Horror movie
For about 6 months now i've been exploring this idea in my head of a short horror film. Like any good horror film in it's beginnings, there's no real plot. There's just a lot of imagery in my head.
In the past when I initially thought about this film, I envisioned a world with rust just everywhere. Rust covereing everything.
Second, I envisioned creatures. Again like the plot, there's no real point to the creatures. They exist, and that's about all I can come up with. That and what they look like/do. In the initial thought process I imagined a wall stretching, then slightly crumbling or maybe even exploding with multiple humanoid creatures crawling out of it, as the main character walks by, as if to pass a bum: unpleasent but not uncommon.
Oh yeah, and the other definite is a main character. My first ideas that I tried to think up were that he suffered from insomnia, or some form of sleep-related problem, and that he worked for a late-night/early-hours radio show/program, so that he'd have to walk from home to work and back at night time, when his city appeared dead and abandoned. Desolate except for those few and unexpected scurries of human life: maybe a drunkard, a bum, some nutcase, a car dragging it's way into bed or screeching down the street for aparently no reason. Vague, brief, and scattered life if anything: the sort that would shock you the moment you discovered it at that hour. That was the idea, anyway. After a while of not thinking about the film, i've since just broken down to A) Main character, B) Male. That's pretty much it.
The 'point' to the film, as you would have it (since it doesn't have a plot yet...) is atmosphere. It's to create a feeling through various ways, of which I'd wholly approach speeding up and slowing down the film, filming on different types of film (B&W, different grades, filters, etc.) and cutting it up to fuck in post-production.
I reckon the soundtrack would actually be quite vitally important as well.
A few inspirations are Silent Hill and the film Begotten.
So here I go at a first real attempt at trying to piece together what this film would look like...
...I've no idea yet. I've just got images in my head. Like introducing a creature in the film, but the main character pays no attention to it like it's not there. The creature jumps and skips about as the film is cut up and sped up in various ways, like he's hyper-jumping or warping from spot to spot, and...
Well I have no definite idea for what the creatures look like, but one idea I had was a man half-naked, and the entirety of his head would be a gi-normour mouth that would just bear teeth. Not even like, deformed or monster or point teeth. Just a giant human mouth with lips drawn tautly back.
There's always something quite unnerving in disproportioning human parts. Just as well, it's unnerving to leave out parts that should A) be there, or even more so, B) have to be there, like a mouth, or going even further, an entire face. If you wipe clear someone's entire face in a convincing manner (i.e. don't just put a tight cloth over their head), then it has potential to get to you. Even more so, you don't need to just 'wipe' their face. You can build or destroy over it. You can carve out of it and make it a pit or cavity, a recess. Just the same you can pile muck onto it, or there's a third alternative. Just alter it. Burn it, and it creates this changed texture. Acid-burns, maybe a beating gone savage. Of course, you can always do all this stuff in an extremely cheesy and campy manner so that it makes people want to laugh instead of actually believeing the face, or even the story behind the face. It's kind of sad but true in that you need to make it look like a detail has a story behind it in order to be believeable, but I have always critisized prop, makeup, and costume people of almost forcing people to think about the story behind an object or person. Accurate subtelty is perfection, in my eye. Don't overdo it, unless you love gore.
Of which, I don't. It's pointless. Gore should only be called upon to serve a point (a plot, a story, an explanation, an idea, etc.), and never the other way around.
By the way, most of that huge paragraph about burned faces and whatnot wasn't about what I had in mind for my creatures. Most of my creatures would be unnerving from post-production and editing in their movement. All the same, I had that spiel to let the reader know that cosumtes/makeup/props still play a vital role in the creature. No dogs with shark-fins tied on their backs and then "editing magic".
I'd be more comfortable if I were to explore different ideas for the main character, but I definately know that much of my passion for making this film comes indeed from night time hours, almost exclusively at that. So keeping in the same vein, I think it'd be a good idea to keep the movie at least somewhat night-based. Or even further from that, include a decisive amount of darkness (literally) in the film. Dark halls. Maybe from there having a wall groan outward as someone pushes out from it like putting a plastic film over the wall and then having someone lean into it, pushing on it. Maybe the film would burst and figures would drop, even pour out of it, covered in blood or mud or whatever liquid-whatever, as more and more just kept pouring out. And not zombie-figures. Figures missing arms, legs, with their faces non-existant and their entire bodies covered in massive scars, cuts, burns. Their skin one cohesive texture and 'pattern', with no hair. What am I getting at? What is this vision? Is there an ispiration? (Does there have to be?)
I could invade the entire screen, or the main characters entire field of vision with an oncoming flood of creatures, soaking up every corner and drop of free sight until he becomes encumbered with their weight and enveloped within them as them crowd around him reaching all over him and then in the blink of an eye take EVERY living thing away. All of it. I would have the main character go outside where no animal nor man nor creature exists. In a non-atmospheric world, he would explore neighbors' houses, go into the super-market midday in the middle of the week with all lights on and no one there. And then, creeping out of the cracks in the floor tiles, soaking through the rust in the pipes, choking the air in the ventilation systems, I would have the atmosphere grow back again like an angry mold: slow, yet growing with a passion. Rust would boil and pour over surfaces, covering and dirtying everything. It would come out of the cracks, out of the darkness in the shelves, and hang off of the ceilings like a stalker always watching, every ready to ambush but every so unnerving because it does not strike at the perfect time, instead sifting about and churning itself over. While the atmosphere battled with reality, creatures would spawn but still be weak as if still fresh from birth and maturing within minutes. They would writhe on the floor, barren and vulnerable, and then instantly suck them into a wall, perhaps even leaving a black stain where they had been consumed by the wall.
Floors would sway and buckle, and groan and churn about, as well as walls. Everything that was stable, inanimate, and was a building would be prone to morphing and mutating, swaying and writhing about, sometimes bursting, sometimes swaying, sometimes lashing, sometimes dropping or erecting or twisting up over and over. Wooden beams would bend out of walls like wires and metal sheets & beams would flow like water ripples. And then.
It would stop.
And the pattern would continue with new problems and twists and happenings and all that. New creatures would come out, and different settings would produce different atmospheres perhaps. Wallpaper-peeling houses would be strewn with rust that looked as if the black plague had gone through the house coughing up it's innards in a passing detour, and the corpses has been sucked into the house, giving it the character of their depseration and decay.
Woods and forrests would have ruins. The environments would always be hostile towards man in some form. The cities would hold them hostage and the woods and lakes and mountains would attack them and their image. All that man had created would hold him hostage, and all that he deterred from would attack him. The trees would burrow their roots into the foundations of homes and destroy them in a wrangled web. They would make their hate visible through the mess of roots and branches and vines that would rip apart the homes of the living.
The cities would be left on their own, as they were the true prisons, punishments, torture-fields.
Have I stumbled upon a theme? Perhaps even a plot?
No... just a... vision. A vision where everything that man knows and all the places man goes is hostile, will attack him, will hold him hostage, is not to be trusted, is to be feared, is out to get him, and does spend it's entire existance filled with man's hatred, seeking him out and waiting for him to come into their hunting grounds.
A world litered with creatures that just lurk about, skulking here and there with no aim and no purpose. They exist only to exist in their own, indescribable ways. They bubble about and then recoil, and the ebb and tide and flow and churn and boil and receed and back and forth and so on until they catch someone and have them killed. Do they want to kill someone? It's hard to say. Their entire existance is baffling and is a question that if answered would only spawn a thousand other questions, most likely.
So we have a world that hates you wherever you go, yet the creatures don't care. A paradox to a point. Hopefully unnerving.
Perhaps a scene where the main character is in pitch-black room, with only a flashlight. There's a generator or a pump in the room, still chugging. Why is it still working? What's it powering? Who's using it? Is anyone using it? Why? On either side of the room is any number of doors. One would creep open, in a number of inches. Creep open so that you would only notice it jut out a bit if your eye caught it, because the generator was too loud. The MC would notice it, and then the moment he did so every door would fly out, indeed even some bursting off their hinges, and spew out a hundred figures running at full-spring into the other doors. Their entire purpose would be to run from one door to the next as if in a frenzied riot of fear. Some would bash into each other, and then crawl or push themselves off with their feet into some door. Then all the doors would slam shut (or not at all if they came off the hinges), the figures would full-out disappear beyond the door(way)s, and it would be the sound of the generator again. It would only happen once.
Balancing atmosphere is a delicate and crucially important thing, because it's easily broken if you just pound the audience with action after happening after special effects scene. You can just as easily bore or unimpress them if you just give them silent or quiet moments of cinematography or scenes of no-action. It's timing that is the glue that holds this balance together.
All the same, I can't just present a world with a bunch of creatures and then show the word 'fin' at the end. I have to make it obviously clear that the creatures have no point, and that because they have no point they basically complete their own question of existance. Creating an air of mystery can aid this, but I know the creatures can create their own air of mystery on their own, without any extra mystery added. I would just have to make their world so ridiculously abstract and irrational that the viewer has no hope but to abandon making sense of it. The viewer would have to succumb to the fact that he can't explain it, and that there will always be a question about it, or some mystery, or something never truely understood even at a superficial level. "Were those burn-marks?" "I dunno, were they?" "I know those were roots, but... there's still something about them that isn't root-like..."
Don't even get me started about funding this monstrosity of an idea. The good thing is that it would be a short film, and that it would have no need to be any kind of real length. This would aid financial issues in that the grand scale of the film couldn't sustain anything but a short film. The special effects and heavy post-production would require the film to be kept short for budget reasons. In addition, I would prefer to use outdated and even damaged film to make the movie, so that could additionally help cut costs, or it could even make them worse, due to my desired film having to be specially made in a lab or shipped in from a far-away lab.
Perhaps a lone creature spasming about in the middle of the worlds or a field, contorting at unhuman speed, wil flailing arms flying about in a painfully tense dance of pure discomfort and uncontrolable pain, cutting down the high grass in the field in swathes, and exploding into the wood of trees as his arms numbly break into their bark, maybe even breaking his hand but he can't feel it because he's in too much pain, contorting and stretching in... you get the picture. He would destroy as his primal reaction to his hatred, or his pain, or his whatever. Even I don't know what it is. I think that's makes my creatures unforgetable, interesting, and dare I say it, appealing. They are like a core of myself that is a part of me, and I have drilled a well into that part of myself, and from time to time the tap it turned on to let drip out that raw and inexplicable primal essence that makes up myself.
Okay so you get the idea. Maybe I should lay off for now. I'm going to go see what my stomach's aching for (get it) in the freshly-stocked fridge (get it now?).
Leave some comments: let me know if i've just got an idea here, or I don't know what i'm in for, or how you want to tell me how crazy I am, or how my writing stile isn't up to your taste or how it acctually tastes like a $10 burger when you havn't eaten since last night's dinner. Something.
See you.
In the past when I initially thought about this film, I envisioned a world with rust just everywhere. Rust covereing everything.
Second, I envisioned creatures. Again like the plot, there's no real point to the creatures. They exist, and that's about all I can come up with. That and what they look like/do. In the initial thought process I imagined a wall stretching, then slightly crumbling or maybe even exploding with multiple humanoid creatures crawling out of it, as the main character walks by, as if to pass a bum: unpleasent but not uncommon.
Oh yeah, and the other definite is a main character. My first ideas that I tried to think up were that he suffered from insomnia, or some form of sleep-related problem, and that he worked for a late-night/early-hours radio show/program, so that he'd have to walk from home to work and back at night time, when his city appeared dead and abandoned. Desolate except for those few and unexpected scurries of human life: maybe a drunkard, a bum, some nutcase, a car dragging it's way into bed or screeching down the street for aparently no reason. Vague, brief, and scattered life if anything: the sort that would shock you the moment you discovered it at that hour. That was the idea, anyway. After a while of not thinking about the film, i've since just broken down to A) Main character, B) Male. That's pretty much it.
The 'point' to the film, as you would have it (since it doesn't have a plot yet...) is atmosphere. It's to create a feeling through various ways, of which I'd wholly approach speeding up and slowing down the film, filming on different types of film (B&W, different grades, filters, etc.) and cutting it up to fuck in post-production.
I reckon the soundtrack would actually be quite vitally important as well.
A few inspirations are Silent Hill and the film Begotten.
So here I go at a first real attempt at trying to piece together what this film would look like...
...I've no idea yet. I've just got images in my head. Like introducing a creature in the film, but the main character pays no attention to it like it's not there. The creature jumps and skips about as the film is cut up and sped up in various ways, like he's hyper-jumping or warping from spot to spot, and...
Well I have no definite idea for what the creatures look like, but one idea I had was a man half-naked, and the entirety of his head would be a gi-normour mouth that would just bear teeth. Not even like, deformed or monster or point teeth. Just a giant human mouth with lips drawn tautly back.
There's always something quite unnerving in disproportioning human parts. Just as well, it's unnerving to leave out parts that should A) be there, or even more so, B) have to be there, like a mouth, or going even further, an entire face. If you wipe clear someone's entire face in a convincing manner (i.e. don't just put a tight cloth over their head), then it has potential to get to you. Even more so, you don't need to just 'wipe' their face. You can build or destroy over it. You can carve out of it and make it a pit or cavity, a recess. Just the same you can pile muck onto it, or there's a third alternative. Just alter it. Burn it, and it creates this changed texture. Acid-burns, maybe a beating gone savage. Of course, you can always do all this stuff in an extremely cheesy and campy manner so that it makes people want to laugh instead of actually believeing the face, or even the story behind the face. It's kind of sad but true in that you need to make it look like a detail has a story behind it in order to be believeable, but I have always critisized prop, makeup, and costume people of almost forcing people to think about the story behind an object or person. Accurate subtelty is perfection, in my eye. Don't overdo it, unless you love gore.
Of which, I don't. It's pointless. Gore should only be called upon to serve a point (a plot, a story, an explanation, an idea, etc.), and never the other way around.
By the way, most of that huge paragraph about burned faces and whatnot wasn't about what I had in mind for my creatures. Most of my creatures would be unnerving from post-production and editing in their movement. All the same, I had that spiel to let the reader know that cosumtes/makeup/props still play a vital role in the creature. No dogs with shark-fins tied on their backs and then "editing magic".
I'd be more comfortable if I were to explore different ideas for the main character, but I definately know that much of my passion for making this film comes indeed from night time hours, almost exclusively at that. So keeping in the same vein, I think it'd be a good idea to keep the movie at least somewhat night-based. Or even further from that, include a decisive amount of darkness (literally) in the film. Dark halls. Maybe from there having a wall groan outward as someone pushes out from it like putting a plastic film over the wall and then having someone lean into it, pushing on it. Maybe the film would burst and figures would drop, even pour out of it, covered in blood or mud or whatever liquid-whatever, as more and more just kept pouring out. And not zombie-figures. Figures missing arms, legs, with their faces non-existant and their entire bodies covered in massive scars, cuts, burns. Their skin one cohesive texture and 'pattern', with no hair. What am I getting at? What is this vision? Is there an ispiration? (Does there have to be?)
I could invade the entire screen, or the main characters entire field of vision with an oncoming flood of creatures, soaking up every corner and drop of free sight until he becomes encumbered with their weight and enveloped within them as them crowd around him reaching all over him and then in the blink of an eye take EVERY living thing away. All of it. I would have the main character go outside where no animal nor man nor creature exists. In a non-atmospheric world, he would explore neighbors' houses, go into the super-market midday in the middle of the week with all lights on and no one there. And then, creeping out of the cracks in the floor tiles, soaking through the rust in the pipes, choking the air in the ventilation systems, I would have the atmosphere grow back again like an angry mold: slow, yet growing with a passion. Rust would boil and pour over surfaces, covering and dirtying everything. It would come out of the cracks, out of the darkness in the shelves, and hang off of the ceilings like a stalker always watching, every ready to ambush but every so unnerving because it does not strike at the perfect time, instead sifting about and churning itself over. While the atmosphere battled with reality, creatures would spawn but still be weak as if still fresh from birth and maturing within minutes. They would writhe on the floor, barren and vulnerable, and then instantly suck them into a wall, perhaps even leaving a black stain where they had been consumed by the wall.
Floors would sway and buckle, and groan and churn about, as well as walls. Everything that was stable, inanimate, and was a building would be prone to morphing and mutating, swaying and writhing about, sometimes bursting, sometimes swaying, sometimes lashing, sometimes dropping or erecting or twisting up over and over. Wooden beams would bend out of walls like wires and metal sheets & beams would flow like water ripples. And then.
It would stop.
And the pattern would continue with new problems and twists and happenings and all that. New creatures would come out, and different settings would produce different atmospheres perhaps. Wallpaper-peeling houses would be strewn with rust that looked as if the black plague had gone through the house coughing up it's innards in a passing detour, and the corpses has been sucked into the house, giving it the character of their depseration and decay.
Woods and forrests would have ruins. The environments would always be hostile towards man in some form. The cities would hold them hostage and the woods and lakes and mountains would attack them and their image. All that man had created would hold him hostage, and all that he deterred from would attack him. The trees would burrow their roots into the foundations of homes and destroy them in a wrangled web. They would make their hate visible through the mess of roots and branches and vines that would rip apart the homes of the living.
The cities would be left on their own, as they were the true prisons, punishments, torture-fields.
Have I stumbled upon a theme? Perhaps even a plot?
No... just a... vision. A vision where everything that man knows and all the places man goes is hostile, will attack him, will hold him hostage, is not to be trusted, is to be feared, is out to get him, and does spend it's entire existance filled with man's hatred, seeking him out and waiting for him to come into their hunting grounds.
A world litered with creatures that just lurk about, skulking here and there with no aim and no purpose. They exist only to exist in their own, indescribable ways. They bubble about and then recoil, and the ebb and tide and flow and churn and boil and receed and back and forth and so on until they catch someone and have them killed. Do they want to kill someone? It's hard to say. Their entire existance is baffling and is a question that if answered would only spawn a thousand other questions, most likely.
So we have a world that hates you wherever you go, yet the creatures don't care. A paradox to a point. Hopefully unnerving.
Perhaps a scene where the main character is in pitch-black room, with only a flashlight. There's a generator or a pump in the room, still chugging. Why is it still working? What's it powering? Who's using it? Is anyone using it? Why? On either side of the room is any number of doors. One would creep open, in a number of inches. Creep open so that you would only notice it jut out a bit if your eye caught it, because the generator was too loud. The MC would notice it, and then the moment he did so every door would fly out, indeed even some bursting off their hinges, and spew out a hundred figures running at full-spring into the other doors. Their entire purpose would be to run from one door to the next as if in a frenzied riot of fear. Some would bash into each other, and then crawl or push themselves off with their feet into some door. Then all the doors would slam shut (or not at all if they came off the hinges), the figures would full-out disappear beyond the door(way)s, and it would be the sound of the generator again. It would only happen once.
Balancing atmosphere is a delicate and crucially important thing, because it's easily broken if you just pound the audience with action after happening after special effects scene. You can just as easily bore or unimpress them if you just give them silent or quiet moments of cinematography or scenes of no-action. It's timing that is the glue that holds this balance together.
All the same, I can't just present a world with a bunch of creatures and then show the word 'fin' at the end. I have to make it obviously clear that the creatures have no point, and that because they have no point they basically complete their own question of existance. Creating an air of mystery can aid this, but I know the creatures can create their own air of mystery on their own, without any extra mystery added. I would just have to make their world so ridiculously abstract and irrational that the viewer has no hope but to abandon making sense of it. The viewer would have to succumb to the fact that he can't explain it, and that there will always be a question about it, or some mystery, or something never truely understood even at a superficial level. "Were those burn-marks?" "I dunno, were they?" "I know those were roots, but... there's still something about them that isn't root-like..."
Don't even get me started about funding this monstrosity of an idea. The good thing is that it would be a short film, and that it would have no need to be any kind of real length. This would aid financial issues in that the grand scale of the film couldn't sustain anything but a short film. The special effects and heavy post-production would require the film to be kept short for budget reasons. In addition, I would prefer to use outdated and even damaged film to make the movie, so that could additionally help cut costs, or it could even make them worse, due to my desired film having to be specially made in a lab or shipped in from a far-away lab.
Perhaps a lone creature spasming about in the middle of the worlds or a field, contorting at unhuman speed, wil flailing arms flying about in a painfully tense dance of pure discomfort and uncontrolable pain, cutting down the high grass in the field in swathes, and exploding into the wood of trees as his arms numbly break into their bark, maybe even breaking his hand but he can't feel it because he's in too much pain, contorting and stretching in... you get the picture. He would destroy as his primal reaction to his hatred, or his pain, or his whatever. Even I don't know what it is. I think that's makes my creatures unforgetable, interesting, and dare I say it, appealing. They are like a core of myself that is a part of me, and I have drilled a well into that part of myself, and from time to time the tap it turned on to let drip out that raw and inexplicable primal essence that makes up myself.
Okay so you get the idea. Maybe I should lay off for now. I'm going to go see what my stomach's aching for (get it) in the freshly-stocked fridge (get it now?).
Leave some comments: let me know if i've just got an idea here, or I don't know what i'm in for, or how you want to tell me how crazy I am, or how my writing stile isn't up to your taste or how it acctually tastes like a $10 burger when you havn't eaten since last night's dinner. Something.
See you.