Tag Archives: horror

Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 11: Homage and hybridity

Our last week brings everything we’ve learned in this semester so far into focus, stepping outside the characteristics of a single genre and instead looking at films that play with genre itself.

This is a nice full-circle connection to my first post for Exploding Genre, in which I analysed A Mighty Wind (2003) as an example of a metatextual film. Such films simultaneously adhere to and deconstruct genre tropes and conventions, laying bare the underlying structure of a genre while also acting as a successful expression of it. It’s remarkable when it’s done well, such as in A Mighty Wind, the television show Community, or this week’s screening, The Cabin in the Woods (2012). That film was a revelation to me when I first saw it, so sophisticated in playing with the inherent absurdity of so many horror conventions but still reverent of those conventions. And actually scary! Even the cheap jump scares that are present in The Cabin in the Woods are handled in such a way that even though you expect them to come, and you know exactly what the filmmakers are trying to do, they’re still scary.

Jackson (2013)1 contends that audiences of such metanarratives sit in an “in-between space” that lies between the reality of the film and reality reality, which adds a completely new layer of experience to the film. The five main characters in The Cabin in the Woods are manipulated by technicians aware of horror cliches, and those cliches are made “real” in the story world, but it falls upon the audience to try to figure out what’s just “real” and what’s actually real. So the act of watching the film really hits audiences on three levels: the basic narrative and its fictional/visceral/corporeal response, the meta acknowledgement and manipulation of horror tropes, and then the “in-between space” that blurs both of the above into a third level of reality. It’s all quite sophisticated and I’ve developed an even deeper respect for Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon (and Edgar Wright, whose films operate in much the same way).

It’s a shame I didn’t get to experiment with intertextuality in my own work this semester, but I feel that homage and hybridity is advanced level filmmaking and I’m not quite at the stage where I would be able to pull it off successfully. Maybe next year.

  1. Jackson, K. (2013), “Metahorror and simulation in the Scream series and The Cabin in the Woods” in Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror, pp. 11-30. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 7: Genre trajectory

This week we presented our Genre Trajectories to the class and a small group of leaders from other studios. Here’s mine:

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  • In my first sketch I was mostly interested in the functional aspects of genre — specifically, I looked into how a particular technique (in this case, silence) is used to achieve a particular effect (in this case, tension)
  • The result was OK, but not particularly successful — you all heard it in class, it was a pretty perfunctory interaction with genre and tension was marginal at best.
  • In terms of execution, I was happy with some things, but ultimately it was just too simple and surface-level. But I have learned a lot about sound design from it that I will be able to put into practice in future projects.

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  • Moving on from here I’m hoping to start looking deeper. I am now interested in figuring out the meaning signified by genre elements, and whether the meaning can be kept in tact when modifying those elements, or whether it’s possible to keep the elements the same but change the meaning.
  • For example, what makes a film noir a film noir, specifically? Can you transport those elements and the iconography of the film noir into other situations and have the film still be recognisable as a film noir?
  • As a result of this, I’ve started reading into syntactic and semantic inscriptions of genre, which distinguishes between the actual style or narrative elements that are the building blocks of a genre (semantic), versus the larger concepts around how those elements are arranged to create meaning (syntactic).

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  • For my next sketch I’ll be investigating the Spaghetti Western, and I’ll be modifying it in two ways — to essentially see if I can keep the essence of a Western film even through basically all of the hallmarks of the Western will be changed to something new in my film
  • The first thing I’ll be doing is gender flipping it, which has been happening lately with films like Ghostbusters and the upcoming remakes of Splash and Ocean’s Eleven. I’m very interested in readings of Western films as artefacts of the male gaze, and reflective of problematic ideas of the place of women in society that would never be acceptable in modern films
  • The second thing I’ll be doing is transporting the action of my Western to modern-day urban Melbourne. This is for practical reasons — I don’t have access to any horses — but also helps me investigate whether the iconography of the Western stands up to being changed so radically.
  • Sukiyaki Western Django is a good example of a film that in some instances uses the tropes of the Western without modification, and in other instances uses an equivalent trope from Japanese cinema, and sometimes it uses something completely new — but in each instance the element successfully contributes to the genre tapestry of the film.
  • So that’s what my next genre sketch will explore, and from there I’m hoping to explore either the bottle drama or the romantic comedy from a similar semantic or syntactic perspective. Across my first two sketches I still haven’t written a word of dialogue, so I’m really looking forward to writing a script, and I now know that I’m not a great director, but I think writing lies closer to my strengths.

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  • My goal for the final sketch is to find a way to write either a romantic comedy or bottle drama that doesn’t adhere to any of the specific cliches of those genres, but is still recognisably a romantic comedy or bottle drama. If I can achieve that, I think it’ll be a great way to deeply explore genre without confining myself to just replicating tropes.
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 5: Horror

This week we moved on to discussing a genre I consider one of my least favourite: horror. There are a small number of truly exceptional examples throughout film history, and some of my favourite films are horrors, but the general strike rate of the genre is incredibly poor. For every good horror film there seems to be ten bad ones.

Berberian Sound Studio, this week’s screening, is one of the good ones. I wish I had watched it ahead of time and didn’t wait to see it in class — it’s essentially one long exploration of the visceral effect of sound design and construction in the horror film, which is what I based my Project Brief 2 sketch on. I wanted to reckon with the function and effect of silence in horror, and at first I tried experimenting with literal silence, but quickly learned that that is actually just confusing and would cause an audience to wonder if my piece had finished early. So I kept building it up more and more with sound effects — atmospheric noise, crickets, twigs, a low hum — and, surprisingly, even though I kept adding more sound to the mix it still felt like “silence” in the context of the sketch.

Berberian Sound Studio does the same thing (but, obviously, on a much more sophisticated level) by showing Gilderoy (Toby Jones) at work as a sound mixer in a giallo horror studio. He laboriously and intricately layers a cacophony of seemingly unrelated sounds — knives going into cabbages, lightbulbs rubbing against metal springs, water frying in a pan — to construct a final product that an audience would accept as a suite of genuine live sound effects without batting an eyelid.

I’ve often thought about the effect sound has on horror, and suspected that sound is the element through which mainstream modern horror films most often cause fear and surprise in their audience. Jump scares, which reached the zenith/nadir of their use in the 2000s, are rendered almost completely ineffectual with the sound turned down. I first noticed this when watching the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at home late at night. I had seen the film at the cinema earlier, and experienced a high number of significant scares, but at home with the sound turned down relatively low the effect had been completely lost. Play a really loud, really abrupt sound and people will jump.

This is a subject discussed in this week’s reading1, in which film scholar Rick Altman is quoted as saying “the construction of a uniform-level soundtrack, eschewing any attempt at matching sound scale to image scale, thus takes its place alongside the thirties’ numerous invisible image editing devices within the overall strategy of hiding the apparatus itself”. This suggests that, traditionally, sound was supposed to be invisible, just accepted by the audience as an inherent accompaniment to whatever is being presented visually. Clearly this is no longer the case, and dramatic changes in the characteristics of sound (loudness, timbre, perspective, etc.) are often exploited to achieve a particular effect — and this is especially true in horror.

  1. Sarkhar, B. (1997). Sound bites: Fragments on cinema, sound, and subjectivity. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, 17(2). ↩
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