Check out this video from Gamespot for a nice list of awesome video games for all platforms XBOX 360, Playstation, Wii, etc. This is about as close to a greatest horror video games list that you will ever find. These games are guaranteed scary as hell and will make you crap your pants! Depends pull up undergarments required in order to play. Doom. Resident Evil. Bioshock. System Shock 2. Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl. The Thing. Alone in the Dark. Silent Hill 2. Dead Space. Clive Barker’s Jericho. Silent Hill Homecoming. Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 5. Cilve Barker’s Undying. Left 4 Dead. F.E.A.R. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Condemned. Condemned 2.
Legendary actor Christopher Lee is now a Sir – he was officially knighted by British royal Prince Charles on Friday.
The 87-year-old star, famed for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer horror movies, was honoured by the Prince of Wales for his services to drama and charity.
Lee is one of the U.K.’s most prolific actors with roles in 1973’s The Wicker Man, 1974 Bond movie The Man With The Golden Gun, and more recently appearing in the new Star Wars films and the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
Rocker Joe Brown was also presented with an MBE (Member of the British Empire) for his contribution to music during the ceremony in London. »
From Mike Jones Digital Basin: Allow me to be deliberately provocative…
How a Movie looks is a very important thing. The visual aesthetics of a movie profoundly shape the experience of watching it. Few would argue with this position.
Aesthetics, by definition, is the study of ways of seeing and of perceiving. When we consider the aesthetics of cinema we are considering how a movie looks and is perceived. To the filmmaker – concerned with making, building, constructing a film rather than just experiencing it – aesthetics are tangibly the techniques they employ to depict the world of their cinematic creation.
So far, this is all pretty obvious and straight forward. But something we must consider is this idea of ‘Technique’ and the choices at the filmmaker’s disposal – What are they? How are they used? What do they mean?
Any visual technique used by a filmmaker is simply a tool leveraged for an aesthetic story-telling purpose. Quick-cutting or long-takes, close-ups or wide shots, colour or black and white, dollys or pans, so on and so on… The effectiveness, impact and worth of any given technique a filmmaker employs is derived from its suitability to the context of the film. In simple terms, does the technique match the story?
Filmmaking is above all else a process of problem solving and the techniques employed are simply the solution to those problems – be they narrative, emotive, technical or creative. For example;
PROBLEM – The audience need to feel a part of the action, that they share the danger the characters face.
SOLUTION – Shoot hand-held and shaky, ducking and weaving the camera with the action
All this seems well and good and leaves open infinite possibilities for creative aesthetic solutions. Great films are made when directors find innovative, fresh and exciting aesthetics to solve creative problems.
But if we except this premise then we must face up to a distinct problem. If a single aesthetic choice becomes so dominant and common and ubiquitous across all genre’s of filmmaking, regardless of the creative problems posed by individual films, then it ceases to be grounded technique – it becomes stale, meaningless, banal, a default position rather than a creative choice.
In the 21st century I would attest that Shallow Focus and Rack Focus aesthetics have lost all meaning as useful creative problem solving techniques and instead have become banal, unimaginative staples of cinema. And it prompts us to ask loudly…. “What the hell happened to Deep Focus?”
Let me step back a bit from this verbose statement and provide some clarity on the trajectory that leads me to this point. In the early days of cinema film stocks were slow and so apertures had to be wide open in the hope of obtaining decent exposure. With wide open apertures you get very shallow depth of field – a short stretch of space where the subject is in focus that renders anything in the fore or back ground blurred.
In the 40’s companies such as Kodak and Agfa developed better chemical processes and faster film stocks. With faster film stocks apertures dont need to open so wide for exposure and thus depth of field can be extended. Deep-Focus cinema was born; an image aesthetic where subjects at varying focal-lengths from the camera can be equally sharp; both foreground and background in focus. Cinema changed dramatically as a new set of problem solving aesthetic techniques were opened up for filmmakers; new opportunities and possibilities for how a film could look. Shallow Focus and its offspring Rack Focus (where the lens is manipulated in-shot to shift focus from one subject to another) became not the staple of how films looked and worked visually but rather options of choice that a filmmaker may chose to use, or not use, depending on the needs and context of the film.
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and the superb camera work of Gregg Toland, stands as a penultimate example of the power of deep-focus and spawned the host of new thinking about cinema aesthetics that was embodied by the French New Wave and scholarly journals such as Cahiers du Cinema.
But the cinematic party of aesthetic choice, possibility and variety seemed to be cut short as deep-focus became the victim of the Video and Digital Revolutions.
Let me explain…
Video technology – the ability to capture a moving image electronically rather than chemically – came along in the 70’s and 80’s. For the most part such technology was seen as having a great many benefits but one of them was Not visual fidelity. The technology still had many years to go (and an evolution from analogue to digital) before it may be considered visually equal. The simplistic result of this was that Video Cameras at this time were made, in large part, not to directly compete with film cameras for conservatively traditional cinema roles but to serve different purposes. As such they were largely small cameras with small sensors. There is of course a direct mathematical correlation between the size of the sensor (the imaging plane) and the depth of field rendered. Small sensor = deep depth of field. Large sensor = shallow depth of field. Video technology, by nature of both its technological limitations and cultural position within media industry contexts, was innately deep-focus.
What must remembered about cinema aesthetics is that they are deeply connected to cultural responses. Take for example the modern age of mobile phones and mass popular YouTube uploading. We have become so used to seeing nightly TV news filled with amateur footage that is shaky, pixelated and out of focus depicting immediate and current events in a veritae style that there is a prevailing cultural construct that directly associates such Shaky / Out of focus / Pixelated images with ‘Truth’ and ‘Actuality’. It’s for this reason that modern TV news proactively requests amateur footage from its viewers despite it being only a few years ago that airing such footage would have been considered beneath ‘Broadcast Quality Standards’. Similarly TV networks the world over have been known to compress and deliberately degrade images of natural disasters and war zones in order to make it seem more ‘authentic’.
This same cultural construct response was forced upon deep focus by the video revolution of the 70’s and 80’s. What was ingrained into the popular visual language was that ‘deep focus’ equated to video and so, in the minds of viewers, primarily to documentary, news reporting, amateur footage, cheap production and pornography. Conversely that ’shallow focus’ equated to ‘film’ and high budget, narrative cinema, high-art.
This shift in the popular cultural ‘reading’ of moving image aesthetics and the separation of High and Low cinematic art on the basis of Deep or Shallow focus has been a blight and a curse on filmmaking ever since.
In the digital age, amid the famed ‘digital revolution’, we at last moved towards a parity of visual fidelity between celluloid and digital but have been simultaneously afflicted with a prevailing bogus desire to constrict the aesthetics of digital to the legacy hang-ups of film.
Sadly the prime concern of digital indie filmmakers over the past decade has not been the new aesthetic possibilities afforded them by digital technologies but rather an almost singular focus on the cost saving and pragmatic elements of digital. As such, the much lauded desire of digital filmmaking has been to, on one hand, shoot cheap but, on the other, have it look like ‘Film’.
Now, despite the thousands of website articles, posts, forum treatises and essays dedicated to the mission of how to get the ‘Film Look’ it is arguable that a useful definition with any clarity on exactly what constitutes the ‘Film look’ is near impossible to come by. Frame Rate, Progressive scan, Grain, Flicker, Weave, Dynamic Range, Gamma curve – these are all the traits often cited as the ‘film look’ but together they constitute such a broad palette of hazy and in-tangible possibilities that distilling them into a particular set of aesthetic traits is a highly ephemeral process.
May I suggest this…. The ?film look? is bullshit; a product of marketing representation and the digestible distillation of an association with a particular mode of viewing. The ‘film look’ is a cultural rather than aesthetic understanding; one drawn from our legacy of personal cinematic experiences in the movie theatre watching a projected image – Nostalgia not Aesthetics.. Thus, when it comes to making ‘films’ in the digital age for ourselves our base instincts are to want our films to evoke those same nostalgic memory associations we have with celluloid. This we translate as the aesthetic of film, the ‘film look’, but in truth it’s much more about cultural and personal association.
Through all this, the ramifications of this for digital indie filmmakers have been profound. In working with Digital Video but desiring a ‘film look’ – that is near impossible to quantify – their efforts were skewed and corrupted. For so many digital indie filmmakers over the past 15 years their functional definition of the ‘film look’ was primarily whatever aesthetic characteristics were the opposite of what was innate to small-format video. Most specifically Shallow Focus.
Because deep-focus is the default position of many small format digital cameras, owing largely to small sensors as imaging planes, the prevailing aesthetic desire of indie filmmakers was to invest their films with the opposite – to enforce shallow-focus as a way of connecting with a popular culture mindset that connects Shallow Focus with ‘high-budget cinema’ and Deep Focus with ‘low-budget’ video.
As a result we have a whole generation of filmmakers who measure their aesthetic mark by how shallow their focus can be and how often they can Rack-Focus their shots. They are a generation who have been obsessed with rack-focusing rather than staging to move the viewer around the cinematic space; using the camera lens to depict space in flat 2D planes rather than a 3-diemnsion staging of space itself.
We’ve spent so much of the digital revolution fussing over how to make digital look like film that we’ve neglected the subtle art of arranging space itself, forgotten how to focus the eye Spatially rather than the far more clumsy and overt mechanics of doing it Optically. Most importantly we’ve forgotten that the viewer is a sentient and intelligent being, more than capable of deciphering, analyzing, speculating on and articulating the visual information they take in.
Let me offer a verbose rebuke of Shallow Focus and Rack-Focus by way of being provocative.
Shallow focus and Rack-Focus is lazy. A ham-fisted and overtly slothful technique with little impetus other than to lead your viewer around by the nose, to force them to look exactly where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. As a tool, like all other cinematic tools at the filmmakers disposal, it can and may be very useful. But as a staple and default way to depict moving images it is as articulate as a house brick.
Shallow focus and Rack Focus is the cinema equivalent of spoon-feeding the audience one small digestible and banal visual morsel at a time. Handing to them a deliberately unsophisticated and unchallenging image platter. It is the camera equivalent of writing only in capital letters and short sentences for fear your reader/viewer may not understand precisely and exactly what you want them to understand. “Look here”, “see this”, “turn now” – no distractions, no surprises, no accidentals, no confusion, no uncertainty, just the domineering dictation of a moving-image experience on pre-determined flat 2-dimensional planes. This is the essential internal logic of Shallow-Focus/Rack-Focus cinematography which, by nature of it’s elimination through blur of any distractions outside of a singular focus, is an acutely dictatorial aesthetic. An aesthetic that leaves nothing to the viewers analytical mind and doesn’t engage the viewer in a more complex visual contract. Rack-Focus refuses to allow the viewer to decipher and assemble meanings for themselves and is a condescending and patronizing way present a cinematic image.
That said, the problem is not Shallow and Rack Focus unto themselves as techniques but rather that they are not seen and used as deft Tools and problem solving Options. Rather they act as blithe and banal default methods fueled by a misguided desire for an association with nostalgic ‘high-art’.
Utilizing deeper focus allows for a complex play of light, space, distance, obstacles and subjects. The arrangement of the framed contents becomes paramount, the subjects proportions and relationships to each other the prime creative device. The construction of a cinematic space that is detailed and nuanced becomes the main canvas of the filmmaker. Shallow focus eliminates and takes these options away, it dissolves a great deal of the problem-solving and decision making process that is the art of the Director. In shallow focus the Director is not demanded to solve problems of space, is not compelled to ask questions of arrangement and position, is relieved of the requirement to convey proximity and relationships.
A post such as this may be very confronting for some indie filmmakers who have dedicated so much of their time to extolling the virtues of shallow depth-of-field and to toiling in their colour-grading system to mimic film-stock emulsion and gamma curves. But for those more enlightened readers who feel compelled to think outside of banal convention and consider how else things might be done, I encourage you to read David Bordwells superb book ‘Figures Traced Light’ which explores in exquisite detail the lost art of Cinematic Staging and Deep-Focus.
Likewise the two links below present some interesting reading in regard to the contentious history of deep-focus and its connection to movements such as the New Wave and the idea of ‘reality’.
By Rodney Robbins from the Charlotte Creative Community Board:
With all those lights and all that great looking talent, you have the perfect chance to shoot stunning, attention grabbing publicity stills. Instead of thinking of these shots as add-ons that slow down your already Super Tight production schedule, I say schedule them in and SAVE time! Do your publicity shots after the last take, before you strike the lights, that way it takes 2 minutes to get a great shot in stead of 20. Here are some shots to consider adding to your Shot List.
Close-up of lead crying or laughing
Two shot of leads arguing or being VERY expressive
Director giving notes to talent on set
Medium shot of actors pointing at lines
Actors playing with (er…um…I mean Rehearsing with) props
DP and producer with camera
Gaffer and DP or director setting lights
Writer and director framing a shot
Talent and director pigging out at craft services
People usually find these “candid,” behind the scenes shots much more interesting than a wide shot of the entire cast and crew. May I also suggest that you go ahead and feature individuals in your shots, make them STARS, but for different media outlets. Let the talent be the stars of main stream newspapers–they love that stuff. PAs can be stars in their college newspaper. Producers can be stars in business journals and newsletters. Directors and photographers can be stars for weekly newspapers and journals. I hope this helps.
Halloween is a week from now, and there’s one very special way to celebrate it in Evans City, Pennsylvania this year, at Gary Streiner’s 2nd Annual Living Dead Festival. Recently, I interviewed Gary about his role in the production of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Through Gary, I was able to interview another of the key people involved in the film: his brother, the producer and the actor who played Johnny, Russell Streiner.
Russ was an important part of the Latent Image, a commercial filmmaking company which he founded with George Romero. He’s since gone on to work on many films with another NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD collaborator, John Russo. Russ was gracious enough to take some time today and discuss the legacy of the zombie classic with me, for his fans at Icons of Fright.
Phil Fasso: How did you first get involved with George Romero?
Russ Streiner: I started off wanting to be an actor, which I pursued through high school. And after high school, I went to the Pittsburgh Playhouse School of the Theatre, and graduated from their two-year acting program. While I was there, I was working in stage shows at night, and at one of those, I was cast with another fellow. His name was Rudy Ricci, and we shared a dressing room. Rudy had been attending classes at Carnegie Mellon University (back then it was called Carnegie Tech). He was taking art classes there, and he met George Romero in an art class. George was transplanted, from the Bronx to Pittsburgh, to go to Carnegie Tech’s School of Painting and Design. Rudy brought George over to one of our shows one night, and that’s how I first got to meet him. Then, within maybe six or eight months, George called me and asked me if I would be willing to be an actor in a movie that he was putting together, called EXPOSTULATIONS. And I told him I would. I showed up for my very first day of production, and really became intrigued with the whole film production part of the business, which I knew nothing about. I stuck with EXPOSTULATIONS as an actor, and then also helped out on the crew. That’s how George and I first met. And we went on to set up a business and worked together for about 10 years.
PF: How did your experience in commercials and industrial films help you to put together a feature film?
RS: Any time you get a chance to practice your craft, whether it’s in short form like TV commercials or longer form like industrials, all of that goes to help you refine your craft. And that’s certainly how our whole group got helped out, all of which led up to 1967, when we did the actual filming of NOTLD.
Read the rest of this interview with a piece of Night of the Living Dead history click the link below.
MVP is proud to announce that our Civil War triage scene for G.H.O.S.T. was a resounding success! We had a fantastic turn out of extras comprised of talented musicians, hopeful actors, and knowledgeable horror fans. Our special make-up FX expert Todd A. Britt was on hand to apply liberal amounts of make-up to our eager cast. After a few hours splashing blood on one another, tweaking mustaches, and adjusting the lights – we were ready to shoot another fun scene for G.H.O.S.T.. The shots turned out better than expected and the costumes provided by seamstress Angela Pritchett helped make the scene that much more authentic. Thank you all for another hard night of work. Be sure to relax and enjoy yourself for Halloween. We’ll see you back on the set on November 7th for our big finale. Thank you all.
Share and Enjoy:
Posted 2 years, 3 months ago at 10:29 am. Comments
Mutantville Productions is proud to announce that Kayli Tolleson (young Maya) has wrapped her role for G.H.O.S.T.. Kayli and her very supportive mother Janna joined us on the set of G.H.O.S.T. this week for her time in front of the camera. Kayli put on a splendid performance as young Maya. We are very happy with her and we are sure she will be proud of her work in the final movie. Thank you for your help Kayli and Janna! We’ll see you at the wrap party!
From Fear.net: Making a horror movie can be a surreal experience. You spend long hours performing terrifying atrocities in front of the camera. Then the director yells “Cut!” and suddenly you’re headed over to the snack table to have a cup of coffee with the person you just disemboweled.
But sometimes, the line between making a realistic horror film and finding yourself knee-deep inside one gets a little too blurry and bloody for comfort. Here are ten of our favorite examples:
PEEPING TOM (1960). Here’s the good news: you get to star in your own movie. Here’s the bad news: the director likes to film his stars as he kills them, so he can capture their true expressions of fear. Talk about method acting. But hey, a gig’s a gig
DEMONS (1985). This Lamberto Bava/Dario Argento production is an example of how even watching a horror movie can get you in trouble. A late night crowd enters a cavernous Berlin movie theater to enjoy a special midnight screening of a new horror film. However, thanks to the presence of a cursed mask from the set of the movie, the monsters of the film come alive inside the theater itself, where they bypass the popcorn and start gnawing their way through the audience.
WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994). ”One, two, Freddy’s really coming for you!” While filming the next installment of the lucrative “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise, the actual actors and crew members (Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, director Wes Craven, etc. all playing themselves) discover they’re being stalked and killed by what appears to be a real life Freddy Krueger in Craven’s mind-bending twist on the creative process.
From ShockTillYouDrop: While just about every major horror franchise has gotten a videogame (NES gave us the legendarily hard Friday the 13th and “4 Player” Nightmare on Elm St. games in the late ‘80s; Atari had Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre… things they called games), Saw is possibly the only one that would contextually make sense in video game form. Half of the genre games released nowadays start off with someone trapped somewhere without knowing why (like most of the Saw films have), and the series’ locales are the same sort of burnt out warehouses, dungeons, and dilapidated houses that most survival games take place in anyway. In short, it’s no surprise Saw: The Video Game exists, only that it took this long to hit consoles.
Taking place between the first and second films, you play as Detective Tapp (Danny Glover in the first film, but looking/sounding like a much younger guy here thanks to Glover’s refusal to lend his likeness), who Jigsaw apparently took the time to save from his seemingly fatal wounds at the end of the first film. You wake up with a trap on your head, and once you get it off (not very hard), you begin a six to eight hour journey through the halls and rooms of an abandoned insane asylum, avoiding as many traps as you can while pursuing Jigsaw (whose identity is still unknown at this point in the Saw narrative) and occasionally rescuing other characters.
More of the night Horror Etc came home (sorry, can’t help it).
Continuing our retrospective of the Halloween franchise we cover the immediate sequel Halloween 2 (1981), the failed anthology experiment of Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982), the Return of Michael Myers in Halloween 4 (1988) and the jumbled mess of Halloween 5 The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989).
Through the course of these films we discuss the evolution of the Loomis character from a stalwart defender against the evil of The Shape to the brink of utter madness. Musical scores, shifting cinematography, character motivations and many more elements play into a truly eclectic film franchise where the central figure of Michael Myers was arguably lost in translation.
The presentation of our retrospective purposefully avoided trivia bits and production anecdotes in favour of general interpretations and impressions of the films themselves and as such…
Spoiler Warning: throughout our conversation the assumption is that the listener has seen the films in question. No attempts are made to suppress story elements and major plot points are discussed freely. Please be warned in advance.
A brief Schlock Corner caps of this week’s Halloween talk (thank you Natalie), and we catch up with Anthony to hear about his UK odyssey.
We always welcome your comments: horroretc@gmail.com
Welcome to Mutantville Productions MVP Blog. Join Streebo, Brento, Geo & the rest of the Mutantville Players as they set sail on the high seas of guerrilla filmmaking in their ongoing quest to bring you the finest in genre entertainment.
Legendary actor Christopher Lee is now a Sir – he was officially knighted by British royal Prince Charles on Friday.
By Rodney Robbins from the Charlotte Creative Community Board:
from Icons of Fright:
MVP is proud to announce that our Civil War triage scene for G.H.O.S.T. was a resounding success! We had a fantastic turn out of extras comprised of talented musicians, hopeful actors, and knowledgeable horror fans. Our special make-up FX expert Todd A. Britt was on hand to apply liberal amounts of make-up to our eager cast. After a few hours splashing blood on one another, tweaking mustaches, and adjusting the lights – we were ready to shoot another fun scene for G.H.O.S.T.. The shots turned out better than expected and the costumes provided by seamstress Angela Pritchett helped make the scene that much more authentic. Thank you all for another hard night of work. Be sure to relax and enjoy yourself for Halloween. We’ll see you back on the set on November 7th for our big finale. Thank you all.
Mutantville Productions is proud to announce that Kayli Tolleson (young Maya) has wrapped her role for G.H.O.S.T.. Kayli and her very supportive mother Janna joined us on the set of G.H.O.S.T. this week for her time in front of the camera. Kayli put on a splendid performance as young Maya. We are very happy with her and we are sure she will be proud of her work in the final movie. Thank you for your help Kayli and Janna! We’ll see you at the wrap party!
