The Blind Side
Last Call is the first interactive horror movie which allows the audience to communicate with the on-screen victim and become responsible for the impending horror/happy ending on screen. To participate, audience members submit their mobile phone numbers when they buy a ticket. When a scene appears where the protagonist takes out their phone, the film’s controlling software contacts one of the audience to personally guide the victim to safety – should they choose. Every choice the viewer makes shapes the film’s fate, leading to a different film and outcome every time. While a film controlled by the audience blurs boundaries between game and film, surely it extinguishes the potential for horror by eliminating the fear of the hidden and the uncontrollable?
Paranormal Activity, one of the most profitable films ever made, centres on a young couple haunted by a supernatural presence in their home. The movie, presents found footage from a camera set up by the couple in their bedroom, which milks maximum amounts of tension from its claustrophobic setting. It doesn’t sound scary, but director Oram Peli manages to make it terrifying.
Horror has become a predictable genre but in this film, all it took was one bedroom door to move 12 inches unaided, nothing else, to strike fear into the heart of the viewer. The film’s fear factor relies on dislocation and disembodiement. We see bunches of keys flying around work surfaces, the opening of doors which ought to be shut, the switching of lights on and off and things that go bump in the night. Why is this so scary? The evidence points to the possibility – that the hidden is more believable than the much clichéd tangible bogeymen.
Michael Haneke’s Cache takes the notion of the hidden further. It is a film that delivers – not Scary Movie pseudo-fear, but real fear: scalp-prickling fear, without any attempt to define it. The film centre’s around a bourgeois French family who receive video cassettes from an anonymous source of featuring surveillance of their home. At first passive and harmless, but later accompanied by childlike crayon drawings, the tapes lead to questions about Georges’ childhood that seems to imply secrets are being kept. The mystery, of course, involves the identity of the person or persons sending the videos, but Cache real plays with the notion of the hidden through its title to themes such as hidden cameras and hidden guilt. There is no dramatic score, none of the traditional shocks or excitements, just an IV-drip-drip-drip of disquiet leading finally, to a convulsion of horror. It relies on that physiological unease that conjures up fear without it having to be thrust at us.
Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story. Boo!
References
Guardian – Paranormal Activity Review
Guardian – Culture
