DBR70
03-28-2010, 11:50 AM
You know that old dominoes game where you stack them verticly in a row and knock them down and it makes a pattern. that's sort of a way my mind works, but it keeps going in dark places. I was watching the 2008 horror film "Quaratine", it was really scary, reminded me of one of my fav horror films "The Blair Witch Project". I sorta wanted to know why amature-documentry-style horror scares me so bad. Is it because that it gives you the feeling that what you're watching is the real thing? So i decided to "experiment" with my feelings just out of curiosity, see where it takes me. I went to Google and put in a key words like "death", "documentry", "media, cant remember all the words, it mightve been a phrase, cant really remember. I looked at the results, and my eyes seemed to have locked on "American television news reporter who committed suicide during a live television broadcast." It was a story about Christine Chubbuck who actually did just that. It happened in Florida in July 1974. Another example of a real life death on film is the one that everyone knows...the JFK assassination in 1963. We've seen that so many time we've become so desensitized to it. It wasn't until 1999 when they came up with a gimmick to not only release a documentry style horror film...but make believe that the people who were in it and shooting it were actually in fact killed. There! "The Blair Witch Project" sold like hotcakes. A breakthrough! But now, the fear is on a differant, more complicated level. We know it's only a movie, Heather & the boys are alive and well. Then what actually scared us, was it the legend itself? Nope! It was the sheer feeling that what you were watching was real and that feeling is very disturbing. Then came "Cloverfield" in which i do call it a "Blair Witch" meets "Independence Day" rip-off. Then came "Quarantine" in which it was closer to the BW tradition. Horror movies are looking more and more like JFK assassination and Christine Chubbuck's on air suicide. That's why its more disturbing and therefore, youre gonna get more scares out of the audience.
Documentry style horror can put you in a mental state as to where if you really did see the real thing on a video tape you found, would you know it's real or would you just say "it's just another Blair Witch knock-off"?.
Check out this scenrio: You give a person 2 video tapes who has never even heard of "The Blair Witch Project" (or for that matter not even "Quarantine" or "Cloverfield" [those are more "unbelievable" than TBWP anyway]) One tape is the entire footage of "The Blair Witch Project" (minus the credits, movie ends when camera hits the floor) and the other tape is the news footage where Christine Chubbuck commits suicide in front of the camera. And you tell that person one's fake and the other one's real. He/she would not be able to tell which one is fake. Even the way the special effects are nowadays, the fake stuff looks more real than the real stuff. How that happen? I think it just has alot to do with desensitization. We're so used to seeing oscer-winning performances and special effects, when the real thing happens in front of our eyes, we wouldn't recognize it.
Documentry style horror can put you in a mental state as to where if you really did see the real thing on a video tape you found, would you know it's real or would you just say "it's just another Blair Witch knock-off"?.
Check out this scenrio: You give a person 2 video tapes who has never even heard of "The Blair Witch Project" (or for that matter not even "Quarantine" or "Cloverfield" [those are more "unbelievable" than TBWP anyway]) One tape is the entire footage of "The Blair Witch Project" (minus the credits, movie ends when camera hits the floor) and the other tape is the news footage where Christine Chubbuck commits suicide in front of the camera. And you tell that person one's fake and the other one's real. He/she would not be able to tell which one is fake. Even the way the special effects are nowadays, the fake stuff looks more real than the real stuff. How that happen? I think it just has alot to do with desensitization. We're so used to seeing oscer-winning performances and special effects, when the real thing happens in front of our eyes, we wouldn't recognize it.