Cloverfield (2008)

PEOPLE ARE GONNA WATCH THIS.

by Liz Shannon Miller

Nothing kills me in a horror film like the details. Endless CGI wastelands are not nearly so heartbreaking as a half-burned photograph of a family vacation, or a beheaded teddy bear waiting for the return of the child who loved it. Intimate details like those are the secret sauce that makes movies like The Exorcist so terrifying — the more time you get to know a group of characters, the more you come to like them, the more you dread their inevitable possession, or decapitation, or disembowelment, or what have you.

The first-person horror film is an evolution in this concept, one that, since the premiere of The Blair Witch Project, has often been seen as gimmicky. But to write off the shaky handheld approach in this fashion overlooks why it exists in the first place. I’d argue that Cloverfield is the first truly modern horror film, one that captures how our relationship with not just the genre, but the technology we use every day, is evolving.

Cloverfield is the story of two days, a month apart: one, April 27th, a dreamy day at Coney Island with two young lovers; the other, May 22nd, a night of terror documenting the destruction of Manhattan at the hands of a thoroughly alien monster. The conceit is that both days are being captured with the same camera and the same tape, with jarring cuts in between the two due to technical or user error — this is backed up by the film’s opening frame, an update on Blair Witch’s “A year later, their footage was found”:

The script (which isn’t hard to find illicitly online, not that I would ever encourage you to do such a thing) actually says “digital videocassette” instead of a digital SD card, which goes to show how fast digital filmmaking has evolved in the last five years. According to the IMDB trivia page, the film’s runtime of 80 minutes is deliberately timed to mimic the standard runtime of a miniDV tape, which of course is meaningless given that in the final film, it’s an SD card, which can have all sorts of different runtimes—

Okay, so the actual logic behind the film’s structure may not make sense. Here’s what matters: You’re watching a tape of a happy perfect day being taped over by disaster. We don’t spend too much time at Coney Island, except for the occasional moment of ironic or heartbreaking juxtaposition, but it’s key to the film. See, the first disaster we encounter on May 22nd is learning that in the almost month since their perfect day together, Rob (Michael Stahl-David) has been blowing off Beth (Odette Annable) because he’s about to leave town for an exciting new job in Japan.

So at Rob’s going away party, which Rob’s best friend Hud (T.J. Miller) is documenting with the camera in question and is DJed by the contents of my iPod circa 2007 (seriously, EVERY SINGLE SONG is one I still own), Rob and Beth have an angry confrontation over said blowing-off. Later, when the Godzilla-but-way-freakier monster begins its rampage through New York’s nicer neighborhoods, Rob learns that Beth has been hurt in her apartment and, full of regret and angst, decides to go rescue her, friends in tow.

That’s basically the plot of the movie, omitting the bit where Rob’s brother Jason gets killed on the Brooklyn Bridge during their first attempt to escape the island, and the bit where a shell-shocked Lizzy Caplan (one of those actresses who I always enjoy watching but never ever ever want to meet) tags along only to meet the movie’s most gruesome death. Oh, and there’s this whole thing where little bits of the monster sometimes fall off the monster only to become awful tiny monsters who are like giant spiders but faster. I watch that scene with my eyes closed.

This seems like a good place to say that there are plenty of really good reasons not to like this movie. For one thing, certain moments are decidedly “too soon,” in 2008 or even today. I have a number of friends, who were in New York on 9/11, that find Cloverfield to be completely unwatchable, and it’s understandable. The first moments of the monster’s attack are nothing but explosions and destruction and a decapitated Statue of Liberty; you see the clouds of smoke from a collapsed building rushing down the street, obscuring store windows. Later, when the horror becomes much more clearly monster-related, it’s somewhat palatable, but those images are still so memorable, potent. Even ten years later. Even if you weren’t there.

Also, things vacillate wildly between believability and lack thereof, specifically when it comes to the survival rate of the characters. While poor Rob’s brother gets taken out by a stray whack of the monster’s tail, poor Beth survives hours of impalement inside her apartment and a helicopter crash — only a thermonuclear bomb (or whatever it was the military had handy) appears capable of taking this woman out.

She does get taken out, though; at the end of the movie, the only character presumed living is Jason’s girlfriend Lily, who is last seen riding a helicopter to safety. Everyone else we get to know at all? Not so lucky. Rob could be considered the hero of the film, but what does he do? He goes off to save the girl, which everyone tells him is a stupid idea, and they’re all right. He ends up getting almost everyone killed. In this case, sticking together is perhaps NOT the answer.

That’s the blunt truth of Cloverfield, one that I value deeply, because unlike the plucky heroes of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie, the reality of chaos on this scale is that not everyone makes it. Our bodies are fragile. The world is cruel. The only thing that has a chance of enduring is what we create — ideas, children, art — whatever you can leave behind.

Why I really wanted to write about Cloverfield is this: The conceit of the film being “filmed” by the characters might seem to be gimmicky at first, but it eventually becomes the film’s most essential quality. “People will want to know what happened” is the justification Hud gives for holding onto this consumer technology while fleeing for his life. Rob and Beth’s final moments together are spent using the camera to reach out to whoever might be out there to declare their existence. And we know right from the beginning that what we’re watching has been archived for future generations — if only for its brief glimpses of the monster in action. These people died, but in some sense, they live on.

Cameras are everywhere — my toaster practically shoots 1080p — and they have increasingly become an unconscious part of how we process events, from a baby taking its first steps to protesters under siege on the streets of Oakland. Were the Cloverfield monster* to strike today, we’d see camera phones and web cams and Flip cams and everything else held at the ready, capturing every moment. Yes, Cloverfield wasn’t the first film to demonstrate this behavior. But it was the first film to understand why.

Liz Shannon Miller is very afraid of giant spiders. She writes and other stuff here.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART

by Erica U.

My older sister went to see The Blair Witch Project before I did; she was always the cool early adopter.  She was the first to play me Morrissey and Cure tapes, which she borrowed from the emo boy who stocked shelves at our small town grocery store. You could watch the overnight workers shuffling like ants in a glass farm, restoring inventory behind all those locked and fogged glass doors. We played the tapes for a few months, driving around in her fourth hand Ford Escort with the windows down and her black hair dancing madly until we lost them and even then, he never got mad at her at all.   

The night I followed her orders to go see The Blair Witch Project, it had only been out a few weeks and the hype had not yet become a cacophony. It was still just this strange little $60,000 budget movie that was scarier than it should have been. 

I drove home from the theater on one of those nights where a fat moon tucks behind clouds, illuminating all the heavenly shapes and drifts like a crystal ball. Unsettled in the way only the smartest horror movies leave you - both hands on the wheel and my eyes on every wooded expanse, up to and including the neighbor’s row of midget pines, slowly growing into a snow break.  The house was dark when I parked. No porch light left lit, no overhead light welcoming in the entry way. After I ran up the walk, unlocked the door and flipped on the switch inside the frame, it took my eyes a moment to adjust.  

As they did little clusters began to come in to focus.  

Piles of rocks around the foyer. 

Twigs tied together like figurines, like hanged men, dangling in the shadows of the dusty old chandelier. 

Skittish already, I lost it. Rocketed backwards into the wall and cried out in something embarrassingly close to tears.  All these sinister talismans, so creepy in the movie, were unthinkable in your own house. Turns out, there is little scarier than the implications of celluloid come to life.  

I trampled down to her bedroom, rammed open the door and pounced on her sleeping form, still screaming. Despite waking to my fists pounding her body like grief, her only response was laughter.  

She was always laughing. 

What a terrific joke. 

I didn’t camp for two years after the night I saw The Blair Witch Project. I didn’t feel comfortable in the woods for even longer and still, the night I rewatched it in my grown up home, no longer suspecting it is real, the bare tree limbs outside my third story bedroom are tormenting. Still and again I watch them as though they have been waiting all this time to turn on me. As though they are sleeper agents and my safe wooden floors will be riddled with stone rituals again come morning.   

The Blair Witch Project opens with a black screen and a simple explanation: 

“In October 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkitsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”  

We walk into the movie and meet Heather, the alpha female of the group.  She has hatched a plan to film an investigation of the legends surrounding Burkitsville – tales of an unusually high number of children killed in the 1940’s, girls disappeared for days and turned back up incoherent and men lashed together, gutted, and left to decompose on river rocks.  Heather’s friend and fellow film student Josh is her second in command and she boasts to him of ample preparations – field guides and maps and “How to Survive In the Woods” - as they pack up.  Mikey, an acquaintance of Josh’s, joins the group next and the trio heads out to interview townspeople on Blair Witch lore. 

Armed with a foundation of foreboding hand-me-down stories caught on tape and overly dramatic shots of child graves, the filmmakers drive to the edge of a remote woods and head in. The first day’s destinations are mildly creepy but no one is taking it too seriously and the only tension surrounds squabbling over maps and trails and Mikey forever lagging 20 feet behind like an insolent child. 

Over the next few days, however, the trip begins to dissolve. Mikey challenges Heather’s waning directional aptitude.  Josh works to keep the peace. Heather insists she has always known where they are going and yet soon and forever, the trail is gone. The troops’ bickering rises into a frantic boil after they find themselves lost night after night – long after they are meant to return to work and school. After food and cigarettes run out, the map is lost and the rain comes. 

I don’t know how the movie holds up to a fresh audience now, ten sophisticated years later. Back then, it was effective. The dialogue was so improvised and the characters were so awkward and pettily human that it worked. You just bought it. Everything felt real. 

After its unaffected style, the film is most masterful in its understanding that if we are left without adequate information, we will fill in the gaps with the worst possible thing we can imagine.  

Take the movie’s portrayal of nights. 

The noises begin subtly.  One 3 am, in the surrounding distances of the tent, it is the sound of rocks hitting rocks in the echo of gravel pits. The clap of stones.  The next, it is the muted calls of children.  

Each time, the group clamors out of the tent with cameras and lights and sound equipment, frantically aimed in a questioning 360. They capture nothing but trees and noises undeterred by their presence.

The daylight brings its own unwelcome omens. Three balanced piles of stones surround the tent one morning. Built up like cairns, which troubles me. Is this ritualistic or logistical – marking someone’s way back to them?  

There is no justifiable reason we should be afraid of clapping in the night. And it shouldn’t be dread inducing when the group wanders in to a pause in the forest, tangled with dozens of wooden hangings.  Sticks bound together like clumsy pentagrams, like men splayed out, spinning and dangling from the tree branches above.  But captured on Heather’s 16 mm black and white memory, even in broad daylight, the gallery is dreadful. As menacing as it is indecipherable. 

That is the brilliance of this movie – its ability to drill into and then magnify our propensity to be scared even by the gentle suggestion of something we don’t understand. 

The night Josh disappears is the worst. They wake frantically to the sound of collective but disembodied murmuring and then the tent is shaking. We see two figures, running from the tent in the dark. 

It’s hard to say afterward if Josh was lost in the chaotic escape from the tent, or if he was gone before they ever woke. Your mind runs back to examine those 15 seconds of footage and you decide his space in the three-person shelter was already empty when the camera clicked on. But then tell me why. Was he snatched by something? Was he lured out?  

Not understanding the siege, Mikey and Heather shake and huddle in the blackness until dawn. The frame is dark and we switch to audio alone. To just the sound of their breathing clotted with fear, and the occasional swoop of their flashlight still searching for Josh.  

There is no tangible incarnation of our antagonist - no ghostly presence, no serial killer. And it still is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than crouching, unprotected, in these hostile woods. Not alone. 

They hear Josh call like a siren in the nights after that, echoing from all directions. They crawl out of the tent and scream for him. You scan the woods with them and you begin to see things. Is that someone hunched down? Is that a body? Is that a face? And for years afterward, these invented visions are what you will see amongst any collection of trees. 

Heather films herself in one of the unsleepable nights, crying and apologizing to their mothers for this uncareful trip and the loss of Josh. I always liked how unattractive this scene is. Her stocking hat over horse eyes, bulgy with fear and grief. Nose running and quivering with tears that aren’t dainty or pretty. I like that she is not a sexualized victim in the waiting. And when she tells us “I’m scared to close my eyes. I’m scared to open them,” you don’t even begrudge her the line.  

There was always a moment at grade school slumber parties, in which some blonde pre-teen with a premature mischief in her smirk would suggest a game of Bloody Mary. 

There are only so many ways to dodge this sort of experience.  Be the last one into the bathroom – the one who, oh damn – no that’s ok, I’ll be fine out here, doesn’t quite fit in.  Or slink up and around the carpeted staircase of her split level, quietly hiding in the entry way until the game spends itself in an ejaculation of screams and uneasy giggles. Of promises that “I Saw Her! I really saw her!”  

And so, from time to time, you would have to man up and do your time in someone’s wallpapered guest bathroom, pressed flush to the vanity by the surge of a half dozen wiggling girls behind you.  

There is something terrible in the almost reflections of a dark mirror.  In watching for the possible threat of something you haven’t decided to believe in. In your own eyes flickering and straining for proof. I never wanted any part of it. 

When I saw The Blair Witch Project, in those early days, it was still presented as a possibly-real documentary with a shrug and an eyebrow raise. With a very Bloody-Mary-reminiscent dare to believe. And if we didn’t buy it completely, we were secretly confused enough by the rumors and legends to have to consider it potentially true through all 82 minutes of the movie.  

At 11 or 22 or 33, this was always the basis of my fear: If you can’t get a grasp on a thing’s chemistry – on whether it exists or what it might do to you - how do you know how much to be afraid of it? 

On the last night caught on film, Josh is not crying anymore. He is calling to his friends, plain and calm. For some unfathomable reason, they venture out in to the dark again and follow the noise to a house with windows blown out and piles of wooden planks on its porch, macro versions of their stick bundles. Scrambling through the wrecked house, they can hear Josh better. Up the stairway, there are small handprints and the camera doesn’t stop and over-accentuate them like it would if this was a blockbuster Hollywood horror flick. Our lens pans past them just long enough for you to understand that these handprints are small and probably made of blood, though you hope – and the movie lets you hope – it is just mud.

The last minutes of the film are ones I can’t get out of my head – like the skull stomping scene in American History X that I would give almost anything to unsee. It takes a long time to stop thinking about Mikey facing the corner of that unholy basement, his head hung and waiting in the silence. 

Rewatching this movie, I decide all our fears are based on two base phobias: the fear of the unknown and the fear of losing control. 

I avoided the woods so long after I saw this because I didn’t know if I needed to or not.  

Because I didn’t know if every hunch I had overcome in order to love the darkness of the forest was suddenly validated. More hefty and logical than I had given them credit for. 

At this age, I am still afraid of the laundry room in my building, and the storage room and the industrial hallway between them if it is late enough and dark enough. I feel uneasy waiting for the water to fill coin operated machines in that low ceilinged echoing room and my pulse skitters as I run back up the three stories to my apartment, which I have left unlocked of course. I am afraid, a bit, of the man who lives next door and cries out sometimes at night, whose handshake is too light and words too slow. Of the trees watching me through old storm windows and the way the yellow lights hover over the park across the street, waiting for something. 

I am afraid of everything that probably won’t hurt me. And not at all of the city or all the things with likely more treacherous constitutions, because I understand the risk. It is the uncertain, the ephemeral threat that undoes me. You could spend your whole life scanning the horizon with your camera and not capture anything on tape.  But that doesn’t mean nothing is out there. 

 

Erica U. is still afraid of foreboding woods and basement corners. She specializes in phone photography and TL;DR writing here.

Halloween Week: Carrie (1976)

MEAN GIRLS

by Tess Lynch

When I was in high school, there was a hazing ceremony that was in the final stages of its existence. In it, some senior girls would choose girls from the junior class, lead them down to a beach, blindfold them, and torture/humiliate them (mildly, like making them fellate a banana). Later, I heard of this same stuff going on in my friend’s sororities in college — the worst thing anyone I knew had to do, and the thought of it still makes me want to wash my hands over and over and over, was to reach into a toilet that had been filled with various garbage (mashed-up bananas, muffins, etc) and smear it all over themselves.

I did not join a sorority. I want to make this really clear. At Brown, sororities weren’t really goin’ on; I do know, however, that at many schools they are goin’ on. I also know how it feels to want to feel confidently part of a group of people — after all, it’s the antithesis of the loneliest depths of human existence. When you’re a part of the herd, you’re protected. You can hide in its center. A family does the same thing: a family can swallow you, cushion the beating the world can sometimes deliver. The scariest horror movies are, for me, the movies about feeling isolated from your allies, alone except for your enemies (Open Water, Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby,The Blair Witch Project, Poltergeist (go with me, Carol Ann is away from her family and the only company she has is THE DEVIL)); being constantly rejected, or deceived, is to be stripped of any protective barrier — it’s a terrifying thing.

The best scary movies match their violence with malice. Violence is too commonplace to be “scary” — not just modern violence, but the violence of the food chain, of traffic accidents, of war; what is truly scary is sadism, insanity, abject loneliness, and the kind of stubbornness of will that afflicts religious nuts and people like Hitler. For me, ghosts and monsters aren’t as scary as the guy in SAW I or the sharks in Open Water (it’s okay if you were bored by Open Water, I understand that too). We’re talking fear that comes from the strongest desire to hurt other people.

There is a Lord of the Flies element to high school, obviously; I might go so far as to say that this cruelty, this pecking order, becomes most pronounced in the ladies’ cliques that form between junior high and early college.  There’s something called “relational aggression” that forms in groups of girls; having a scapegoat creates the opportunity for girls to bond while bullying or making fun of their target. This is how cliques form. The seriousness of relational aggression undulates — the severity of name-calling, taunting, and even physical violence that’s too minor to be called abuse (outright, that is) — and makes it hard to understand where poor manners become sadism.

I used to totally partake in this crap. I think many of us did. Most of it was routine, but some of it crossed an invisible line. Looking back, it’s easy to say “Man, I was an asshole,” when you think of one example; think of another, slightly more severe, and you just skip past it. I wonder if the sorority girls who made their pledges reach into toilets think of that episode, ever. It can fill you with shame, but at the time, you were probably laughing. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a perfect scapegoat. She’s naive, she’s uncool, she lets her period get all over the place. She’s also spooky, because she’s got telekinesis; I like to think that Carrie’s ability to, say, make a lightbulb explode with the force of her anxiety is a metaphor for both the shame of adolescence (i.e. wondering if you’re “normal” — she’s not) as well as the incredible potency of teenage emotion. It also doesn’t help her relationship with her mother, who’s super-bananas; Margaret White had a big enough problem with her daughter as a child, because Carrie was born from SUPER SINFUL SEXY TIME, but when she discovers that Carrie wants to go to the prom, which is always a bonerfest, she starts getting really abusive. In Carrie’s mother’s case, she is driven by a blind need to protect her daughter. My interpretation is that Margaret White is the scariest kind of insane person: she really thinks that it’s her duty as a mother to keep Carrie pure (the kind of purity, surely, that is impossible — she calls Carrie’s breasts “dirtypillows”), and would clearly go to any extreme to protect her daughter. There is something infinitely scary, too, about a person who considers life to be inconsequential, especially when compared with the glory of the afterlife. When you’re watching the film, you understand that Carrie’s mother might kill her in an attempt to save her.

Carrie’s mom is a creep, but at least she’s a nutty crusader, not a sadistic high-schooler. Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) is a popular girl, and we all know that popular girls in horror movies are up to some crazy-ass shit in terms of plotting to torment the outcasts. She and her friends make fun of Carrie in the infamous shower scene, and a well-meaning, sympathetic gym teacher named Miss Collins punishes them by giving them P.E., army-drill-nightmare-style detention, suspending them from school, and banning them from the prom (the chorus of Halloweenie zombies goes NOOOO! NOT OUR PROOOOOMMMM!).

I’d like to take a moment to say that this is an interesting comment on what happens when adults intervene in the lives of teenagers. I feel as though it almost always makes things infinitely worse. I’m not sure how to get around it, really — when your kid is being bullied, or you, as an adult, see cruelty to another human being, especially a child, you really feel as though it’s up to you to stop it (silence being consent, and all that). But the turning point in Carrie is surely when Miss Collins tries to remedy the situation by, essentially, using her power/authority to punish Chris, Sue Snell (the more sympathetic popular girl, who urges her boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom) and friends. It disrupts something, some natural order. In many true stories about high school bullying (the case of Lori Drew, for instance), things turn sinister when an adult steps in; maybe this is because the whole point of bullying is to gain power, and when it comes down to it, adults still have more power than high school bullies. Adults can take away important things, like prom, or a car, or money. And this makes a power-hungry 17-year-old girl very, very mad. Where before she might have been enjoying an admittedly delusional bit of fun, she is now out for blood.

SPOILER TIME.

As the prom gets underway, we reach a crescendo of teenage horrors; first, of course: that something you want very badly will be presented to you, everything will seem perfect, and then it will all be revealed to be a horrible prank which makes you look like a fool in front of everybody; second, that you will get pig’s blood all over your cute gown; third, that your batshit-crazy mother will be right (AGAIN). Oh, and then there’s also the fear of being trapped in school auditoriums — can’t forget that one!

The carnage is too awesome to describe. What’s scary about the auditorium/prom queen scene in Carrie is that you find yourself, after having spent so much time with poor Carrie White, actually enjoying her revenge. You want her to get back at all the assholes who have been so horrible to her (but not, of course, some of the innocent and halfway-innocent people who just happen to be enjoying their prom until —!); it’s a glimpse into what it’s like to exact revenge on bullies. It’s horrible, but you understand. Twenty-five years before Columbine, it’s an interesting comment at what slow, simmering rage can do (and the shitty sequel to Carrie is, of course, sub-titled The Rage; Brian de Palma’s absence is W.S. Merwinian in this film. Skip it). But it’s not over! After the prom, you still have to face your mom!

and after the prom it’s the after party

Carrie comes home to see that the house has been filled with lit candles. Her mother is hiding in the shadows. After Carrie bathes, her mother insists that they pray together, and tells Carrie about how she was conceived (marital rape — no wonder Margaret White is bonkers about coitus). Following this, Ol’ Marg stabs Carrie in the back — either believing Carrie to be possessed by the devil because of how she came into being, or because of her own pent-up rage at Carrie’s ability to live her life without the same oppressive fear of eternal judgment. Either way, Carrie unleashes her powers once again, bringing down the whole house on top of her mother and herself.

What if the things we wished for when we were desperate, vulnerable, and helpless — that we’d be avenged somehow, or that those who caused us suffering would suffer even worse — could happen? Willed into being by our thoughts? Mean girls find safety and power in numbers; there is a bond in a clique, and those groups make their own rules. They can cause change, they can alter the course of someone’s life, they can wreak havoc on another person’s psychology; however, they fail when their target is desperate, with nothing left to lose. This is true horror: alienating someone until they are somewhere between human and animal, fighting to survive, un-buffered by the comforts of others. He or she becomes a stranger, almost unrecognizable.

(follow this link to watch the entire film right now, via YouTube)

Tess Lynch can’t make anything explode by thinking about it, except your brain when she hits you with the longest article she’s written for Filmosophy in a long while.