by Fallible wrote:Spinozasgalt wrote:I mean, it's the same as when a film makes me sad or happy or feel anything else. if it's character-based fear, then maybe I'm not feeling fear for your my sake but more so on behalf of someone in the film. If I identify with, or even just come to like the characters, I get scared of the situations they're put in because I sort of feel as if I've placed myself in there. That's what happens with good horror films, anyway. But you also have other aspects of films that work at you. A creepy mood and unpredictability can put you on edge even if you couldn't care less about the people in the film. Jump scares work on you this way.
I remember one of the found footage films I recommended to Fallible and UncertainSloth here one day (Scandinavian, I think) creeped me out near the beginning very simply. It wasn't anything bloody or things jumping out in the dark. It was just a scene where a messy-looking guy stood out on the road surrounded by trees while the focus characters drove around him. And he just stared with his mouth open as they passed close by and drove off. That's all it was. But the mood from the normalcy up until that point, and the lack of an immediate explanation for this sudden detour into weird human behaviour, gave it a sense of something being suddenly very much off. It turned out to be something about aliens and had a bunch of other scares in the dark, but the opening one was the the image that stuck around. Maybe because my brain knew that that was something that could happen for real: some weird guy could stand out on the road staring at me like that and I would be creeped out by it.
For me, the It Follows beginning scenes are very creepy, and in fact the whole film carries that vibe successfully. At the start you have a young woman fleeing in terror from something on a suburban street, but we have no idea what. We just follow her as she tries to escape and eventually runs to ground on a beach to wait for something. I think it's the idea of a relentless malevolence that you can't get a handle on because it just looks like a series of people which does it. You have this awareness that somewhere, maybe miles away, or maybe just around the corner, it's coming and it won't stop. I found myself trying to work out in my mind through the film how long it was likely to take her pursuer to get from point A to point B...
I liked It Follows. It had a lot of retro style in there, too. But its success with me was still down to its creeps.
