Unseen Cameramen and the Fall of Horror Films

RANT TIME!

Huge balls. Yes, that is the preface for this article, but not in the literal terms you may well have imagined. Not genuine big balls. An expression of frustration and a indicment of something generally shit.

It's been a while since I've gone into rant mode, something which should really be a regular occurence considering the way this blog is titled. And, since I'm pretty much permanently logged into 'film-mode', it would make sense to make a start there. My medication has been thrown at the wall from Yonkers, the blocks have been removed, time to spit-wax lyircum.

The subject of my ire this time has been brought up by my weekly movie night being ruined by a hugely disappointing, infuriating 'critically acclaimed' slice of timewasting, teasing mediocrity and crowd pandering money making. Namely the Spanish horror film '[REC]', yet another 'found footage' type thrill ride, this time with a difference.
The 'difference' is that there isn't a difference, and frankly it's as thrilling as a prostate exam sans rubber glove and lube.

And It Sucks Because...?

In order to make the point a little clearer, and also help alleviate my condition (supposedly a civilian version of PTSD), I shall briefly review said film just now.

The 2007 film by Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza is the story of a bunch of people stuck in a building with zombies and stuff. Except fast zombies. And some kind of disease and quarantine and all that. This TV reporter (a young woman who strips down to her undervest at the earliest opportunity, you know....because of sex) and her cameraman are making a documentary about firefighters in the unnamed Spanish city, and tag along when two of the guys are sent to an apartment building because an old woman is screaming. Here, they find all of the building's inhabitants hanging around in the lobby because....um...because an old woman is screaming. Oh, and she's weird and lives with her cats. As if that matters (or is fresh or something...clear red herring territory...you can almost smell the salmonella).

Anyway, despite pissing off everyone and generally getting away, the reporter and the cameraman are allowed to go upstairs as they break into the flat and find the old woman covered in blood and gibbering inanely. As soon as one of the present cops turns round (a veteran police officer leaving himself exposed to a potentially dangerous and unstable member of the public ALREADY covered in somebody else's blood), crazy old hag lunges in and cranks up the gore factor to parody levels to bite out his throat. Everyone panics, shouting and all that jazz. Then they rush near dead officer downstairs, leaving the second police officer to arrest the woman, handcuff her and bring her down....

Oh wait, no they don't. The other cop helps take dying guy away, leaving the youngest and most inexperienced fireman alone to guard the unrestrained woman who has just tried to kill an agent of the law. Hmm...guess what happens to him.
Then it turns out that the law has sealed up the building, citing that it's a quarantine against a potential contagion, trapping everyone inside. Pretty bad right? So the colourful characters who live in this nice looking building all start shouting and freaking out, the cop pulls his gun on everyone, and then the second fireman (who was left conspicously unarmed and unprepared to guard an attempted murderer on his lonesome, in an unsecured and unsearched darkened apartment) shows up by screaming and taking a plunge down the stairwell. Ok, credit where it's due, I almost shat myself when this happened.

Right, I'm veering dangerously close to simply describing the film's plot here, which will more or less waste word space, so I'll summarise the situation and then dissect the bullshit with the aid of appropriate SPOILER tags as surgical bay curtains. Alrighty?

So, everything is set up and established nicely. There's plenty of mystery, some in-film rules have been established, everything is boiling nicely (aside from the flaws in logic, but these things can be passed off...possibly). They can't leave the building, because they're stuck inside. They can't go back upstairs, because that's where the crazy is. You have two dying men who need to go to hospital, strange noises and real potential for creepiness and scares. So what goes wrong? I'll tell you.

[SPOILERS]

The film messes it up by basically following tropes and cliches present in every other similar film. It chooses frights over genuine horror, screams over tension, and monsters over fear. For every good step it takes, such as building up animosity and conflict between the characters, it takes a wrong one by going down the B-Movie route of trailer fodder thrills over plot based substance.

Where it could have been original, it rehashes. The monsters are basically the infected from 28 Days Later, following the same ground rules and breaking parameters. These 'undead' style victims are stronger than regular humans, as well as extremely aggressive. They only bite the necks of potential victims....for some reason. When they could easily rip into somebody's hand or leg, they instead try to go for the jugular. Like vampires. Hmm...yup, vampire-zombie-infected...s.

But it's not just in these stakes that it gets fucked. The main character, the reporter Angela, becomes an action girl from the moment stuff gets weird, yet has a bi-polar personality. One moment she's cynical and selfish, determined to get footage and to scream blue murder at the cop for being as equally screwed as the rest of them, the next she's overly compassionate and empathetic, the moral core. Of course, she's more proactive than anyone else. The cop, incidentally, goes from Blue Screen of Death moment to general wannabe leader and then into some rapidly changing amalgam of heroism and terrified out of his depth amateur. The fireman, Manu, equally flickers between cowardly to heroic. There's a preening, racist apartment dweller, and Asian family, a conveniently placed interm who is overqualified, a creepy little girl...yup.

And, oh wow, we never see the cameraman (What a wonderful plot device! Because this way, we are the cameraman. We're Pablo!...um, except not all of us are called Pablo, and most of us probably don't have his voice...). No, nothing gimmicky about that. This leads us to one of the film's biggest flaws.

[END SPOILERS]

Where similar fare, notably The Blair Witch Project, get it absolutely right is this: when the film is atmospheric and taut, you are so caught up in events and the action that you actively forget the format you're watching. Is it handheld? Are the characters filming? I was too distracted by the dementia causing tension to notice. Add to that an in-universe explanation (in BWP, Heather films because it makes it easier for her to distance herself from the terrifying situation).

But [REC], like the equally inferior Paranormal Activity, makes you painfully and acutely aware of the fact that some autistic asshole is still swinging the camera around, causing more harm than good. You wonder why he doesn't ditch the heavy, incumbersome piece of machinery so he can run away faster. Even when it is useful as a torch, it is not used in this manner.

Even when the camera itself can prove itself useful, this opportunity is ditched. In one scene, some of the characters need information they cannot remember, and are faced with having to put themselves in harm's way in order to obtain it. This is despite the fact that the number they need is in the footage, they can recover it by simply playing back the video. You could argue that they would be too scared to think of this...and I would agree if they hadn't done it earlier, at a no less traumatic moment. This inconsistency, setting up and foreshadowing but then forgetting, is simply lazy plotting, unfocussed writing.

But this is just a symptom of a bigger problem.

Bad Horror isn't Horrifying

The issue here is the loss of discipline in making horror films, supposedly scary movies that are meant to prove a visceral, shocking and terrifying experience for the viewer. Ridley Scott recently commented, as part of his promotion of Prometheus, that it is harder to scare people now. This isn't exactly true.

The problem is that it in tried and tested fashion, it has been found that selling cinema tickets is far easier when you focus on scares, on those moments that make people jump. However, the horrific mutated offspring of this fact is that modern day horror films are simply a series of these events stapled together with a half baked plot (and that's putting it mildly). Yes, it may frighten people, make their heart race, but it's unsatisying and has minimal repeat value. And of course, 'found footage' format is perfect for these tactics, because you can have monsters jumping out at the camera and other such cliches. Do they work? Yes. Are they predicatable? Absa-fucking-exactly.

This isn't true to the genre. Films such as Blair Witch, The Excorcist, Alien, The Shining and The Haunting (more on this later) are damn effective and memorable because of the tone and mood, the palpable sense of dread that they build up, so claustraphobic. Where does this stem from? It comes from discipline, from patience, and from good storytelling, good characterisation and excellent subtext. In each of these films, there's an underlying theme, something which drives the plot and makes for great anaylsis. Dross such as [REC] and Paranormal Activity lack any kind of depth, or intelligence, so have no substance, only style.

With this in mind, here are a list of rules for making excellent horror:

1. STORY: Come up with a great story first, from start to finish, make sure it all makes sense and works in it's own confines. The film must make sense, and just because it's horror doesn't mean it can ignore basic storytelling principles.
2. CHARACTERS: Introduce us to the people, get to known them, FORCE the audience to like them and understand them, to empathise and relate to them. When shit goes down, it's more scary if we care about what happens to them.
3. LESS IS MORE: Not showing the evil is oh so much better. Remember, the imagination of the audience is infinitely more effective than whatever CGI or make up designs you can come up with. An apocalyptic log entry is creepier than a special effect zombie, and goes much further in terms of tension. The aftermath is scarier than spoonfeeding.
4. PURPOSE: No matter how messed up the film, it must have purpose, and follow its own strand of logic. If a nympho vampire wolf hybrid jumps out of a cupboard, there has to be a reason. Why was he in the cupboard? Why is he attacking? How did he become this way?
5. STORY!!!: I can't stress this enough. You must have the outline, the blueprint first, not the scares. Act One, Act Two, Act Three, Act Four, Act Five. They must ALL be there, corresponding perfectly.

A great example of the significance of these cornerstones is, how such a horror film ends. Again going back to a Mr Moneybags scenario, more recent fare are more interested in a twist ending, or a Hollywood killer shot. This is when the final image is supposed to be a shocker, something which sends you out on a freaky, terrifying note. Basically a scary equivalent of a cumshot.

But these usually fail because they ignore everything that came before (no pun intended). So, in Paranormal Activity, the girl lunges at the stationary unmanned camera with her bloodied teeth. Why? Why does she do that? Does she intend to eat it? Somehow I doubt a demon possessing a young woman would have the foresight to leave a 'fuck you' for whoever had to watch the footage back to find out what the hell happened. On a different note, [REC] ceases the main character being dragged into the darkness, out of sight. Why? Um...because it's...chilling? Not really, it's no worse than anything we've already seen. It doesn't add to what we've found out.

And before the 'final shot', both films pile on half arsed exposition in an attempt to provide an explanation. In Paranormal Activity, the guy (annoying, inappropriate cameraman) randomly finds information on an identical demonic haunting which ended up killing some woman. How is this useful? It doesn't provide any explanation as to why this is happening, why it is happening to them, or what the source of this demon thing is.

In [REC], it's the revelation that the uninhabited penthouse is actually some crazy shit lab for finding a cure for a supposedly possessed girl, that went awry. But there isn't enough facts to suggest how the chain of events came about. So the infection started with the girl? How did she give it to the dog?

The door was locked shut, nobody else has been in the apartment for ages. How did the dog come into contact with the possessed girl?

Because....Just Because

Answer: No answer.

Alternate Answer: Laziness (see right).

Simple. Why bother going to all that effort to make sure it makes sense? Because, who cares after all? The people that line up to shit their pants "aren't there to think about it, they want to be scared". But what if it's not scary? "Well, the box office says it is..."

Hence the problem, and once again we're back on to the subject of human stupidity, of general ignorance and borderline attention-defecit disorder. It's so easy to be provided these days, because of the internet and because of technology. Everything's so simple and easy, and people don't care about going the whole haul. Why spend two hours getting ingrossed in an evil story when you can just have fright and fright for an hour and a half? Building up a strong plot and good character development, working up tension and atmosphere, is boring.

Compare the original 1963 The Haunting, with Claire Bloom, to the 1999 remake. The first is subtle and tense, unebearably taut, and underplayed to the max. We barely see a thing, and get wrapped in the dread and the atmosphere, to the point a vase being knocked over is the most terrifying thing that could possibly happen.

The second is worse than runny dog shit, an utter disservice to the classic original and a disgrace it of itself. It can best be summed up with one sentence: "Owen Wilson gets his head bitten off by a fireplace".

So what does this mean? Has there just been a massive slide in quality over the course of the years since Robert Wise's master class? Well, CGI got better, which hurts the genre since it's inability to show convincing visuals forced it to be subversive for so long. They couldn't show a convincing ghost before, and now they can. Imagine how much Jaws would lose if we saw the shark more often.

But the cause is ultimately the masses, and everything feeds from that. It's much easier to make a rollercoaster ride movie than a film, and more profitable to be stupid and predictable than original and thoughtful. Overkill and gorn (gore porn) is easier to sell than tension, violence is more popular when it loses its impact and is just thrown into the mix for the sake of making an adolscent scream. Time would be wasted writing a good story, because these people don't care about the story. They care about somebody jumping out from behind a door, or something throwing itself at an underwritten character.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the why. For worse or for worse, the horror genre is going down the shitter faster than my latest Chicken Korma. And that makes me sad.

And mad, and angry, and furious, and murderous...

RANT OVER