So guys after what can only be described as one whirlwind of a week, I'm back with a video for your viewing pleasure or displeasure depending on your inclination towards my annoying voice. Today I've put up a review of Daniel Radcliffe's new film "Escape from Hogwarts"... Pardon me, I meant "The Woman in Black." Comments and feedback are much appreciated! Enjoy!
Thank God! The same friends who discuss cults were talking about this Daniel Radcliffe guy today, and if it weren't for your blog, I would have had no idea what was going on! Saving me not once but twice from sitting around going "errr", man, you are my hero.
ReplyDeleteIn all seriousness... Well, I may be seeing this later on in the week, and in that case I will try to keep my comments brief now and expand once I have seen the film and can compare notes. If there are as many jumpy bits as you mention, you should probably warn Rach I'll be grabbing her arm the entire movie and she might change her mind about going with me.
I looked up this Luton Bus Effect you mentioned, and got lots of articles on National Rail and London Luton Airport and finally fell upon a gaming website that explained the Luton Bus effect as about fear stemming from anticipation, not the reveal, which in turn lead to me reading more about Mark Gatiss (yay, using blogs as procrastination for my work for tomorrow!). This story takes places in the late Victorian period/Edwardian era, right? I know it wasn't written then, but the English lit student in me is a bit perplexed by that. To me, historical fiction usually tries to be in keeping with the literature of its intended time. So, in the 1880s, Gothic fiction was just going through its big revival (Dorian Grey, Dracula, Turn of the Screw, etc.), so this sense, as you say, of being suffocated in dread and atmosphere would have been apt. But... this Luton Bus working sounds like it would be decidedly early Gothic (a century earlier). And even those authors got tired of it pretty quickly, just like you did. Have you read Northanger Abbey by any chance? I realize it's probably not your thing, but it pokes fun at the Gothic fiction of the 1790s (where so much of the terror was in the anticipation), and it parodies it by having these huge passages where the heroine finds a spooky chest in a spooky room and can't open it and it must hold a secret and there are scary noises and ooooh and there are mysterious papers and the candle goes out and oh-so-creepy...and then the papers are old receipts. It sounds as though you were fed up with misdirection and, well, Northanger Abbey is about being fed up with that. And then the Gothic horror genre moved on to bigger and better things after the early 19th century, so I would have thought that this film wouldn't get stuck in that... But I may be getting the Luton Bus effect all wrong. In any case, I am now really interested in seeing the film just to see how it fits into the Gothic genre trajectory. [End lit student's rantings and ravings about Gothic fiction.]
Rocking chairs, toys, weird paintings? Are you sure this wasn't Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Did the UK get that Canadian (!) tv programme in the 90s? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jitg-3xbmKU Case in point)
Err, it cut me off...
ReplyDeleteI have already told you of my inclinations towards your voice, so I will say no more about that and will instead discuss my bewilderment at the loss of your luscious locks. Isn't your nose lonely without your facial hair?
I have always wanted to ask a British person how to pronounce Ciarán Hinds. Thank you for enlightening me.
Well, now I'm ready to be disturbed and seeing whether I agree that Daniel did a serviceable job. And I am intrigued to see this house. And I will probably pester you for details about the original and how the motivations of certain characters were changed. You have been warned.
Sidebar: Have you seen the BBC's North and South? I doubt it, since it's a period drama, but it has been immensely popular in the States (among the female viewing population at least) and the stills you showed of Daniel Radcliffe were shockingly similar in costume and lighting and angle to stills from that film, to the point where it looked as though they were *trying* to make him look like Richard Armitage and thus steal into the hearts of those already won over by the gorgeous Richard.
I sincerely hope that your Muppet video includes clips of your rendition of Man or Muppet.
And now I will stop rambling and return to my reading. Hope you had a great weekend!
Ha.... I seriously think this film should come with a health warning for Rach.
ReplyDeleteWell Mark Gatiss made a BBC Four series on the history of horror in film and it was absolutely brilliant. If memory serves me right the Luton Bus effect originated from a black-and-white film called "Cat People". It was seen as a revolution at the time because of the aforementioned technique. It is indeed linked to anticipation rather than the "monster" reveal, for want of a better phrase, but when we do get a reveal it turns out to be something far more ordinary than our mind would've wanted us to believe. For instance, a cat jumping at someone or a door slamming... In any other context these occurrences wouldn't scare us to the degree they do in horror films due in no small part to the anticipation that is prevalent within horror, which feeds one's own fear.
I do see where you're coming from with regards to historical fiction but I don't necessarily believe authors need to be constrained by past literacy tools in order to tell a period story. Modern day examples would probably include Sebastian Faulks or Michael Faber. I think, as I said in the review, this film relies too much on a technique that should only be used to supplement a story rather than define it... If you compare this version to the original mini-TV series, that show went for something all-together more sinister, which was foreboding and dread. To some degree I'd argue that the original TV series is probably one of the scariest horror stories I've ever witnessed. I'm not saying that some of the jump scares weren't effective but I do feel it cheapens the experience somewhat when the Watkins was throwing them around right, left and centre.
I've unfortunately not watched North and South. Is it really good? I seem to be watching way too many tv shows at the moment lol.
Oh dear, is Rach as jumpy as I am?
ReplyDeleteI will check out the Mark Gatiss series you linked me to. And thanks for explaining the Luton Bus effect, I really only could get info on it from this gaming forum... I don't know much about films at all, but I have done a lot of work on Gothic horror in nineteenth-century literature, with Freud and the uncanny, vampires and Frankensteins and working-class revolt, blood-soaked females and the French Revolution etc., so I'd be curious to learn more about how horror plays out on the screen and not just on the page.
I'll try to nuance what I said--I agree, I don't think authors need to be constrained to that period's literary techniques when writing a piece of historical fiction. Not at all. I was trying to say it was weird to me, while an over-reliance on that horror tactic might have been "acceptable" to me if it was in the early Gothic mode/time frame (because it could have been written off as historical accuracy at least), it seemed strange to revert to a mode that had been deemed limited/ineffective. I'm not overly familiar with Faber, but I believe he set works in previous times but wrote in a postmodern style, which to me makes more sense, because he takes good elements from previous periods--the Dickensian and Eliot-esque bits, the finest aspects--and adds to them new layers, with Freud, Marx, et al. That, to me, would seem a sort of progress in literature/art. But to take the bad bits of previous periods--the bits already deemed flawed--seems like regression. It wasn't that I was trying to say it would have been better to stick strictly to late 19th century literary styles, but that I just wouldn't get why they'd let the work turn into what sounds like an early Gothic piece that, as you say, relies on a certain horror technique to define the story rather than add to it. But I'm probably not making any sense (again).
Hah! I can't answer that last question. I am incredibly biased. It's based on a novel by the author I study, so obviously I'm going to tell you it's one of the most beautiful love stories ever written. But if you want to get a sense of Manchester industrialists and working-class strife in the nineteenth century, it's also good for that.