It’s both a good and bad thing that horror films have shed (most of) their sketchy reputation and become very popular and big money makers.
Horror films, good and bad, (mostly good) old and new are my passion. This obsession has been ingrained in my DNA so long that I’m not sure when it began. I think it may have been from “The Magic Sword” a movie two of my (obviously) sadistic sisters took me to see. The movie is a grand adventure filled with terrifying images that haunted me for a LOOOONG time.
One particular sequence shows a handsome hero coming across a sexy young woman. (Not calling her a maiden cause she does NOT do anything maidelly)
He reacts as any (male) hero should by embracing her and quickly planning their wedding in his head. (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here.)
Things do NOT go as planned. As soon as he embraces her she transforms, and I don’t mean she slips into something less comfortable and more revealing.
There are many scary moments during the movie. In every case, putting my hands over my eyes just didn’t seem enough, so I hopped out of my seat and huddled in the area between my seat and the seat in front of me. This is not humorous hyperbole. I did that shit and it annoyed the hell out of my sisters.
Expository Sidebar: The sadistic nature of my sisters (the two living at home anyway) is well documented. Once at the pool one of my sisters offered to help me learn to swim. She said the best way to to this was for us to hold hands, count to three, and jump in the deep end. Sounded good to me. (At this point, I clearly didn’t understand the nature of True Evil. I learned, OH GOD how I learned.)
Here’s how it went:
- We held hands
- We counted to three
- She slung me into the pool and watched me sink to the bottom
She only jumped in to rescue me when I didn’t spontaneously learn to swim. In her words I just sat at the bottom, apparently waiting to die. (With sisters like that, death might have seemed a wonderful release.)
You may be thinking that this is more humorous hyperbole ( I LOVE using that word!) It isn’t. My sisters (particularly the youngest, seven years older than me) delighted in terrorizing me. Once they gave me a raw chicken heart, saying it was candy. (Not kidding, I WISH I was kidding)
Guess what, it wasn’t candy.
End of Expository Sidebar
The Magic Sword was probably my first experience with cinematic horror. I think it sparked something within me, as after that I started to seek out scary thrills in the most accessible media available at that time: TV
The best two choices for TV horror were “The Outer Limits” and “The Twilight Zone”.
The Outer Limits was straight up horror. It was too intense for me. The Twilight Zone offered a more measured approach to scares and was my choice for thrilling TV.
But one episode, actually one image, completely broke me. If you were alive then and watched it, it probably broke you too.
I remember my reaction to this terror very clearly: I got up, turned my back to the tv, and walked backwards to turn off the set.
Somehow, my brain translated all this trauma into a passion, an obsession. Even though I actively sought out horror material, I had great difficulty actually watching it. Reading horror was my great love as well, as it was much easier to just stop reading if stuff got too intense.
Enough backstory (actually probably far too much), let’s get to the movies for today: “Tinsman Road” and “Nightfall A Paranormal Investigation”.
Both films are ghost stories and that’s about where the similarities end. One if very, very well done, perhaps a masterpiece, the other is a self-indulgent black hole of cinematic waste. (Hope my feelings aren’t too vague here.)
Let’s start with the good one, and it’s very good.
This masterpiece of cinematic terror is in the glorious tradition of some of the supernatural horror greats: “The Haunting 1963”, “The Legend of Hell House”, and “Poltergeist 1982”
The story is very simple: Two young paranormal investigators in 1988 are probing into several seemingly related supernatural disturbances.
The film mixes conventional cinematic horror techniques and found footage. Amazingly, it mixes them very well. This is a movie that beautifully uses sound and imagery to lead you through a slowly building experience in terror.
Dialogue is sparse and to the point. The soundtrack is wonderful, accentuating and highlighting the subtle yet terrifying stuff appearing on the screen.
I simply can’t recommend this movie enough. Towards the end, something happened to me that hasn’t happened in years: the growing cinematic dread made the hair on my arms stand up. To me, that’s like a horror film orgasm, without the soiled socks.
Now the bad one. And it is very, very bad.
I have the highest level of admiration for anyone with the drive, passion, and vision to undergo the heavy labor of making a film.
But not this. This isn’t a movie. It’s a two hour long exercise in cinematic narcissism and self indulgence. It’s found footage done wrong in every conceivable way.
Spoilers ahead.
The premise of the movie is that a guy returns home from Hollywood to his childhood home and mother to seek answers for his missing sister. His sister vanished while walking in the deep woods.
His mother spends the whole film saying she feels the presence of his sister, how much she misses her, and how happy she is to have her son home.
The son tells him mom he’s making a documentary about angels. This makes her very happy.
The entire movie, every shot is shaky, badly framed, and completely devoid of any relevant narrative content.
If you make the incredibly poor choice for watching this film, you will find yourself asking several questions:
- Why am I subjecting myself to this when I could be pulling my toenails off?
- Why is he spending so much time filming his own face?
- Why is he repeatedly filming his mother, who is saying the same things over and over?
- Why is he walking in the woods, again filming his own face?
- Why is there not one, single solitary decent well composed shot?
- Why am I watching this film?
At two hours, it feels like two hundred. The pacing is non existent. Nothing of consequence happens until around one hour and forty minutes into the film. Then while our hero is in the woods he sees a sketchy guy and we immediately know he’s the killer. There’s twenty more minutes of our hero filming his own face while tramping through the woods.
Those are the two movies for today. Tomorrow we’ll do something a bit different. We’ll look at several incarnations of the same movie: “Night of The Living Dead”. Again, there’s good stuff and very, very bad stuff.
See you then.
