/grim/ - Death's Waiting Room

>>261

I think that the episodic format of V/H/S really lends itself to the horror genre in that sense. A skilled director can call to mind and then exploit a particular fear in a short amount of time, and different people are scared of different things. This was particularly well-done in the zombie episode in V/H/S/2. The bicyclist's character only lasts for, what, two minutes before getting bit, with only the one conversation with his girlfriend to set up the character? But it does an adequate enough job that the audience's investment in the character is quickly and brutally shattered when he "dies" right at the beginning.

Another movie I recently watched, Megan is Missing, went entirely the other direction. More than half the movie was spent trying to get the audience invested in the two main characters, and in forty or so minutes the movie still failed to accomplish this, which made the ending rather unimpressive IMO.

A lot of people tell me how horrifying Megan is Missing is because it's so 'real', but really I think it's a perfect example of the worst aspects of trends in modern horror genres - found footage and torture porn. The movie both clumsily attempts seem so 'real' and blunt, and then exploit this with gratuitous violence. It's a cheap recipe for disturbing people that aren't used to sheer violence, but for the trained eye of a seasoned horror film fan and /b/ lurker, it ironically destroys the suspension of disbelief that a movie creates. The audience knows that the movie is fake, but allows itself to become invested in the rules of the movie, but if a movie fails to set up its own rules and aesthetic and rather attempt to mimic reality, it has failed as a movie. Quintin Tarantino understands this very well, for example.

I still recommend giving it a watch just to see how shitty it is, though.

Also, succubus-tan is mai waifu.

>pulse

Here you go: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2adecce3b7b6f7153ea584b7406202abc7d4aa46&dn=kairo+pulse+2001+japanese+w+eng+subs&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337

>>292

I agree, I felt sort of the same way about it. That's why I liked the scene so much. I felt some actual sympathy towards the succubus, but at the same time it was pretty understandable that the guy would be too terrified to get hard. I think /monster/ would like that episode a lot.

Yeah, Pulse is one of the most unique horror films I've seen. The whole movie is shot with such an ugly color palette, like the whole thing is one beige late-90's computer case, that really contributes to the bleak atmosphere of it. That and the way that most of the characters die from committing suicide is one of my favorite parts about it, and as you said how they kind of just resign themselves to death really dispassionately. It's rare to find a movie that can shock even regular horror connoisseurs, and in this case the death scenes are all done so differently from how most horror movie deaths are.

There's a certain jouissance in horror that comes from seeing a death on-screen - a terror and joy at seeing your innermost fears that horror films capture come to their climax in death and suffering. But in recent years there's been a trend in torture porn and found footage that either tries to force this jouissance (torture porn) or tries to deny it entirely and present something as being very "real" and serious (found footage). In fact, this is exactly what "Megan is Missing" did. But "Pulse" is interesting for managing, in my opinion, to both reject the joy and preserve the terror in a horror death scene. It keeps its filmic aspect but also feels all too real. But maybe that's just because its message of alienation and simulation is even more relevant now than when it came out.

And then on the other end of things, on the torture porn side of horror, there's New French Extremity. Like "Pulse", the films that have come out of this genre are significant to me for being one of the few cases where a film has managed to shock me. Have you seen Martyrs or Inside?