What’s missing in most horror
films isn’t the big idea but the small one.
Films with big ideas are great‑Night
of the Living Dead (1969), The Blob,
Cabin In the Woods‑but they are
necessarily rare. Films with small ideas
are rare as well, but there is much less excuse for this. Horror writers and directors should search
for the little ideas that make a character and story genuinely captivating and
nurture them with just the right degree of attention.
V/H/S is a
fine little piece of found footage film making that is pretty much a workshop
for what I am talking about. It accepts
the usual flaws of the genre: annoying motion, implausible assumptions about
people who keep filming while they are running for their lives, etc. On the other hand, it makes a virtue out of
the low budget project. All the visual
effects fit within the realm of the video recorder, which gives them a visceral
kick that is almost always lost with CG.
The film is an anthology of
short horror stories. The context piece
involves a gaggle of hoodlums who apparently make a living by harassing people
and selling the footage they record as they do so. They are hired to break in to a house and
steal a VHS tape. One of them watches
the tape, on which the other stories appear.
It’s a nice setup. I got the idea
(perhaps it was a product of my own imagination) that anyone who views the tape
will end up on the next version of it.
What makes the film unusually
good is that each of the set pieces (with one exception) plays off an exquisite
small idea. In the first story, a bunch
of rowdy guys set out to party on the town and hope to end up making a porn
film. Two of them are typical jocks and
one is the essential nerd. At a bar the
nerd picks up a very unusual girl who has astonishingly big eyes but who can’t say
anything but “I like you”. She seems to
become attached to them, showing up in each subsequent scene though we never
see how she comes to be there. That’s
the small idea: the girl who seems to stick around even though she is barely
noticed. The filming here becomes a
metaphor for our inattention to detail.
We get glimpses of her body that indicate something very sinister but
only fleeting glimpses. No one pays enough attention until it is way
too late.
Another story is a version of a
very familiar one: boys and girls go into the woods and are stalked by a killer. The small idea here is that the killer
flickers in and out of reality, much like the images on the video. The film makers used the device of video
distortion to convey the supernatural power of the killer who can never be
caught. At one point the woman with the
camera cries out in frustration: “Why can’t I film you?” I share the frustration. I couldn’t get a coherent screen capture of
the killer. He is visible in no single
image even if he can be seen more or less as the film rolls.
In another story, a young woman
communicates with her boyfriend by means of a split screen program
(Skype?). We see his face in the lower
corner of the screen as she tells him about the poltergeists in her
apartment. What looks like a very common
story becomes uncommon by the small idea.
She thinks that something is inside her arm and she starts digging. This is the most inventive and least
predictable of the stories.
I wouldn’t count this among
great films, but it is surely a breath of fresh, if rather bloody, air. Each story plays with a delicious small idea
and tells you just enough and no more. I
really enjoyed this film and I suggest that you will as well.
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