In Contention

Tag: The Blair Witch Project

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 horror films of all time

    It’s Halloween week and since we are a movie site, we are under some kind of unspoken obligation to provide our dear readers with a list to fit the festivities. You may remember a similar list popping up two years ago, in which all current contributors voiced an opinion and the final results represented a collective agreement. Since I was not a contributor at that time, Tapley asked me to offer up a new take this year.

    A little backstory on my relationship with scary movies seems appropriate. I was raised by two Christian parents who were very protective of the images that I put into my head. When I was six years old, I was playing at a friend’s house when he suggested we watch “Beetle Juice.” Knowing that it was a potentially objectionable title, I called my mom and asked if it was okay and she said it was not. Kids being kids, we watched it anyway.

    What did I think of it? It scared the crap out of me. So much so, that I understood why my mom didn’t want me to watch it and actively avoided scary images on my own free will from then on. When one or two infiltrated me, such as “Ghostbusters,” I was always a little rattled. As I’ve grown, I’ve only become slightly less sensitive to these types of images and only actively seek out scary films if I hear there is a lot more going on to make it worthwhile.

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  • ‘Paranormal’ experience and thoughts on horror

    Paranormal ActivityI finally got around to “Paranormal Activity” last night, which has been scaring audiences nationwide for about a week now.  The film sat on a shelf for two years, terrifying Steven Spielberg, awaiting a release of some sort, primed for a remake at one point, and finally made its way into the marketplace last week with an innovative, experimental distribution strategy.  All the inside baseball was covered well in this 9/20 John Horn piece in the Los Angeles Times.

    I wasn’t going to write about it.  It’s certainly not an awards film, of course, but I just kind of wanted to have a good time at a midnight screening and let it be that.  But I was still wide awake at 3:45am last night, demanding my girlfriend to stay awake with me on Skype (which actually made things creepier given the cinematographic composition of a Skype video chat).

    The film is repetitive on one hand, but that repetition lulls the viewer into a sense of foreboding that’s hard to measure.  I’m interested in seeing the alternate endings, especially the original, which seems more in keeping with the film’s insistence on a grounded scare.  But the Spielberg-suggested denouement (unfortunately featured in the trailer, leaving its truly jarring moment something to be anticipated rather than freshly experienced) is incredibly unsettling.

    I wouldn’t say filmmaker Oren Peli fully capitalized on the potential of his concept.  Like “The Blair Witch Project” (a film to which “Paranormal Activity” often finds itself compared), there are elements (specifically a moment involving a charred photograph) that feel forced and even betray a sense of anxiety on the part of the filmmakers (who do a remarkable job of letting practicality serve as visceral terrorist for the most part).  But for $20,000, it’s an impressive accomplishment all around.  And it got me thinking on the genre.

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  • Remembering 1999, the movie year that was

    Brad Pitt in Fight ClubLast year I dedicated one of the first formal installments of The Lists to the films of 1999, one of the most electrifying slate of films to come along since Hollywood’s epic 1939 peak 60 years prior.  There was an embarrassment of riches, truly, great work from the classic masters, eye-opening new work from future masters and everything in between.

    There was exceptional independent filmmaking on display as well as impressive studio offerings.  Envelope-pushing was the norm while formulaic studies also seemed curiously refined.  As the century drew to a close, it seemed, in some ways, that 1999 would come to represent everything that made the medium so special for its first 100 hundred years.

    Over at Movie City News, Noah Forrest has dedicated a new column to the discussion.  He can be forgiven, I think, for twisting in the winds of indecision when it comes to pegging a personal best film from 1999, but he also offers a number of other superlatives to honor the films and performances from the year.

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