Saturday, June 30, 2007

Thoughts on horror and scares

Heading back to LA on Thursday. Last stretch of packaging on Slaughter and Digger. Gonna have some announcements on those soon, but best wait til the news is public. Of course you understands. Gracias.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies. Mostly bad. Kind of tells ya something, especially because we have two on tap for the summer. Hopefully we can make something scary, and hopefully, good as well. Scary first. Scary is a good start.

One thing I’ve noticed about the best horror movies is that it’s the acting, as much as anything else, that makes them work and frightening. I mean, the concept and script of course play their parts, but it’s the communication of fear from the actors to the audience that creates fear. So I suppose that what that tells us is that the fear that we feel when watching a horror movie is sympathetic. Its received from the feeling of the characters, and the better their ability (the actors) to convey that feeling and make us believe it as well, the better the movie works.

I guess that plays into a lot of elements, the believability thing that is. If the effects are not believable, i.e. too schlocky, or the stunts are poorly staged, then it affects the overall believability of fear – not as much as bad acting (to me), but to some degree.

I hope both movies will have the acting and overall believability that’s so necessary to scare the pants off of the audience.

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