I find that straying from a formula once in a while will lead to shockingly great results. This can applied to just about anything in life. How you approach your job, how you exercise, cooking. In fact cooking for me is a combination of a stressful activity and a momentous achievement. I am pretty limited in what I can make, so if I try something new, I tend to follow the instructions as closely as possible. The only time I get a little risky with my cooking is when I make overstuffed potatoes. I have found that substituting crushed red pepper for black pepper give them a bit of a kick and is a nice combination with the other spices, I also add a full cup of sharp cheddar cheese instead of the half-cup, it makes it cheesier and I am from Wisconsin, cheese makes everything better.
ANYWAYS...horror films are like this as well. For the most part they follow a pretty strict recipe for success. Once in a a while you get a film that goes outside of the blueprint and improvises and it either tastes delicious or it gets fed to the dog. The found footage genre has yet stray from it's formula, and that formula has become extremely predictable, not scary, and completely broken.
2011's Apartment 143 follows the found footage genre to the "t." A crew of parapsychologists (which includes "Spanish" from Old School) arrive at an apartment complex which is pretty much abandoned, except for the apartment they are about to set up shop in. We are introduced to a family, a father who is to eager, yet reluctant to have the crew their, a stand-offish teenage daughter, and of course a little boy. From than on, we watch them set up every camera and device while explaining what everything does to both the little boy and the audience, as if we have never seen one of these films before.
The middle part of the movie is boring and excruciating to watch. We wait for random moments of fright, something unexpected to happen and jump out at us. In which we are treated to shaking walls and odd noises. We of course get a psychic or medium involved and someone gets possessed. There is, of course, more to the story than we are initially told, and it gets painfully told to us at a snails pace. The last act of the movie, the action finally intensifies, we find out the whole story, and of course there is a "scary" and jumpy ending.
This formula has been basically used since the Blair Witch Project. It hasn't changed and has become extremely predictable, there was never a moment where I went, "well I never saw that before in a found footage film." To top things off, not once was I scared, even in the moments where the film was building tensions, I knew that when the camera pans around for the fourth time, there will be something there that is supposed to make me jump, but it didn't (well, maybe a little but that is due to the loud noise that accompanies the fright moment).
Unless changes are made, this genre will never truly frighten anyone anymore. Of all the found footage genre films, The Blair Witch Project is probably the scariest (however, it's still a really boring film until the very end), now granted a lot of it had to do with the marketing of the film (there were quite a few people that thought what they were watching was real). But there were other elements to that film that made it much more frightening then any of it's contemporary clones.
For one, there was a continuous steam of camera activity. There weren't any cuts at all unless the camera was turned off by the operator. The whole reasoning behind why the found footage genre should be scary to us, is that we (the audience) are seeing what the characters experienced in true form. If you watch Apartment 143 and other found footage genre films like Paranormal Activity, there are actual cuts in the action, or all of a sudden it's the next day. Watching these films, you are not experiencing what the characters are really experiencing, you are experiencing what a movie company or what someone somewhere cut together a bunch of film they found to be interesting. Not to mention, there's always different cameras showing us a part of the action, it's not one camera that we see, in Apartment 143 there are multiple camera's and multiple angles, it's giving us an unauthentic look at the events that occurred. Basically, someone manipulated the film to fit an audience, and the whole point of watching a movie like this, the reason it should be scary, is that it wasn't tampered with, we are experiencing the true horror that the characters would have seen through one camera.
Another thing that drives me crazy with this genre is the addition of sound effects. Sound effects are typical in all scary movies. For some reason, it's an audible cue that if what you are watching doesn't scare you visually, a loud shrieking noise is guaranteed to lift you off your seat. The Blair Witch Project didn't rely on that, which is what made it authentic for audiences, there was no cue as to what when a scary moment happened, which sometimes worked well, like the ending, it came out of nowhere. Other times, it didn't work and you kept questioning what you were looking at, but, in a sense, isn't the unknown more frightening than the known.
Another pitfall of the genre is the story. Every story is the same. A group of investigators that are combination of skeptics/crazy believers go to a home and meet a family or a person that has been experieicng things they can't understand. Nothing happens for 45 minutes except maybe a kid talks to thin air or a chair moves. Story reveals some "shocking" twist that is really responsible. The ghosts or spirits become more violent or more rambunctious. Finally there is a final showdown and an ending that reveals a ghost that jumps out at the screen.
It's a story that may work the first time, but every found footage genre follows this formula and it's getting sickening. Apartment 143 strays a little in that the story becomes vague and nothing concrete is revealed. The doctor believe that one of the characters was schizophrenic despite what they experienced. I am not sure if that was the film's intention to make you guess what was really going on, or if it was just poorly written, but the film still followed the same formula for the story.
A way to improve the genre would be to start the scares off right away. Stop with the mind-numbing introductions of the characters and the team of investigators. The unnecessary middle act of nothing happening except dumb conversations that progress the story slowly are excruciating Pick up the pace, the audience, tends to fall asleep, and everything is so predictable, that we are just waiting for the climax ending. Also, stop trying to throw the audience off with some twist in the story, and either have the characters clearly win or lose, no more "surprise" endings revealing a ghost that jumps out at the scream, or some monsters heavy breathing. These films are starting (if not already) insulting the audiences intelligence.
The genre needs an overhaul. I am not sure if V/H/S is anything different, but it looks promising, but I am going to go see that eventually. But, why does this genre continue to thrive, and why do people feel the need to see the same repetitive movie over and over? From a studio standpoint, these movies are cheap and easy to make. There's not a lot of production involved, for the most part these movies are cast with unknown actors to give it more of an authentic feel. If people go see the movie in droves, the studio makes it's money back and than some (just ask the maker of Paranormal Activity how they are doing).
The other reason why this could be scary or something why horror fans (and I am speaking about newer horror fans here) are drawn to this genre, is that reality television has become the norm. Kids today that grow up watching horror films are so used to the Real Worlds, America's Next Top Model, Hell's Ktichen that story telling and fictional boogeymen are just not scary anymore. The Freddy Krugers and Michael Meyers of the genre are similar to Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny, if they don't exist in real life it can't be scary. Now haunted houses, ghosts, possessions. Since these are paranormal events that are documented as having happened, this is scary to the audience. They realize that what they are watching is just a movie, but what they are watching is a)shot from the perspective of being real, and b.)something that has supposedly can happen in real life.
We watch Rock of Love with the perception that what we are watching is reality. By contrast however, almost all reality is scripted and planned, but it's the perception that gets us to either think Brett Michaels is awesome and living the dream, or that he is a dirt bag and these women are idiots. The found footage genre is no different. It gets the audience by creating a plausible situation based on how we watch t.v.
In a way we have all become voyeurs, a society obsessed with how others are living their lives. That's why reality television works, we are interested in other people's lives that are not our own. Now we are interested for different reasons, we like seeing celebrities look like real people (or just make asses of themselves), we like to fantasize about the lives they are perceived to be living, we like to watch them fail. For horror fans, it very well could be we want to see what happens when people are faced with ghosts.
Even though we know it's not real, some people project themselves onto the characters that are being haunted, they want to see how they may react based on how a real person acts. Shows like Ghost Hunters don't help the situation at all. It makes people once again, watch the show because they feel that something real is happening, and this is the appropriate way to act around it.
However, in most of these films they are displaying the inaccurate ways of handling these situations, so if we do take our ques from the found footage genre like we do from reality t.v, we all better pray that a ghost never invades our home.
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Blair witch project was ok. More creepy than scary.
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