Banter: There is Nothing to Fear, but Fear itself

I have just completed playing one of the creepiest video games ever made: Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Yes, yes, I will maintain banter about film, but the game's incredible ability to invoke fear has me thinking about movies and fear. Tis the season after all!
Growing up I loved intense movies, as a kid I wanted to see Aliens and Terminator, in early teens I watched The Fugitive and Burton's Batman movies. But there were some things that scared me.

Yeah, you know what that is don't you. I must've watched Terminator 2 when I was about ten or eleven years old. It took me a while before I watched this terrifying sequence. Brain numbingly good physical effects...

And the face on the right should look familiar to a lot of people; it's the "face" that can be seen on the surface of Mars. However, it was the template of the X-Files episode Space, and despite how outdated the effects look now... I still remember that episode freaking me out so badly. Actually... I still have trouble looking at that face... why did I put that in the blog...?
...
(Focus! It is only a mountain with a shadow! Only a mountain.... only a mountain....)


Fear is quite subjective; some people find things scary which others might call laughable or entertaining. Some people fear ghost stories, possession, aliens, spiders, or even simply darkness.

Movies have intense ways of burning images and sounds into our minds with fear, and I believe (in my opinion) that the best scary films are those that give you very little. The films that makes your mind fill the gaps; to make you terrify yourself.

I believe this image from Paranormal Activity is burned into my mind (and hopefully not my retina too). Unlike its sequel that moves the viewer's eye about and somewhat gives them breathing space in doing so, the original movie keeps this single shot permanently. The effect? You are hypnotised by watching it. Seconds move agonisingly slowly as you find yourself too scared and anxious to look away, compelled to watch it. Every time this image appeared for the last twenty minutes of that film, my heart sank in dread; what was going to happen next?

What did happen? A fantastic use of shadows, subtle gestures to downright savage, sudden explosions of movement, yet more often than not the film used eerie sights and quiet sounds... Footfalls on distant stairs... footfalls that approach and stop... floorboards creaking, your mind works overtime against your will to imagine what's happening. Yet nothing's there!

The video game I mentioned, Amnesia, works in a similar way. It deprives you of options and puts you directly in harm's way (like Paranormal Activity's frozen perspective) and mercilessly torments you with sounds, sounds and little more. Your mind incubates and develops its own fear.

A great definition of this is comparing the film The Haunting (1963) and its 1999 remake. The remake is a garbage pile of bad acting, shameful CGI nonsense and even a literal Hell. The original shows you nothing; it plays with sound, shadows and unsettling camera work to unnerve you psychologically.

Now... I express my own opinions here about what scares me. The unsettling, disembodied sounds, the grey-black shadows of unfamiliar (yet real) places, the abnormal and terrifying manifesting in recognisable or subtle ways.
What can I say about the "horror" movies that do not scare me? How about Saw for an example.
Saw is not a film gauged for invoking fear... Saw is sickly and gross, and the terms torture porn and "goreno" have been wisely applied to it. Similar to exploitation movies of the 70s, you have to wonder who decided to conceive these scenarios (I'm looking at you too, Human Centipede) or those who buy them to watch repeatedly.
They aren't scary, they are grotesque examples of physical special effects (impressive nonetheless it should be said) and little more, at best forcing you to turn your head in disgust. If I want that... give me the nail-pulling scene from District 9 any day, or Old Boy's tooth-pulling extremes.

But tell me... isn't fear that feeling of helplessness, of being at the mercy of some unseen force, the unknown, the mysterious?
I think so.
And a film that can do that, has mastered something indeed, and while the fright might never be as strong a second time, the sensation lingers...

Sleep well.