Month: October 2016

Meta Horror and Hybrids

What an interesting mixture of genre are films like the Scream series and The Cabin in the Woods? Horror hybrids and metahorror may have inspired me for my final project brief of sketches. As Jackson (2013) suggested, these films are self-reflexive and knows that it is constructed horror. Watching Cabin in the Woods did scare me with its intense soundtrack use, visual gore and “the villains” as well as its nerve-wrecking silences. The part where it is revealed that the characters are put in a place as science subjects controlled by puppeteers explodes audience readings of the definition of horror as genre. It also debatable whether or horror is without say usual weapons utilised in slasher films.

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

Action in Ronin

Purse (2011) signified that the action sequence is the dominance of action films and what basically defines the genre as it “displays dramatic physical action with dynamism and intensity that marks itself out from other sequences”. Action as genre gives the hype or the thrill feeling like riding a roller coaster as cars are about to crash into something with extreme speed. Therefore it needs the thrill and the speed. As Ronin had portrayed, action sequences include the cars speeding up and bashing towards each other while people are running at every directions. Though what if an action film, with the thrill suspense and even car-related, does not incorporate speed? For instance, Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Drive (2011) can still be considered an action film due to its tropes that includes guns, cars and physical violence whether or not captured in speed or slow-motion. Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012) does not only employ the tropes of action films, it does not really dominate itself with action sequences. Like Drive, Looper had also used art house aesthetics of action sequence that is captured with slow-motion instead of the “need for speed”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UagyHnJAYTM

Purse, L 2011, Contemporary action cinema, “Chapter 3: The action sequence“, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 56-75.

Drama in a bottle

As we’ve watched bottle drama episodes this week, it really blew my mind how creative these construction of space is. There are just lots of ways to get around a little of cash left when crating a TV show, like the Community bottle episode where it took place only within one single location and focusing on dialogue and performances. Similarly, Coherence uses minimal cast in a small space within a house though successfully convey dark tense elements through it’s cinematography and editing. These bottle dramas may be constructed out of limited budget but became innovative in its own way. Belton (1988) explains that the space in Rear Window is “quasi-theatrical in its pro-filmic unity and three-dimensionality and yet also cinematic in the flat, multi-windowned design of the apartment…”. This signifies that bottle episodes resembles a series of clips of movie screens but with an importance to the performance yet also the overall aesthetics and compositions.

Belton, J 1988, MLN Comparative Literature, “The Space of Rear Window”, publish The Johns Hopkins University Press, vol. 103, no. 5, pp. 1121-1138, <http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/stable/2905203>.