First Synthetic Life? →

People are awesome: Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2011 →

What Makes a Horror Film Scary or Not

I’m all about the big scares, probably just as much as the next person.  They’re fun and exhilarating, but I also think they are so few and far between.  I have almost altogether avoided seeing any horror films in recent years.  A large part of me doesn’t feel like putting in the effort or the time to invest in these movies, mainly because I feel they are poorly made.

But without getting into an argument about the movie industry as a whole and how many of the movies coming are out are uninspired and designed to be cash cows, let’s get into how many horror movies are today, in my opinion, failing.

TONE and MOOD
Thank God they nail this almost every time.  We can’t have a horror movie being colorful and bright, but sometimes a dark story isn’t integral for a good scare.  Tone is often confused with mood, which is how a movie looks and feels.  The sort of atmosphere it gives off.  Tone is a little more essential, and it ties in with the setting.  It sort of contains the logos/pathos/ethos, giving off a stance on certain issues or subjects relevant to the story.

Example: The movie “Hostel” is about several victims of an underground international business where people pay to torture, mutilate, and kill victims.  The tone is that this is extremely wrong and it needs to be stopped.  Contrast that with the first “Saw” movie which is about a guy who hurts people and threatens them with death, giving them only one, extreme way out alive.  The tone is a little more ambiguous, bringing into question if it’s ethically wrong to do these things to people when they are horrible people to start with and wind up changing others’ lives.

Having the right tone for a movie is important, and when I’ve seen it fail, it’s a train wreck.  I only need to look so far as “Drag Me To Hell,” a movie only a couple years old.  It’s about a woman cursed by an old witch and the worst of events are inflicted upon her, leading to her ultimate demise.  Sounds like a sad and grim tale, but I wound up laughing through a great deal of it.  Between the projectile blood and the talking goat…yes.  A talking goat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7DEVZfvBE4

The movie lost any shreds of credibility after that for me.  The problem is that memorable scenes like that from a movie need to make sense, and they need to be executed well.  That scene was supposed to be the event where the woman was cured from the curse.  But it ends up going horribly wrong.  Any sort of investment you have with the characters is destroyed by this awkward scene.  Yes, the presence of the goat makes sense symbolically, but even that feels forced.  It’s so in-your-face and obvious.

IS IT SMART OR PREDICTABLE?

Which brings me to my next point.  I understand that if there’s one truth in the media world it’s that you always sell to the lowest common denominator.  If it’ll sell to an idiot, it’ll sell to everyone else.  It sounds good in theory, but at least in movies it’s not always true.  People can tell when they’re being spoon-fed a movie.  They may not be aware of it, but they can anticipate it.  That’s why most horrors don’t work for me, I call the scares a minute away.

The build of music droning in the background, the carefully placed camera angle, the flickering lights, the bump in the night.  They’re tried and true methods of ramping up a frightening moment, but for me it’s hard to be taken by surprise when you have these elements waving in your face.  The very nature of it’s predictability through presentation of signs removes any chance of fright.  The best scare I’ve ever had was surprisingly not in a horror movie but in “Signs”.  Yeeeah remember when Shamamylamylan’s movies were good?

There’s a scene where Mel Gibson’s character wakes up in the night to his daughter saying “there’s a monster outside my room, can I have a glass of water?”  It’s a scene so innocent, you think she just had a bad dream.  The next scene is a fantastic character building scene between father and daughter which is abruptly ended when Gibson’s character looks up and sees someone on his roof.  It’s so unexpected and there’s no warning of it at all except for a meandering gaze upward.

There’s no signs of it coming (hehe) and we feel the shock that the character does.  That’s what it’s all about, feeling for the character.  Most horror movies have this in-balance of character suspense and viewer suspense.  It works for some, but for the most part it’s just broadcasting to me.

CHARACTERS

This is the most integral part of what I think makes a horror movie scary or not.  Characters are the keepers of a story, without them what is there to tell?  The depth that we connect with them and the way that we do greatly affects how we feel about a movie.  In fact in almost every case a movie is marketed to its consumers based on how people will connect with the characters.  You wouldn’t advertise the Hangover 2 on Nickelodeon or the Christian channel.  That’s because the movie is about guys in their young twenties having so much fun one night they can’t remember anything.  It’s about bro-ing out and getting wasted.  Naturally, the people interested in that will be men and women with similar interests and/or lifestyles of one of the characters.

I find it difficult to be scared in a horror movie because I have almost no connection with the characters, or no avenue to invest in them.  Why did Signs scare so good?  That wasn’t the goal.  It was about a family suffering from the loss of a parent and strengthening their love for each other by facing their demons and growing closer to one another.  You feel for every character at some level.  For Gibson’s character it’s about getting over his deceased wife.  For his brother Merrill it’s about learning to shoot for his dream of being a baseball player.  For the son, Morgan it’s battling asthma and his resentment for his father.  The way they mix with each other causes the viewer to want them to succeed because they have a clear understanding of a goal they want to achieve and are trying to do it.

Signs and good horror movies choose their scares and find ways to make them manifest in terrifying ways.  When a movie like Drag Me To Hell tries to sell horror it fails.  Most bad horror movies don’t leave room for character development or have characters that are hard to relate to.  A bank consultant getting cursed because she did her job?  How am I supposed to feel for that character?  I can’t even remember if she had a boyfriend or husband.  It just doesn’t work.

I’m not saying that a horror movie has to be about me in order for it to be good, it just has to do things well.  Not throw everything in your face and give you an ambiguous character to fit yourself into.  For some it works, and maybe it’s because I over-analyze the movies that it’s just a dud for me.  Who’s to tell.

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(Source: teeniebel)

TheLoveEbullient: “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.... →

theloveebullient:

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important…

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Hmm…

It’s sort of a beautiful thing isn’t it?

We cannot even begin to fathom the smallness of our stature in the big picture of the universe.  We are but a fleck of space dust in the vast oceans of the continuum, hurling through the darkness of space at hundreds of thousands of miles per second, a speed at which the eye could not catch but what appears to be nothing more than a lackadaisical journey happening silently and humbly in the background every second without a single notice.

From our first of days we’re taught that humans are important, and our history, regardless of what religious beliefs, paints a beautiful picture about an epic struggle for survival.  But really we are but a germ on a piece of glass.  Completely unnoticed and insignificant.  What is so terrible about that though?  To say that amongst such an active and violent universe we came and survive is astonishing.  One universe where stars explode, galaxies swallow each other up, and space debris destroys planets in the blink of an eye.

We, came from all this.  As does so many other forms of life, out there somewhere.  It’s like amongst all this we were meant to exist.  That is of course no more than a human-centric claim dipped in feelings of higher purpose for our species.  What’s it all mean, this living business?  Religion tries to answer such things so poetically to stop people from asking, but what’s it really all about?  What is anything about?  When you step back and really think about how absolutely vast and irrefutably turbulent the universe is, you really start to wonder.  You can’t imagine how one rock spinning around a ball of gas crafted something so precious and fragile as something like us.

Life.  It is everything the universe is not.  We’re fragile, low in numbers, vulnerable.  We somehow exist in a mass of chaos and force to which we are completely subject.  It seems almost ironic.  But we live in a universe of opposites.  Opposition is everywhere.  It’s in the forces that repel and attract galaxies from others, it’s in the erruptions of energy within every star, it’s in the minds of every person you ever stood against.  No matter what scale it is, the same thing occurs.  Repition, common attributes.  Things that just shouldn’t make sense, things that seem so chaotic, are still governed by the things that we already understand so well.  And that’s the amazing thing about it, isn’t it.  A fractal universe.  You try and see deeper and it’s just more of the same.  Atoms…small particles floating around a core nucleus.  Humans existing, groups of people gravitating around cities, in clusters.  Planets, rotating around a center star.  Clusters of systems rotating around a massive black hole to make a galaxy.  Clusters of galaxies grouping together in the darkness of space.  It’s this constant comminality that makes everything we don’t understand about the universe so riveting.

So what does all of this amount to?  In a universe so subtly guided by rules and laws, there must be a rational answer to what it’s all for.  Life is a force so maleable, but so potent and so unique.  It has the ablity to take the universe and turn it into itself.  Think about it, a force of this universe that can change matter into itself.  You see it happen all your life.  You eat food and you grow tall.  You work hard and you become stronger.  What else in this universe can do that?  What force becomes stronger under stress?  This is what is so astonishing about life.  It has the ability to control the universe through permeation.  Consume enough of it and you can understand it.  Become it.  Perhaps the answer to life is to make the most of it, to use that phrase liberally.

Our most subtle of instincts is to reproduce.  The idea of such a thing is infinity beautiful.  Two living things come together and create something from…well seemingly nothing.  This obviously isn’t true, it’s nothing but a magic trick, but it has effectively taken the universe into itself and created more of itself.  Maybe our goal is to become the universe, to take it and turn ourselves into it.  From the stars wence we came, to them we shall return.  We came from the stars, and maybe someday we will become them.  Someday, the very forces that created will be the ones we become.  We will live amongst the stars.  It’s sort of a beautiful thing isn’t it? 

What is a museum?

    With the question proposed “what is a museum,” I find the answer to be a complex one.  From the outset a museum could simply be called a building which contains various works of art or artifacts of past cultures from all over the world.  While this may be true, it doesn’t quite define all that a museum is.
    A more accurate one may be that a museum is a container for which fingerprints of people, time periods, and cultures are placed for others in the present to fathom and appreciate.  These fingerprints are things considered “works of art” for the history they contain, the emotions the evoke, or the ideas they stir for the viewer.
    Without getting into detail on who decides whether something is a work of art, it is relevant to discuss what one is in order to gain a better understanding of what a museum is.  If one analyzes what is often defined as a work of art, there are many qualities that change.  The sort of things one would see in a museum can be a mummy from Ancient Egypt or a boot painted in gold on a pedestal, created as recently as a last year.  The subject or the time period does not matter, but there is one thing both of them have in common; that is empirical beauty.  It is the beauty and value of an object when its original design reasoning, philosophy, and/or purpose have been lost.  For example, there are many artifacts from older cultures that people consider beautiful and works of art, when they are referring to pottery, utensils, and other similar objects that were once no more than practical items.  This is also seen frequently in “modern art,” which is often a misnomer for the appropriate term “ready-made art.”  People take objects crafted for other purposes and manipulate them in such a way to make art.  What happens here is that an object is being removed from its original contextual use and is presented in a different light.  By doing so, it removes an automatic association a viewer would assign to it, and the object is instead analyzed for its form, or empirical beauty.
    This is only further perpetuated with museums.  When works of art are put into a museum, they are immediately taken out of their original context.  This does not apply to art designed to be displayed in a museum—as some modern art is—however the nature of the art is typically so abstract that original context for a work of art does not weigh in heavily on the matter.  Speaking more to more traditional pieces (paintings, sculpture, drawings) the original context is lost.  Any Ancient Greek statue in a museum has lost its original context, lost the place it was meant to be seen.  So what happens is that instead of considering the statue’s placement in relation to an old temple, who it honored, how the sunlight would touch it in a Greco sunrise, it is analyzed for its beauty.
    Some argue that doing this to art ruins it, that it destroys the way works of art are meant to be displayed.  In some ways this argument is valid, as some things out of their environment lose a part of their beauty.  But this is often done for the sake of preservation, to allow these fingerprints of people alive.  A museum may remove things from their original context, but in doing so it allows art to be appreciated for what it is, and to be seen for its empirical value.  Even if some of its contextual beauty is lost, it will at least be around for centuries to come, for many more to appreciate.

The Word of Notch: I hate "free to play". →

notch:

Ok, that headline it a bit overly inflammatory. While I am sceptical of the free to play trend, what I hate is the wording “free to play”.

The reason some people are moving to this area is that free to play showed up in the “social gaming” segment (facebook) and made a few people (zynga) very…

The Fuss Over Facebook

This is something I wanted to do a couple weeks ago when it happened, but there was recently a change in the Facebook layout…again.  It’s been happening for years every several months.  And when it does there isn’t an applaud of appreciation but an uproar of protest. 

But why is it this way?  Why do people get pissed when the team behind this social network add things like video chat, or IM chat, or improve the layout of Facebook?  I know there’s the old bromide, “people don’t like change,” and it works here in some ways, but the level of complaint is ridiculous.  It isn’t just some people worrying about the change, it’s pretty much everyone I know posting complaints in their statuses.  The only exception is one or two individuals that have grown beyond complaint, and instead tell everyone to shut up about the new layout.

That’s sort of where I stand in this.  I too, don’t like the new layouts that come every so often, but I understand that they’re necessary.  There’s again another bromide that I hear often when these things happen, where people say “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”  I would agree that if Facebook was a monopoly, if it had no competition, that the constant change in layout would be a superfluous effort.  But they have forces like Myspace and Google+ to contend with.  They are constantly looking for ways to trump the power that is Facebook, and I’d say they’re doing a pretty good job.

So as annoying as it is to be momentarily lost when a new layout pops up on your browser window, think about how annoying it would be if Facebook lost the foot-race and you had to move to another social network because all your friends were leaving Facebook.