Halloween the movie would never work today, because the screaming babysitter could just call 911 from her cell phone while barricaded in the closet. Any movie involving nubile teens camping in the woods as a serial psychotic murderer stalks them now needs to deal with the fact that said teens today would be Tweeting the entire experience, or at least texting friends to come help them. Nobody is alone anymore. The cell-phone-problem (as it were) MUST be handled by horror and suspense films now, it can’t be ignored – otherwise current-day audiences just won’t believe that these people are 1. stranded 2. there’s no way out 3. there is no one who can save them.
Check out this very funny and pointed compilation of scenes below – of various people trying to find signals, unable to find signals, commenting on their cell phone coverage in the middle of a horror film, lamenting that there are “no bars”, or – even more desperately – dropping their cell phones in puddles, or of scaffolding … ANYTHING to make sure that these people do not have cell phones.
Funny stuff. Kudos to Rich Juzwiak who put this together – it’s quite impressive. (Thanks to Edmund, for the clip).
However, today Halloween might work better because we have special effects.
And I say that as someone who watches that movie on Halloween at least most years. But I watch it for its unintentional humor. I’m tempted to watch the Rob Zombie version to see what it’s like if it’s actually scary (I’ve finally decided after Saw that the torture porn stuff like House of 10000 Corpses is too rich for my blood, so haven’t seen his other movies).
To the point of the post and the video: my mother and I were just having a conversation about the cell-phone-in-horror-movies thing, so I was very pleased to see that someone had taken the time to put together so many examples of it. I love the one guy saying, “97% coverage nationwide and we happen to be in the 3%.” You can just feel the writer turning him/herself inside out to mae lack-of-cell-phone a plausible scenario.
I’ve heard really good things about Rob Zombie’s Halloween – I would like to see it. I can’t do torture porn. There are triggers there for me, or something. It’s extremely upsetting. I suppose that’s the point, but I just can’t do it.
I do love the original Halloween but the whole damn thing wouldn’t have happened if chick had a cell phone!!
Sorry to hijack.
Hijack to your heart’s content. Maybe I’m insane but I still find the first Halloween almost unbearably scary. It’s so imitated now that it’s hard to even perceive it at times – ooh the handheld in the bushes … but I still find it terrifying.
Dial 911, girl!
Oh, that’s right. It’s the 70s. You have no cell phone. And if you DID, what do you want to bet there wouldn’t be a signal??
The original Halloween is just hilarious. I can’t even take it seriously. The part where he stabbed the guy we called “30 second Bob” and hung him up on the doorknob with the knife? It’s like a FREAKING STEAK KNIFE. You can’t hang up like a 160 lb. guy up by a FREAKING STEAK KNIFE.
Torture porn, though…I’ve never been able to deal with torture, something where suffering is the point and there’s another person or entity enjoying or orchestrating it in some way. Can’t deal. I can watch all the Saving Private Ryan you want, and I admit Saw was a good movie, but that’s about as far as I go.
hahahahaha Steak Knife Implausibility!! hysterical!
Yes, there’s something about the torture that has to be presented in a way where I don’t feel the FILMMAKER is getting off on it too. I do think it’s interesting – the power dynamic – and what some people are capable of when they realize they have power over another human being (this is the focus of that Stanford Prison Experiment book I mentioned on Facebook) – the psychology of it fascinates me, so I don’t mind it as a topic in and of itself – but it’s the PORN aspect of the recent genre that I can’t deal with, and find myself almost having post-traumatic stress reactions to it. I have no distance.
Why did I say doorknob? LOL. Door. Hung him up on the door.
That’s a damn high doorknob.
hahahaha
This post came from…
INSIDE THE HOUSE!!!
LMAO re steak knife implausibility and doorknobs. There’s another scene in Halloween 2 where he also picks up a nurse by a knife he’s stabbed into her back WHICH IS LIKE AN EXACTO KNIFE. Again with the knife implausibility! Then, there’s a shot where her shoes just go plop…plop. I’m like, how are we NOT supposed to find that funny?
Or like the horrible jump cut when he puts the guy in the jacuzzi-type thing, which is supposed to like boil his head or something…wtf is THAT all about?
I’ll give you that there are some scary moments. The glassy-eyed ‘young’ Michael Myers after the scene with the older sister at the beginning of the first one, for example…
As for not having distance, I think it’s called ‘having empathy’. :) Torture porn is torture for torture’s sake. No artistic value–just voyeurism. That’s what I think movies like Hostel are like. Zombie’s other movies might have some form of artistic merit, but I’ve only seen clips of one of them that have made me sick to my stomach. It’s the psychological more than the physical suffering that gets me…that’s why Saw was right on the edge of what I could handle and why I was scared to DEATH by the Blair Witch Project but enjoyed it. I guess I just finally met my match with the torture porn stuff, horror-movie-subgenre-wise. And I include the later Saw movies in that, of which I was unfortunate (or stupid) enough to see two.
Beth – there’s a film blogger I love called “Arbogast” (he’s on my blogroll) and he started an absolutely fantastic series – kind of inadvertently – called “The One You Would Save”. He loves horror films – and he wrote a post about one victim in a horror film that, out of nowhere, really got to him. He wished he could save her. Her in particular. There was something human and almost totally UNFAIR about her grisly death that got under his skin – his post started a huge blog-swarm with other people writing posts about “the ones they would save” – it’s fantastic reading. Let me see if I can dig it up. If you watch a lot of scary films, you get used to all the death – but these ones, with their really subtle observations about why this particular death really hit them hard – is great stuff.
Google rules. Here it is:
The One You Might Have Saved”.
Follow the links in the comments if it interests you.
I thought Saw was a good movie, although I shivered from PTSD after seeing it.
It’s interesting, what matters to me isn’t even necessarily how I feel about the character or story; it’s more about the amount of (obviously, realistic) desperation / suffering on the part of the victim in a momentary situation. Like I love the movie The Crow but always fast forward through the scene where Mr. Gideon gets killed. I wouldn’t save Mr. Gideon, though. I just don’t want to see him die a protracted, completely aware, painful death.
Saw, OMG. How long have you got? I could FEEL psychological damage being done to me as that movie went on. And I saw it on a small screen in a friend’s apartment, not on the big screen which can sometimes make me lose my bearings more (this is what happened with Blair Witch — I think it was the conditions under which I saw it that made it really able to get to me, late at night in an empty theater b/c it was a tech screening). But there were parts of Saw where I thought seriously about asking my friend to turn off the movie. Only the fact that he’d told me the ending was on a par with Seven’s twist (which I think I remember you saying you didn’t like…) kept me going.
Another movie I can’t deal with though it’s not terribly gory — A Clockwork Orange. I can’t take the rape scenes. Just see no reason to watch that. And they make me not care what the hell kind of philosophical point the movie is trying to make.
There’s an absolutely terrible scene in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – where he and his goonish friends torture a couple of people while video taping it. we see the video tape – and it’s filmed in such a raw documentary like way, and the horror and desperation of this couple is so real that I have never forgotten it. I couldn’t help but imagine what that would be like. Henry’s sidekick likes to snap people’s necks – he thinks it’s funny how people immeidately die when you do that – so he does it to one of the guys – and it’s just so fucking brutal, so REAL – like people on this planet have actually died in this manner, for no fucking reason, just because a couple of retards broke into their house …
I will never ever see that movie again – but damn, I will never forget that scene. It haunts me.
Not that I don’t think such things should be shown in film – it makes total sense in that movie, in the context of those characters – but I just couldn’t take it, and I seriously get FLASHBACKS about that scene. it was that awful.
Man’s inhumanity to man.
Or not just their inhumanity – but their GLEE in their own inhumanity. It was the glee that pushed me over the edge.
Blair Witch scared me the first time I saw it – and then it didn’t hold up for me in subsequent viewings.
Saw, yes. A damaging movie. I felt the same way. Well done, but again: I have no distance with this kind of material. Have a hard time with it.
Yes. You’re right about the glee. That is also a word I have thought about before in this context.
There was a scene in Sin City, though, where there was no glee, but a kind of indifference even on the part of the victim that I found nearly unbearable — I had nightmares that had me waking up crying about that movie for a week. I lost sleep over it.
Which scene?? I loved that movie – there were some pretty awful things in it.
My friend Greg writes a brilliant analysis of the scene I mentioned in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – which really nails the awfulness of that scene, and why it is unforgettable – and yet also pulls you (me, anyway) totally OUT of the movie. As self-protection.
Here’s his post.
The scene where Elijah Wood’s character dies. And it’s not even like I sympathize with his character.
I am following these links you’re posting, btw, liking them.
Yes, a terrible scene. Many of those characters remain in my mind – but his is definitely one of the most haunting.
(I’m referring to Elijah Wood’s character). He’s so feral, so ultimately damaged on a cellular level. Grotesque.
Speaking of Saving Private Ryan (a movie I did not like at all) – the only scene that really GOT to me (well, that’s not true – the opening sequence of storming the beach was amazing, visceral – I felt like I was there) – but other than that, the only scene where I really felt the horror of war was not in the battle scenes, but the scene where Adam Goldberg’s character is killed by the Nazi – in a slow eye-to-eye way – shoving the knife into him – it was brutal and also so INTIMATE. Face to face, lying on top of each other – and you think, strangely, that maybe it WON’T happen. that maybe these two men can step outside of the theatre of war for a second and show some mercy. To me, that moment was one of those wrenching moments of loss that I rarely feel in the movies, which so often are so predictable. I truly felt sad that it had just happened. Not because I loved Goldberg, or felt connected to him – it had nothing to do with him – it was just the MANNER of the death, and the really personal nature of it, almost like they were making love. It was terrible to see, and it’s really the only scene in that movie that I remember.
Yeah…read the blog post about Henry. Hadn’t remembered that scene before for some reason though I did see that movie. I may have just blocked it out, or I may have been over-prepared for that movie before I saw it…
I had forgotten that the son comes home until I just re-read that piece. I think I just keep trying to forget that scene, but I just can’t. Yuk.
I know that scene. I remember it because of the very real rage I felt at Upham in that moment, sitting there frozen on his cowardly ass with the ammunition that could save Goldberg. I hate Upham in that movie. He’s supposed to have this redemption at the end when he FINALLY gets around to freaking shooting the guy already, and I was like whatever, f him.
hahahaha YES. Totally. Jesus dude, get it together.
What about the horrible torture scenes in Sound of Music? Where the nun(how wicked it that?)tortures those poor children–making them wear clothing made from ugly drapes, the forced puppetry, hollow folk songs, and the palpable glee that the nun takes in her acts. What always gets me is where, as is all to often in sadism and torture, the children, in spite of themselves, start to experience their own perverse Joy Displays-smiling, singing, frolicking…Oh, I can’t go on. And the awful, awful irony of this happening within the background of Nazi oppression. The viewer is bombarded with difficult choices; who is the most evil–the deviant nun, or the SS?? Truly one of my most harrowing movie experiences.
OK–I’ll go away now.