god save me from insipid characters
Every time I build a complicated financial tracking spreadsheet in Excel -- you know, the sort with long, complex formulas that span over multiple sheets -- I feel a strange peace and happiness settle over me. It's enough to make me wonder sometimes if I missed my true calling as an accountant.
Anyways.
Nate and I watched a movie called Frozen last night, because his coworkers were raving about how awesome and scary it was and I am always down for truly scary movies. Plus, I liked the premise: three college kids get stuck on a ski-lift after the slopes close. It's night, no one knows they're there, the slopes won't open again for several days, and a storm is on the way. Freaky, right?
Sadly, the movie was a giant pile of suck. Some parts were genuinely unnerving, I'll give it that, but it wasn't scary. I spent most of the movie feeling annoyed rather than breathless with fright, and what irritates me most of all is that it could've been so much better. As I was telling Nate last night, I'm getting sick of survival horror that tosses absolute MORONS into the wilderness and then expects us to be horrified when terrible things start happening to them. Points to Frozen for at least making an effort to engage the audience with the characters BEFORE torturing the shit out of them (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, OPEN WATER). Unfortunately, the characters we're getting to know are not only shallow and uninteresting, but they also do stupid things to land themselves in trouble and even stupider things to try to get out of it.
Just once, I would like to see survival horror about competent people. People who know what they're doing and do everything right...except they make one mistake. Or they have one accident. And from there everything spirals out of control and you wonder how on earth they're going to get out of it, because they're not idiots and yet these bad things are happening and you care about them, and THAT, I think, is scary. Like The Descent, which was on its way to being exquisitely frightening even before the monsters showed up. Horror moves are much scarier when you honestly care about the characters, and it's very difficult to care about characters who are complete idiots right out of the gate.
Also, it irritates the hell out of me when the utterly passive "final" girl survives to the end not because of her ingenuity and resourcefulness, but because someone apparently needs to survive and it might as well be her. Fuck that! It's insulting!
Don't even get me started on the ridiculous boogeyman wolves. Gahhhhhhh.
In other news, yuletart! yuletart yuletart yuletart! SO EXCITED! *runs in circles*
Anyways.
Nate and I watched a movie called Frozen last night, because his coworkers were raving about how awesome and scary it was and I am always down for truly scary movies. Plus, I liked the premise: three college kids get stuck on a ski-lift after the slopes close. It's night, no one knows they're there, the slopes won't open again for several days, and a storm is on the way. Freaky, right?
Sadly, the movie was a giant pile of suck. Some parts were genuinely unnerving, I'll give it that, but it wasn't scary. I spent most of the movie feeling annoyed rather than breathless with fright, and what irritates me most of all is that it could've been so much better. As I was telling Nate last night, I'm getting sick of survival horror that tosses absolute MORONS into the wilderness and then expects us to be horrified when terrible things start happening to them. Points to Frozen for at least making an effort to engage the audience with the characters BEFORE torturing the shit out of them (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, OPEN WATER). Unfortunately, the characters we're getting to know are not only shallow and uninteresting, but they also do stupid things to land themselves in trouble and even stupider things to try to get out of it.
Just once, I would like to see survival horror about competent people. People who know what they're doing and do everything right...except they make one mistake. Or they have one accident. And from there everything spirals out of control and you wonder how on earth they're going to get out of it, because they're not idiots and yet these bad things are happening and you care about them, and THAT, I think, is scary. Like The Descent, which was on its way to being exquisitely frightening even before the monsters showed up. Horror moves are much scarier when you honestly care about the characters, and it's very difficult to care about characters who are complete idiots right out of the gate.
Also, it irritates the hell out of me when the utterly passive "final" girl survives to the end not because of her ingenuity and resourcefulness, but because someone apparently needs to survive and it might as well be her. Fuck that! It's insulting!
Don't even get me started on the ridiculous boogeyman wolves. Gahhhhhhh.
In other news, yuletart! yuletart yuletart yuletart! SO EXCITED! *runs in circles*