|
CelticPredator posted:Gonna be straight with you. Halloween isn’t my favorite carpenter and myers is my least favorite slasher and I didn’t really like him much until 2018 It's all good. I hate to drop such a long-rear end explain-y post on the thread that probably reads more rambling and aggressive than I mean it to, it's just in my experience questioning fundamental fan interpretations can make some people defensive on reflex, so I tend to try to cover my bases early on before potentially getting into increasingly specific and pedantic argument rabbit holes, lol.
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2024 03:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 11:52 |
|
|
Dawgstar posted:It's probably worth noting that Carpenter himself regrets the 'slashers prey on the promiscuous' thing that spun out of Halloween because in his view Michael did it because that's when people are most vulnerable, not because he was punishing them or something. After watching a few behind the scenes documentaries, I find myself wondering if Moustapha Akkad also had regrets over this. The first movie he produced without Carpenter's involvement, 4, has Dr. Loomis outright say in the trailer, "he's here to kill that little girl, and anybody who gets in his way!" So people in theory would know going in that Michael is not out to punish slutty babysitters. And all of the subsequent sequels that he produced also went out of their way to clearly give Michael some other motivation, even in Resurrection where Michael is presumably in his own mind "defending his home from intruders." People do get killed after having sex at various points in 4-Resurrection, but it's pretty clearly shown to be unrelated to the motive, at most it just leaves the victims vulnerable by distracting them. Moustapha was tragically killed in 2005 and the first movies with his son Malek in control of the rights were the Rob Zombie movies, where Rob reportedly got a lot more creative freedom than the people who made previous sequels. To the point where in Part 2 Malek told Rob Zombie that there were no rules, hence adult Michael actually speaking in the Director's Cut. And the Rob Zombie movies make this element even more explicit, to the point that even the murder of Judith Myers was post-coital, plus that whole thing with Michael's Mom being a stripper and him getting bullied over it as a kid. He could have gone in any direction he could think of and chose to dial this stuff up. Then for 2018 John Carpenter came back and was given a pretty strong hand in the creative process, and the one babysitter (IIRC) actually stops her makeout session with her boyfriend to investigate a noise. And Michael still kills her, about as clear a demonstration as you can get that this stuff is unrelated to his motive. So I guess various bits of circumstantial evidence point to both John Carpenter and Moustapha Akkad getting weirded out by so many people taking away from 1978 that "Michael wants to punish slutty babysitters", and taking active efforts to attempt to distance the franchise from that in later installments. ---- This is, of course tangential to the main point of this discussion, but I still stand by my original statement. A majority of the early 80s slashers may have imitated the popular perception of Halloween where the slasher is out to punish horny teenagers, but the minority that did not was still large enough that merely making clear that this was not Michael's motivation would not have been enough in and of itself for any sequels to stand out. It's pretty astonishing how quickly the new Slasher genre was overrun. My guess would be that movie studios were desperate for something to make that simultaneously had mass market appeal, was cheap to produce, and could do things that TV shows on the now-ubiquitous color TVs could not do. Halloween had a quite small budget, made a lot of money, and had content that couldn't be shown on broadcast TV (and cable TV hadn't gone mainstream yet). So they leapt at it. Kind of similar to how Hollywood decided that third time might be the charm for stereoscopic 3D circa 2010 as HDTVs were becoming cheap. But you know, I'm not a film historian so I could be totally wrong.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2024 04:41
|
|
|
I like art the clown bc his only motive is he just loves killing. It’s a fun bobby
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2024 04:44
|
|
|
INH5 posted:I find myself wondering if Moustapha Akkad also had regrets over this. Moustapha Akkad was so singularly focused on keeping the cash cow going that I sort of doubt that appeasing moral/ social critics was all that high on his priorities. Of course, not upsetting people's sensibilities can be part of a mercenary goal, too, but my impression is that Akkad's mind was almost exclusively on chasing trends. INH5 posted:The first movie he produced without Carpenter's involvement, 4, has Dr. Loomis outright say in the trailer, "he's here to kill that little girl, and anybody who gets in his way!" So people in theory would know going in that Michael is not out to punish slutty babysitters. If there was an attempt at this, then the writers went and tossed it right in the garbage disposal with that teenaged girl in the "Cops Do It By The Book" shirt whose entire personality could be charitably described as "bimbo," and who is completely unapologetic when the main "big sister" character confronts her for trying to seduce her boyfriend, and has a prompt appointment with Mr. Myers a few minutes afterward, haha! INH5 posted:It's pretty astonishing how quickly the new Slasher genre was overrun. I think a lot of horror fans are too young to really appreciate the craziness surrounding the 80s slasher film. They've heard there was controversy and that there was a boom and bust, but just hearing that doesn't quite do the whole era justice. The first spoof of slasher movies, Student Bodies, was released by Paramount in 1981. This was before even Halloween II came out. This was only a year after Airplane! was released, which means that in 1980 people were already fatigued enough that immediately after watching Airplane somebody thought, "Hey let's do this for slasher movies!" By 1983 slashers were already starting to peter out. The fourth Friday the 13th was being advertised as "The Final Chapter." Nationwide protests got Silent Night, Deadly Night pulled from theaters. Then A Nightmare on Elm Street hit it big and the slasher cycle started all over again. When the slasher-fueled horror crash of the early 90s happened, that was actually the second time the slasher movie died. It had already blown up, rode high, crashed and burned, got resuscitated, rode high again, and was dying again! INH5 posted:My guess would be that movie studios were desperate for something to make that simultaneously had mass market appeal, was cheap to produce, and could do things that TV shows on the now-ubiquitous color TVs could not do. Halloween had a quite small budget, made a lot of money, and had content that couldn't be shown on broadcast TV (and cable TV hadn't gone mainstream yet). So they leapt at it. Yep, in particular it was indie studios that truly opened the floodgates. Slasher movies were cheap, quick, did not require stars, had a simple tried-true formula to follow, were unfathomably profitable (going by budget:gross ratio, for years Halloween was the most profitable movie ever). A Nightmare on Elm Street single-handedly put New Line Studios on the map. In fact, when Paramount released the first Friday the 13th there was considerable industry contention over whether a major studio should be "above" producing an obvious slasher flick, and allegedly some studio execs were quite embarrassed by it (didn't stop them from making 7 more, though!). CelticPredator posted:I like art the clown bc his only motive is he just loves killing. It’s a fun bobby He's the main chick's dad, sorry to spoil!
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 19:03
|
|
|
Basebf555 posted:When it comes to giallo and just the overall majority of slasher movies, the villain usually explains their motivations pretty explicitly at some point during the movie. So Michael Myers does stand out in that the audience is left to interpret what his goals and motivations really were. It's probably the thing that connects Halloween so clearly to Black Christmas as two of the godfathers of the slasher but also two films there were never really duplicated. Even Jason had his mother to speak for him at first. The filmmakers of Friday the 13th were and are shameless about their intentions with the film to be a ripoff of Halloween, and there are enough parallels between them that Mrs. Voorhees could almost be said to also speak for Michael Myers by proxy (or at least, speak for contemporary audiences' interpretation of the character). Jason is a child because Michael Myers is a child during his first murder. Likewise Mrs. Voorhees, a kindly middle-aged lady, is revealed to be the killer in order to reproduce Halloween's opening twist that its killer is a child. Mrs. Voorhees explains that the young camp counselors "weren't paying any attention," to Jason, "they were making love," literalizing Halloween's reoccuring motif of babysitters looking to get it on instead of minding the children. There's subtext that Michael Myers is possessed by the spirit of Halloween; there's subtext that Mrs. Voorhees is channeling the spirit of Jason, somehow made possible by it being his birthday and/or a friday the 13th. What's interesting about Friday the 13th's over-arching theory on Halloween is that the murders are more a matter of personal betrayal than it is one of morals or principles. Jason himself died because the teens were having sex, and it's clear his spirit, or as Mrs. Voorhees imagines him at least, wants revenge. If we extrapolate that to Myers, his offense at horny negligent babysitters, then, isn't of disgust but resentment: it adds an additional subtext that these teens are youngsters who are rejecting their childhood in favor of adult pleasures, and it's his hurt over this that drives Myers.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 20:39
|
|
|
SidneyIsTheKiller posted:
We all know that. But he just loves killin.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 21:38
|
|
|
SidneyIsTheKiller posted:Moustapha Akkad was so singularly focused on keeping the cash cow going that I sort of doubt that appeasing moral/ social critics was all that high on his priorities. Of course, not upsetting people's sensibilities can be part of a mercenary goal, too, but my impression is that Akkad's mind was almost exclusively on chasing trends. Eh, he also had some pretty specific rules for depicting Michael Myers that he insisted on the people making the sequels following. There's an amusing bit from the H20 behind the scenes documentary, "Blood is Thicker Than Water" that talks about a time during a meeting where Akkad reacted quite strongly to a suggestion that Michael might pick up and presumably go on to use a gun, which led the crew to play a prank on him during filming later on. SidneyIsTheKiller posted:If there was an attempt at this, then the writers went and tossed it right in the garbage disposal with that teenaged girl in the "Cops Do It By The Book" shirt whose entire personality could be charitably described as "bimbo," and who is completely unapologetic when the main "big sister" character confronts her for trying to seduce her boyfriend, and has a prompt appointment with Mr. Myers a few minutes afterward, haha! I checked the fan-wiki and, well... quote:Once they were sure there was no one to bother them anymore, Kelly and Brady began to make out and prepare for sex, but they were interrupted by the sudden arrival of Kelly's father along with Dr. Samuel Loomis, Rachel and Jamie. They quickly put their clothes on and tried to look like nothing happened. Once Meeker walked into the house, Kelly wanted an answer to what was going on. Her father told her to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, and Kelly did as she was told. Once she learned what was going on, Meeker asked his daughter to make him some coffee. Kelly complied and was then joined by Rachel. The two girls talked and she told Rachel that she was not aware she and Brady had anything. Rachel did not believe Kelly's lies and knew that she really did not care. Kelly reasoned that Brady was not married and she had to do what was best for her. Rachel replied to that comment saying "...What you do best?". Kelly then told Rachel she should wise up to what men want or Brady would not be the last man she lost to another woman. Rachel had enough of Kelly and told her to "have some coffee", as she poured the coffee on her shirt. So while in a meta sense you can argue that effect is similar, the in-universe logic is pretty clear that she gets killed by Michael Myers because she happens to be the sheriff's daughter and as such ends up in Michael's way when Jamie is relocated to the sheriff's home. Just like the deputy that Michael kills immediately before. The stuff about the first Slasher boom and bust of the late 1970s-early 1980s is all very interesting. SidneyIsTheKiller posted:Yep, in particular it was indie studios that truly opened the floodgates. Slasher movies were cheap, quick, did not require stars, had a simple tried-true formula to follow, were unfathomably profitable (going by budget:gross ratio, for years Halloween was the most profitable movie ever). A Nightmare on Elm Street single-handedly put New Line Studios on the map. That would fit with the "competition from color TVs" theory. Major studios could pour money into special effects that TV shows didn't have the budget to replicate and/or has to be seen on a big screen to be truly appreciated. Smaller studios couldn't compete with major studios on budget and couldn't compete with network TV on volume. I note that Texas Chainsaw Massacre made a lot of money on a small budget 4 years prior, but I'm guessing that smaller film studios weren't quite so desperate back then and the controversy over that film scared them away from trying to copy it in large numbers.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2024 09:20
|
|
|
INH5 posted:Eh, he also had some pretty specific rules for depicting Michael Myers that he insisted on the people making the sequels following. There's an amusing bit from the H20 behind the scenes documentary, "Blood is Thicker Than Water" that talks about a time during a meeting where Akkad reacted quite strongly to a suggestion that Michael might pick up and presumably go on to use a gun, which led the crew to play a prank on him during filming later on. Yeah, Akkad had such strong opinions on what Michael should and shouldn't do he had a laminated card he'd give out to people working on scripts.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2024 15:47
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Yeah, Akkad had such strong opinions on what Michael should and shouldn't do he had a laminated card he'd give out to people working on scripts. What was in the card?
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2024 15:58
|
|
|
WattsvilleBlues posted:What was in the card? Get spooky Kill bitches
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 05:52
|
|
|
The first two slasher booms also occurred before the internet became ubiquitous so for some kids it was woods porn, National Geographic, or the latest Friday the 13th.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 16:57
|
|
|
Pope Corky the IX posted:The first two slasher booms also occurred before the internet became ubiquitous so for some kids it was woods porn, National Geographic, or the latest Friday the 13th. Third boom too, really. When Scream came out in 1996, only around a fifth of Americans had internet access, and that was basically all dial-up internet. But I don't think it was internet porn that ultimately did slashers in - plenty of low budget movies in the 2000s used sex and nudity as selling points, and a not-insignificant number of direct-to-streaming movies continue to do so today - but ubiquitous cell phones making it a lot harder to write them. It's pretty clear when you look at horror trends in the 2000s: for a while they moved plots deeper and deeper into the countryside so that they could have a scene where the characters try to make a phone call and tell the audience that they can't get a signal, then when that excuse started to wear thin an entire sub genre was developed based around people being kidnapped (Saw and Hostel being the most prominent examples), and in the late 2000s cheap CGI and found footage movies to make special effects even cheaper came to the rescue and they mostly just moved to making a lot of ghost stories. None of these patches were great for the slasher genre. Even the "out in the boonies" thing puts some pretty tight limits on which kinds of slasher villains you can use. Like I've written before, the Rob Zombie Halloween movies have some weirdness with the teens not having cell phones and the movies not specifying precisely when they take place quite possibly to make the audience less likely to ask questions about that, and even 2018 has some excuses for Allison to not answer and then outright lose her cell phone. And as far as I can tell exactly one major horror movie, You're Next, had the bright idea to give the bad guys a cell phone jammer. That doesn't seem to have caught on at all more than a decade later. My guess is because, like the earlier "out in the boonies" excuse, it significantly limits the type of villains and settings that you can use (the villain has to have money and be technically savvy so no escaped mental asylum patients or hobos, can't set the movie in a city or it will be immediately be noticed, jammers have a limited range so the victims have to be confined somehow, etc.). Whereas there are countless possible variations on stories involving ghosts and demons. It's really telling that despite Halloween 2018 making a similar amount of inflation-adjusted money as Scream did in 1996, a fourth slasher boom has yet to appear. The obvious imitators are the new Scream movies, which has had that whole post-modernism thing going on since the beginning, that Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot that went straight to Netflix, which is set in a mostly abandoned town to justify why the victims can't just call the cops, and Candyman, a ghost story. Nobody seems to be trying outside of established franchises and it seems like nobody wants to try to reboot Nightmare on Elm Street, the one major 1980s slasher franchise that could easily avoid this issue, again. My guess is because actors that are willing to wear full-face-and-body burn makeup for entire movie shoots and can be relied on to sell a franchise are hard to find. Yet another reason why I expect the next entry in the Halloween franchise to be a TV show. The additional runtime allows for other sorts of plots that don't run into this issue so much. See countless existing shows about cops chasing serial killers and so on.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 23:38
|
|
|
Interesting points. Specifically regarding Halloween and Myers, whether in a TV show or movie, surely there aren't really any other stories to tell?
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 00:24
|
|
|
There’s merch to sell
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 00:26
|
|
|
I call bullshit on the cellphone theory - putting functional cellular phones in a slasher is basically just introducing an additional character called "911 Operator", and you maybe feel like some police need to show up at some point. Plenty of horror movies include police characters! What you're basically claiming is that cellphones are this miracle defensive technology, like nobody with five bars and a full battery has ever been killed. You can't make a slasher nowadays, because nobody fears being murdered anymore! I don't buy it. It's like the interpretation that Myers is specifically mad at negligent babysitters. In 1978, he kills one babysitter and three people who aren't (plus two dogs). Annie might have shirked her responsibility, but she actually does ensure that the girl is being watched by Laurie. (How would Myers even know that Annie was babysitting that night? From his perspective, Annie was just a random person who yelled at him for stalking Laurie.) The actual reason Myers targets Annie is simply because he gets off on killing young women (to some extent), and he targets them when there are no adults around because he's opportunistic. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Feb 13, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 06:40
|
|
|
Pope Corky the IX posted:The first two slasher booms also occurred before the internet became ubiquitous so for some kids it was woods porn, National Geographic, or the latest Friday the 13th. Will attest that I used renting horror movies as a mask to see boobs. Graphic violence was just fine apparently. America
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 07:39
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:I call bullshit on the cellphone theory - putting functional cellular phones in a slasher is basically just introducing an additional character called "911 Operator", and you maybe feel like some police need to show up at some point. Plenty of horror movies include police characters! You can still have people getting murdered in a world with cell phones, the difficulty is when it comes to the specific slasher scenario of multiple people in a particular location for an extended period of time getting picked off one by one. This is precisely why in 2018-Ends Michael keeps moving around and kills most of his victims quickly. And then to get the Strode family involved, Allyson ignores cell phone calls before losing her phone so that she can run into Michael without being warned, then the doctor betrays the police and brings Michael to Laurie's house so that Michael can show up there without forewarning. Then in Kills they're hunting Michael down, then the whole plot with Cory in Ends. It isn't impossible to write, but it takes significant extra effort. Take a look at the top 10 grossing horror movies of 2021, when Halloween Kills hit theaters and so also when we'd expect imitators of Halloween 2018 to start to hit theaters. Going down the list it's: apocalypse, Halloween Kills, ghost story*, ghost story, The Purge series, crime drama/horror hybrid, kidnapping, kidnapping, apocalypse, ghost story. Literally everything except Halloween Kills has an excuse for the characters not being able to solve the problem by calling the cops built into the premise. SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's like the interpretation that Myers is specifically mad at negligent babysitters. In 1978, he kills one babysitter and three people who aren't (plus two dogs). Annie might have shirked her responsibility, but she actually does ensure that the girl is being watched by Laurie. (How would Myers even know that Annie was babysitting that night? From his perspective, Annie was just a random person who yelled at him for stalking Laurie.) Yeah, I just rewatched Halloween 1978, and everything is perfectly explainable by Michael waiting for his victims to be alone. Including the opening, where his actions are totally consistent with simply waiting for Judith's boyfriend to leave. And there isn't actually any evidence that Judith was told not to let Michael go out (he could have gone out trick or treating with a group of other kids and then slipped away) or was otherwise actually being neglectful in any way. But few people owned VCRs at the time (around 1% of US households owned VCRs by 1980), so rewatching a movie to refresh your memory on details like this wasn't easy. And in the public consciousness I guess it just blurred together into "Michael Myers killed his sister for being a slutty neglectful baby sitter, and 15 years later he escaped from an insane asylum to kill more slutty neglectful baby sitters." Another thing I noticed rewatching the original: one of the criticisms of the long lost sister twist is that in the first movie Michael goes out of his way to kill Laurie's friends first. But there's a pretty simple potential explanation: I don't think Michael actually had an opportunity to clearly hear Laurie's voice until he hears her on the phone while killing Lynda, during previous encounters Laurie was either at a distance or on the other side of a closed door. Seems like it would be easy enough to say that Michael wasn't totally sure that Laurie was his little sister until he had a voice to go with the face, and until then he was doing the equivalent of the Terminator going through every Sarah Connor in the phone book, by targeting young women who looked to be of the correct age and general appearance. Obviously that wasn't the intention when they filmed it, but I don't think that twist is quite as difficult to reconcile on a logical level as some people make it out to be. I do, however, think that the 2018-Ends interpretation where Michael and Laurie have no special connection fits better on a thematic level. * This one, the third Conjuring movie, was a period piece set in 1981, "based on a true story". But the Conjuring movies are a pretty clear byproduct of the late 2000s-early 2010s shift towards ghost stories. INH5 fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Feb 13, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 07:57
|
|
|
INH5 posted:It's really telling that despite Halloween 2018 making a similar amount of inflation-adjusted money as Scream did in 1996, a fourth slasher boom has yet to appear. The obvious imitators are the new Scream movies, which has had that whole post-modernism thing going on since the beginning, that Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot that went straight to Netflix, which is set in a mostly abandoned town to justify why the victims can't just call the cops, and Candyman, a ghost story. Nobody seems to be trying outside of established franchises and it seems like nobody wants to try to reboot Nightmare on Elm Street, the one major 1980s slasher franchise that could easily avoid this issue, again. My guess is because actors that are willing to wear full-face-and-body burn makeup for entire movie shoots and can be relied on to sell a franchise are hard to find. And of course you can't at the moment do more Friday the 13th because the rights... are more settled but still kind of a mess from what I gather.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 12:00
|
|
|
INH5 posted:You can still have people getting murdered in a world with cell phones, the difficulty is when it comes to the specific slasher scenario of multiple people in a particular location for an extended period of time getting picked off one by one. I dunno, I also don't buy this. People are ridiculously disinterested in picking up calls, particularly teens. Phones break, get covered in fluids (e.g. blood) and become impossible to use, need to be charged, and can just be a plain old distraction in an immediate life or death scenario -- assuming the characters even realise they're in one. Plus, public services are notoriously unreliable (particularly cops). I don't think phones present such a reliable bubble of protection that they foil slasher films. e.g. Curse of Chucky being the exact kind of scenario you're describing above. I'm not an expert on the film or anything, but I'm pretty sure the original Scream could be fairly easily updated to a contemporary context without changing the plot. You'd probably have a harder time accounting for Gail's presence.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 13:50
|
|
|
The majority of the time when victims are killed in a slasher movie, they don't even know they're in danger until it's too late. Nobody is going to call the police on their cellphone and say "hello police? I just walked down into my basement and when I turned the light on the bulb burned out, then some creepy music started playing in the background. Better send someone, I think a slasher might be trying to kill me!" Usually when the final girl or the last few survivors have that discovery scene where they find their friends bodies, that's the last 15 minutes or so where everything is coming to a head, and calling the police wouldn't really change much anyway. Like at the end of Scream for example, let's say Sid has a cellphone and immediately calls the cops as soon as Billy fakes his death in the bedroom. Would that really force the climax to be written any differently? I think we can suspend disbelief enough to say that the cops just took 5 or 10 minutes longer to respond than they would've in real life. Most of the time in the Friday the 13th series Jason just goes around picking people off before they have the chance to do anything. Same for Michael Myers. Obviously there are exceptions but the point is that adding cellphones to the equation doesn't make most of these movies much harder to write, and most of the time nothing would have to change at all. Edit: Actually in the case of Scream, someone calling the cops would ruin Billy and Stu's plan, because they were trying to frame someone else for their crimes. But that's a specific element of Scream that doesn't really have anything to do with the standard framework of a slasher. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Feb 14, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2024 23:51
|
|
|
Basebf555 posted:Usually when the final girl or the last few survivors have that discovery scene where they find their friends bodies, that's the last 15 minutes or so where everything is coming to a head, and calling the police wouldn't really change much anyway. Like at the end of Scream for example, let's say Sid has a cellphone and immediately calls the cops as soon as Billy fakes his death in the bedroom. Would that really force the climax to be written any differently? I think we can suspend disbelief enough to say that the cops just took 5 or 10 minutes longer to respond than they would've in real life. Also the cops were already busy trying to get the Fonz's body down off the goalposts.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 04:50
|
|
|
Even in Scream as is, shortly after Billy and Stu have revealed themselves as the killers for the finale, Sidney gets away and calls the police on her dad’s cellphone.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 05:00
|
|
|
Open Source Idiom posted:e.g. Curse of Chucky being the exact kind of scenario you're describing above. Skimming the Wikipedia plot summary, it seems like other people get blamed for Chucky's murders because most people are not inclined to believe that killer dolls exist. This has some of the advantages of the ghost story, in that police response is ineffective because the police don't believe that the killer exists, but without some of the disadvantages in requiring exposition, because most viewers will on their own have a pretty intuitive idea of what a living doll can do and what can be done to it. But there's only room in the movie market for so many Killer Doll series, so this isn't really viable for movies outside that franchise. Basebf555 posted:Usually when the final girl or the last few survivors have that discovery scene where they find their friends bodies, that's the last 15 minutes or so where everything is coming to a head, and calling the police wouldn't really change much anyway. Like at the end of Scream for example, let's say Sid has a cellphone and immediately calls the cops as soon as Billy fakes his death in the bedroom. Would that really force the climax to be written any differently? I think we can suspend disbelief enough to say that the cops just took 5 or 10 minutes longer to respond than they would've in real life. It's been a while since I watched Scream, but after rewatching the last 10 or so minutes on Youtube I think that the part where Billy convinces Sydney to give him the gun would be a lot harder to buy if the police were on the way. And even if he managed that, Billy and Stu wouldn't waste time toying with Sydney for several minutes afterwards, they'd either just kill her and implement their frame-up plan ASAP (so the movie ends right there) or if they really wanted to toy with her they'd relocate to another location (which means that Gale can't come in later and distract them). More generally, the problem isn't just actual police response time, it's how long is the killer going to stick around if they know that the cops are on the way? If all the final girl/remaining survivors have to do is find a place to hide long enough for the killer to decide that this isn't worth the risk of getting caught and leave, then that will significantly reduce the tension during what is supposed to be the climax of the movie. EDIT: And constraints still apply to kills before the climax if, IE, you want a victim to survive for a while and have to be chased down by the killer. Having the victim manage to make a phone call and then the cops show up later to find the body doesn't always break the story, but sometimes it does. Now in the particular case of the original Scream, Billy and Stu are exactly the sort of villains who could and would plausibly figure out a plan to take cell phones out of the equation. The trailer for Scream 2022 opens with a scene where the killer repeatedly remotely locks the doors of a smart home, forcing the victim to keep pressing the "lock all doors" button on her cell phone and keeping her distracted. The whole shtick of villains imitating horror movies vs. protagonists/victims who have seen horror movies helps provide justifications for that sort of thing, and is likely a significant part of the reason why the Scream series has continued into the 2010s and 2020s. But that still leaves cell phones as a writing problem to be solved. INH5 fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Feb 15, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 05:56
|
|
|
Open Source Idiom posted:I'm not an expert on the film or anything, but I'm pretty sure the original Scream could be fairly easily updated to a contemporary context without changing the plot. You'd probably have a harder time accounting for Gail's presence.  INH5 posted:But that still leaves cell phones as a writing problem to be solved. I actually find your points about the potential difficulties/complications universal cell phone ownership introduce to traditional horror narratives interesting in general, but I just have a very hard time imagining there are any film producers and executives thinking, "You know, I really would like to greenlight some slasher movies, but these gosh darned cell phones are just an insurmountable obstacle! *sigh* Oh well!" This is a genre where walking killers catch up to sprinting victims, where the car never starts, where hospitals are dark and empty, where the group decides to split up to cover more ground, etc. They're not going to let something like portable phones get in the way of possible millions of dollars. That's what they pay writers for. I think what the industry mostly took from the runaway success of Halloween 2018 was simply that horror as a whole is hotter than ever.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 08:30
|
|
|
SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I actually find your points about the potential difficulties/complications universal cell phone ownership introduce to traditional horror narratives interesting in general, but I just have a very hard time imagining there are any film producers and executives thinking, "You know, I really would like to greenlight some slasher movies, but these gosh darned cell phones are just an insurmountable obstacle! *sigh* Oh well!" This is a genre where walking killers catch up to sprinting victims, where the car never starts, where hospitals are dark and empty, where the group decides to split up to cover more ground, etc. They're not going to let something like portable phones get in the way of possible millions of dollars. That's what they pay writers for. I think that they absolutely would have already made more Friday the 13th movies in the wake of Halloween 2018 if not for the rights getting tied up in court. They were willing to come up with an excuse to bring back Leatherface for a movie that ended up going direct to Netflix, they would have absolutely figured some way to allow Jason Vorhees to kill on the big screen again if they had been given the opportunity by the lawyers. It's for the marginal projects, the ones that aren't guaranteed to make millions of dollars, where the effect is strongest. Hollywood has an extreme oversupply of unsold screenplays. If one script has some obviously strained writing to get around the cell phone problem but this other script that can also be filmed on a low budget about two guys who get kidnapped and chained in a bathroom by a serial killer does not have such obvious issues, there's a good chance that a studio will pass up the former for the latter. Beyond original projects, this also applies to franchises that look like they've run out of gas, like Friday the 13th after Jason X, or Halloween after the disappointing box office returns of Rob Zombie's part 2 making the franchise look like a hit-or-miss thing. Or when deciding which moderately successful franchises from the past to reboot. If, say, CGI is now cheap enough that you can reboot Candyman for slightly less inflation-adjusted money than the original I Know What You Did Last Summer cost (Candyman 2021 cost $25 million to make, IKWYDLS cost $28 million in 2021 dollars to make), without having to expose the actors to real bees and real bee stings like the original 1992 Candyman did, then maybe you go with the script that doesn't need a lame excuse to get around the cell phone problem, and to ride the trend toss in a slasher-esque scene of some high school girls getting killed in a bathroom that you can put in the trailer. Or like in the early 2000s when they were looking to remake Texas Chainsaw Massacre after 3 not-spectacularly-successful sequels, they might well have been able to get away with the "we can't get a signal because we're out in the boonies" excuse, but instead they ended up making a period piece set in the 1970s around when the original had been filmed. Some of those smaller riskier projects will become major franchises of their own right, like Saw and Paranormal Activity, which then get imitated and set trends, so this stuff does eventually "bubble up" to influence the broader genre. INH5 fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Feb 15, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 09:43
|
|
|
If you try to use a cell phone in front of art the clown he just mutilates your arms So simple!!!!
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 10:47
|
|
|
INH5 posted:Skimming the Wikipedia plot summary, it seems like other people get blamed for Chucky's murders because most people are not inclined to believe that killer dolls exist. This has some of the advantages of the ghost story, in that police response is ineffective because the police don't believe that the killer exists, but without some of the disadvantages in requiring exposition, because most viewers will on their own have a pretty intuitive idea of what a living doll can do and what can be done to it. But there's only room in the movie market for so many Killer Doll series, so this isn't really viable for movies outside that franchise. From what I remember, no one realises that there's a killer picking them off one by one until the climax, despite being in a situation that unfolds over hours. Though, yeah, the supernatural angle has an impact -- as it surely would in a Hallowe'en. ("We responded to your call and shot him full of bullets. Sure, we haven't found the body, but he's definitely dead ma'am.") Another decent example is the third season of Slasher, an eight hour season depicting a gently caress load of deaths over a 24 hours period -- despite many of them having access to phones (and some of the cast being police themselves). Just because there are phones doesn't mean that the police are gonna get rung, or that the police will bother to turn up, or that the police will be effective etc. (e.g. your example of You're Next ends with the lead character's police rescue both dead and laughably ineffectual -- ironically, the situation would have been better if they'd just never turned up.) Like SidneyIsTheKiller says above, malfunctioning safety features are a staple of the genre. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Feb 15, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 15:18
|
|
|
The specific scenario that requires a bit more creative writing is where you've got a whole group of people who all know they're being stalked and picked off by a killer, and they're trapped in one location for a significant chunk of the movie. In those situations yea, you need to write in a reason why they aren't able to call in outside help. But that was the case before cellphones too, like in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer there's a hurricane that completely isolates everyone on the island for the duration of the storm, otherwise they could've radioed for help. But like I said before, those situations are more the exception in slashers than they are the rule. The Friday the 13th model is much more common where each person gets picked off without the others being alerted to what's going on until the very end.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2024 15:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 11:52 |
|
|
The Friday remake was good bc they called the cops and the one guy took too long to get there and then immediately got stabbed in the head by Jason That’s all you need to do.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2024 05:46
|
|