Word: horror
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Before Elvira, before Morticia Addams, there was Maila Nurmi, the pioneering queen of sexy, spooky goth. She developed a following as Vampira, host of a short-lived namesake weekly 1954 TV show in which she introduced horror movies. Nurmi, who had a cameo in the classic Ed Wood film Plan 9 from Outer Space, faded from view, earning money by selling handmade jewelry. In 1989 she lost a $10 million lawsuit alleging that actress Cassandra Peterson, appearing as Elvira, had pirated her character. Nurmi...
...Most horror and monster stories follow a simple format: "What if [insert worst thing you can imagine]...?" In the junky, fitfully frightening, virally marketed new movie Cloverfield, the "if" is the worst thing you can remember. To wit: What if a previously unknown agent of evil were to destroy a world-famous New York City edifice? Not the World Trade Center, this time, but the Statue of Liberty - the Lady's head is tossed like a used beer can onto a lower Manhattan street. And the Statue decapitator is not a team of al-Qaeda operatives but a scaly...
...yourself, "Why are they doing something so stupid?", and the answer is, "Because they're in a horror/sf/disaster movie." And if you thought that Abrams - the creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost, and the writer-director of the spiffy if underperforming Mission: Impossible III - would produce a horror movie that was not just high-concept but high-IQ - you misjudge his faithfulness to a genre requiring that, in extremis, people act in a manner that's way below their intelligence levels...
...Susan Sontag described horror and science fiction as "the imagination of disaster." The innovation is in thinking the unthinkable, not creating rounded or even plausible characters. In fact, human idiocy is a crucial aspect of a genre that trades in mortal threat. If the characters holed themselves away in some safe place, they'd never meet the monster. They have to be at risk in order to escape, or get trampled, and for us to get a cheap but essential movie thrill...
...broader contours, Cloverfield evokes real-life horror. The Wall Street area already had its monster mash, on 9/11. So there's no way you can watch downtown panic and crumbling towers without it seeming a bit... familiar. Naturally the director says, he didn't want to diminish or exploit the residue of grief from 9/11. And, as the press notes inform us, "The visual effects teams even took care that the collapsing buildings in the film were older-looking structures that did not evoke the style of the structures that were attacked six years earlier." You're right, visual effects...