NETFLIX UPDATE: My uphill struggle with my Netflix queue continued through this week. I was close to knocking a couple of things off on a quiet Sunday, but I ended up getting sidetracked watching the first season of “Deadliest Warrior,” show that aired on Spike TV that used a computer program and weapons tests to see who would win in a fight between a samurai and a viking, or a spartan and a ninja (sue me, I’m a guy). So the queue count is currently 380 movies now.
SUSPENSE: Recently the film “Super 8” was released in theatres. It’s directed by J.J. Abrams and stars Kyle Chandler (the outstanding star of “Friday Night Lights”) among others, but what caught my eye about this movie was its trailer. It was different than most in that it contained an air of mystery. We know from the trailer that strange things are happening to a small town, and it has to do with a nearby train wreck that seems to have unleashed…well…something that had been locked up in one of the train cars. That description is vague because I’m only going by what the trailer tells us. We don’t know what is causing these strange events, nor does it ever show what was inside the train car. Within the movie industry, this trailer was criticized because it didn’t show enough. Other studios’ advertising departments said: You have to give tell the audience more. You have to give a glimpse of what’s in the train. How else can people decide whether or not they want to see it? That struck me as odd. But it led me to think about a problem in Hollywood movies, and that is the studios’ fading ability to understand one of the most important things to making a good film: the concept of suspense.
The “Super 8” trailer leads the viewer through a series of questions: What are these strange events? What is making them happen? What’s in the train car, which seems to be fighting mightily to get out? All of these make me curious to see the movie. Isn’t that what a trailer is supposed to do? Shouldn’t it make you want to see the movie?
Strange as it sounds, the “Super 8” trailer actually bucks a trend in this area. Trailers frequently spell out every single plot point in a movie, including the ending. Romantic comedies in particular will walk you through the entire story, start to finish. They include the “meet-cute”moment, the initial attraction, the break up and often end with the couple kissing in some picturesque setting, a shot usually taken from the ending of the movie (the trailer for the wretched “Charlie St. Cloud” was particularly egregious in this). In other words, you’ve seen the two-minute Cliff’s Notes version of the film right there already as you get settled into your seat to watch the feature. While romantic comedies spell it all out for you most often, other genres including action and horror movies to the same thing, showing a clip of almost every explosion or attack in the film.
I guess the Hollywood studios just assume we’re too stupid or too lazy to see an interesting movie. They believe we have to be spoon fed each plot point or we’ll be too confused to bother to see it (in fact if we the public were as dumb as they seem to think we are, we’d never find our way to the theatre in the first place). What they are missing is that the unknown, or the suspense of wondering what will happen next, is the single best part of seeing a good movie.
One of the best things about Steven Spielberg’s classic “Jaws” is that you don’t get a really good look at the shark for a while. It lets your imagination run away with you, building tension the whole time. “The Ring” kept you guessing about what happened when your seven days was up after watching the cursed videotape. We knew it was something awful, but the mystery wasn’t revealed until the end, and it led to a thrilling scene. The movie forced us to wait, and stew in our own imagination, and the results were exhilarating.
“The Blair Witch Project” took that a step even further. In the movie about three young filmmakers lost in the woods being terrorized by something they didn’t understand, they never showed the antagonist(s) at all. Throughout the movie you were straining to see anything in the darkness, but you never could. That movie understood a fundamental point: The sound you hear in the woods at night is almost always scarier than what makes the sound. Why? Because while that sound may have come from a squirrel walking over a dry twig, in your mind it’s the boogeyman laying in wait for you, so they let you imagine what this boogeyman looked like. It’s also why psychological thrillers are far scarier than the seen-it-a-thousand-times slasher movies they churn out constantly, or even worse the insulting torture-porn movies like “Hostel.” They miss the entire point. It’s the wondering what will happen that’s scary, not the death scene itself.
Here’s the perfect example: “Silence of the Lambs” was far better than its sequel, “Hannibal” because in the first movie you had all these ideas in your head of how frightening it would be to have that deranged man on the loose again. Those thoughts bounced through your head as the super-intelligent cannibal serial killer escaped from prison and disappeared into a crowd. In the second, he was on the loose and killing people, and it simply wasn’t as good because it wasn’t as interesting as anything you had imagined. It became a run-of-the-mill slasher flick, and Hannibal Lecter, one of the most frightening characters in the movies, became just another movie monster that jumped out from behind things at people with a knife. That’s why the first is a classic and the second is a bomb.
There is hope of course. As it turns out, the rival ad departments were wrong as the trailers didn’t hurt “Super 8” at all, and the movie had a big opening weekend. I’m rooting for the film and I plan on seeing it soon. I hope the studios start copying that formula, realizing we don’t want everything spoon-fed to us. Using your brain – and your imagination – along with the filmmaker makes for a much better experience.
NOTE: I didn’t write about movie spoilers in this, or movies with huge plot twists and how the current environment effects them, although I considered it. I’m glad I didn’t though, as it turns out Chuck Klosterman wrote a solid piece about that topic that appeared on the Grantland.com site the exact day I wrote this post. Go figure. You can read Klosterman's essay here.
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