Will YouTube ruin moviemaking?

Do I get thrown out of the horror geek guild if I admit that I found Blair Witch boring? Jerks get lost, someone's standing in a corner, the end. At what point was I supposed to be scared?

And where was the witch?

Blair Witch tried to pull the same stunt Jaws did. Disorientation plus apprehension equals jitters. But at the end of Jaws, I was rewarded when I saw saw the object of my terror made flesh and bone. Blair Witch wussed out.

"You're supposed to use your imagination," my friends explained. But by that logic, why make a movie at all? Why not just tell people there's something lurking under their beds and leave it at that?

If you go to the trouble to make a monster movie, you owe your audience at least one good, long look at the monster. Bless you, M. Night Shyamalan.

At least Blair Witch was trying to be original. Two new movies - Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead - sound as if they were modeled after UGC. They're monster movies, as they'd be posted to YouTube. Their style is the exact opposite of stalker vision. Instead of seeing what the killer sees, you see what the victim sees.

In theory this intimacy should be scary, but in reality it's almost always annoying. Because in real life, you'd never get to see the monster. It either eats you when you least expect it, or while you're running the opposite direction.

Cloverfield has received positive reviews and Diary of the Dead is the work of a film legend. They may turn out to be individually brilliant. But in general Hollywood shouldn't try to emulate the style of amateur Internet content creators. Hollywood's advantage is that it has the financial resources and SFX knowhow to actually show us the monster. It ought to exploit that edge.

Image from the The Village and Fair Use rationale found on wikipedia.

Final Destination and the importance of insight

There are only two scary movies. The simplest is called Bad Things Happen Off the Beaten Path. It goes like this:

• Act One: Sin - People choose to stray from the beaten path.
• Act Two: Penance - People are punished for straying from the beaten path.
• Act Three: Redemption - The survivors run back to the beaten path.

During the first act of a movie like this, you find yourself screaming at the screen quite a bit. "Don't create super-smart sharks, you fools!" Or, "Don't sneak into the woods to have sex, you morons!" Or, "Don't go searching for a local legend named Dr. Satan, you dumbasses! Because he's not a legend. He's real. And you'll find him. And things aren't likely to get any better from there."

This first type of movie is a lesson written in blood, encouraging teenagers to follow the established norms of polite society.

The second type of horror movie is trickier, and perhaps impossible, to pull off. It's called Sometimes Bad Things Just Happen.

• Act One: Fate Appears - A mysterious force comes to town.
• Act Two: Fate Decides - The force randomly chooses a victim.
• Act Three: The Fight Against Fate - The victim battles back.

This second type of movie is a way for humans to try to understand the cancers and the car accidents and the horrible accidents that destroy and take lives. It is an explanation of the awfulness of fate.

Over and over, horror movies have tried and failed to mythologize around the randomness of life. Michael Myers was visited upon Laurie Strode for no particular reason, until the makers of the sequel concocted a relationship. Jaws picked Amity randomly, but the town fathers sinned when they decided to keep the tourist beaches open. Sidney Prescott was forced to atone not for her sins, but her mother's. The victims in countless zombie movies will never learn that the zombies were inadvertently created by, say, our own government.

So close, yet still so far away.

In a life of watching scary movies, I have only seen one film that ever really challenged either of these two essential structures. Final Destination. In it, a premonition helps teens escape a fatal accident. Several of the survivors die mysteriously, and the rest realize that by evading death, they have interrupted its grand design. They search for a way to escape their fates as death circles back to complete its plan.

Final Destination squeezes the villain of the latter type of movie into the structure of the former. And in doing so, it captures the very essence of human existence. We come into this world randomly, unable to choose either our parents or our station. And we are faced with only one real possible outcome. Nevertheless, we give great weight to our own choices, imagining that perhaps we'll find some way to rewrite the script of human existence.

It is unlikely that Final Destination was supposed to be a message move. But it is. I've watched it and its sequels a dozen times, always admiring the perfection of their concept, if not their execution. They lack the energy of The Descent and often waver between Black Christmas 1974-style tension and Black Christmas 2006-style gore.

But they have something more important. Insight. And that's why I can't get them out of my head.