Ignorance and Immediacy

I don't know if there are other discussions about this topic, but in trying to find them I realized I wasn't even sure what terms to search for, so...

The other day I was talking to a sometimes-poster from the site about my favorite horror movie ever, The Thing. Yeah, I know, I'm a real iconoclast. Anyway, I was saying how I thought, despite the amazing practical effects work on display, the real acheivement of the film is the level of intensity it maintains for the last hour or so. It's just relentless, right up to the final scene. The blood test might be the standout, but things just keep getting more and more desperate even after that. So I started wondering how Carpenter pulled that off. Here's my theory:

The Thing is able to create such a breathless pace despite it's claustrophobic structure by largely dispensing with the "lag time" most horror flicks have where we the audience are waiting for the characters to figure out what we know. I think it's this section that kills a lot of horror for me (and admittedly, I'm not that much of a fan). You know, the parts of the movie where the characters are still trying to come to grips that there's an actual monster on the loose, even though you, having bought a ticket to a monster movie, were ready to accept it before the credits started to roll. Or where we've seen Jason murder a couple of campers, but the main characters still think that their friends are just screwing around. Or the 45 minutes of the family griping at each other before the mutant rape that we came for starts.

I understand the idea behind this time is to build our dread for the characters while they are still oblivious to the danger, but there is a distancing effect when we know so much more than them for any length of time. Which brings me back to The Thing. Yes, we know from the (unnecessary) opening shot that a UFO is involved, but that doesn't tell us much, and really, the guys move past it fairly quickly as well. The difference is from the kennel scene onwards. While we see a longer version of it, the characters witness the first transformation along with us, and are very rapidly brought up to speed on it's capabilities. I feel like in most horror movies, they'd spend the entire second act getting them to this point, with the audience several steps ahead of them. I'm glad that they didn't have a half hour of us watching the dogThing stalking people and infecting them while the rest of the crew is none the wiser.

I guess the short version is, the part of the story where the characters all realize what they're up against and have to start figuring out what to do about it comes earlier than in most horror films. And this allows for a more sustained visceral response. Maybe I just prefer the horror of not knowing what's going to happen next to the horror of waiting for the inevitable.

Anyone have thoughts, or other movies that keep the audience and characters in same shoes re: perceiving the threat for the majority of the the runtime?

This is exactly what I'm talking about, and where The Thing stands out from my admittedly limited knowledge of horror movies.

Hills did a good job of portraying the as real people, but it did a bad job of letting us know they were being targeted by malicious forces from the get-go and taking them 45 minutes to catch up.

Aliens is an interesting case. Sure, they know what they're up against, but they don't realize how severe a threat it is until fairly deep into the film. We know from the start that it's going to be a lot tougher than they think, so there is still that disconnect (in attitude if not knowledge). I'd say it's a case of the lag-time being saved by nice atmosphere and characterization.

28 Days Later is another mixed-bag. First, they go with the monkey-opening, which I think is unnecessary. Maybe they thought that leaving it unexplained would be too derivative of Romero, but if it ain't broke...and besides, I think the later, vague "it's something in the blood" explanation is enough to establish that it's a biological (non-supernatural) infection but leave it frighteningly mysterious. But then they go from the expository opening right into another opening in an entirely different vein, where we are seemingly supposed to share Jim's confusion. It rights itself fairly quickly, but I can't help but think that the first 15 minutes would be even more effective if the monkey lab part were removed.

I guess the pure embodiment of this idea would be The Blair Witch Project. I wasn't that wild about it, but we know if anything less than the protagonists about what is going on throughout. Edit: Mattioli's already on it.


Looks like Feast is heading for the Netflix queque. I'd heard mixed reviews, but it sounds like it's my kind of horror, at least in structure.

Well, we could go on a pretty huge Lost tangent here, but I agree and disagree. It did lose something of that immediacy, but that was already happening anyway, and inevitable given the show's structure. With the large cast and constant flashbacks, we were bound to get more information than they can put together. The cool thing about the flashbacks is that they can tease or clued us in on connections or things that would otherwise seem trivial (i.e. Locke passes over some detail that would seem trivial if it weren't for Sawyer's flashback last week...); the downside is it's constantly widening that divide between our perceptions and theirs.

I'm intrigued by the flash-forward, but it could end up hurting my enjoyment of the show. As you may have been able to surmise, I have a hard time forgetting outside things while I'm watching something. I suppose this thread isn't much more than complaining about plot spoilers that the filmmakers include in their own film.

Actually, that's something I was going to say earlier. I wish there was some person whose taste I trusted enough to just have them say "Go see No Country For Old Men ", and I'd say cool and go watch it with absolutely no foreknowledge. Alas, most of my friends still think Boondock Saints is a masterpiece. This was the great thing about cable back in the day; a movie would just start and I'd watch because hey, it's a free movie. Maybe it still is like that for some people, but I don't watch it anymore and what with Chud and all I always seem to know what I'm getting into.

Oh, and as far as Hostel goes, I think it has quite a bit of lag-time before Paxton figures how much shit he's in. This was compounded by the marketing trumpeting the concept beforehand. Maybe it's unfair to hold that against the movie, but still I didn't like it. Although I have to think that I would have a totally different take on the movie had I gone in completely "cold".

The Exorcist lies somewhat outside of my "theory", as I haven't seen it since I was 13. I don't remember there being a particularly long portion before they find out what's wrong with Reagan, but that could just be because the later portions are so memorable. What I was talking about applies more to traditional slasher/monster movies than body horror or other subgenres anyway.

We actually avoided specifics; if you consider knowing that they play with the structure and POV at the end of the season a spoiler, then sorry.

Halloween was thrown out earlier as an example of lag-time done right, and I'd have to agree, although like The Exorcist I haven't seen it since I was a teenager. So what I want to know is, how does Carpenter make it work? Are there specific tricks, or traps that other filmmakers fall into that result in the characters' ignorance producing tedium rather than dread?

Agree 100% re: irony. The lack of it is one of many weapons in The Thing's arsenal. It's another way of creating the kind of disconnect I get when I know more about what the characters are facing than they do.

However, I think there's a significant difference between "build-up" and "lag-time". In The Thing, there is a lot of screentime before the creature is revealed, but the only bit of info that we are ahead of the characters on is the presence of the UFO (which I think detracts from the film, but only slightly). But aside from that, their first glimpses of the creature (the devastation of the Norwegian camp, the charred corpse, and finally the doglien) are ours as well, and that keeps us tuned in with their reactions and experiences, such that even 30 minutes after the "big reveal" we're still going "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" right along with them.

This is not the case in films like Friday the 13th, Hostel, or The Hills Have Eyes, where we are tipped off to the presence and nature of the threat and then the film reverts to the perspectives of characters who are still clueless. In Hostel, for example, Paxton's investigation into the torture farm and abduction were just tedious for me because we'd already experienced the same realization with the other characters (was he named Josh? He seemed like a Josh). Now, maybe if the characters were anybody I cared about instead of annoying twats, that sequence would have been an excrutiating exercise in mounting tension, but as it was I was checking my watch waiting for a new development.

I think a lot of these movies are hurt by the filmmakers wanting to "open big" or scare the audience from the outset, which causes them to tip their hand too early and distance the audience from the protagonists they're supposed to be identifying with.

Hitchcock could pull this kind of thing off, no question there. There was a filmmaker who always knew what he was telling the audience, and their expected response. Rope in particular is built around the audience knowing more than most of the characters.

I think there's a line between the audience knowing that there is a bomb under the table and already having witnessed a scene where a bomb under a table blows some redshirts up.

Death Proof definitely flirts with this due to its unconventional structure. I didn't find it to be very scary, but man those stunts were nuts.

Halloween is the kryptonite of my theory or whatever it is. It does all of the things I don't like in other horror movies and makes it work. I can't pinpoint any specifc things Carpenter did to exploit the character's limited POV, so maybe it's just that it was my introduction to slashers, and I didn't yet know exactly what to expect.