Read Good Shit On Musings: found footage

By Yasmina Tawil

The Traumatic Horror of Lovely Molly by Chris Evangelista

By Yasmina Tawil

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Molly stares into the camera, a woman undone, with bleary eyes close to the color of the red REC icon tucked away in the top right of the screen. She shivers and shakes, ready to make her confession. Whatever happened, she says in a quivering voice, it wasnt me. She produces a knife from off camera, pressing the blade up tight to her throat before pulling it away. He wont let me, she exhales.

This confessional start to 2011s Lovely Molly will seem familiar. Its the same sort of tearful, emotional, one-on-one-with-the-camera breakdown made famous in 1999s The Blair Witch Project, where documentarian Heather apologizes for dragging her cohorts into certain doom. That familiarity isnt an accidentboth Lovely Molly and Blair Witch came from the same filmmaker, Eduardo Snchez. Yet while The Blair Witch Project has entered the horror pantheon, Lovely Molly has slipped through the cracks. This film did not benefit from the same is it real? hype that lifted Blair Witch and it takes a different approach to fear, using its slow, cerebral sense of dread to explore mental illness. But its blurred line between supernatural horror and mental illness is equally compelling. Unlike Blair Witch, Lovely Molly is not purely a found footage film but a commingling of traditional narrative style and the mysterious, voyeuristic footage that Molly films with her mini-DV camera. The film traffics in a queasy, unentertaining dread that even Blair Witch didnt approach. The plot is similar to the wildly popular first Paranormal Activity film but found none of the same renown. Perhaps this is because instead of being filled with harmless jumps and loud bangs that fade from your mind the minute you exit the theater, Lovely Molly is more visceral, more unrelenting. Its an unpleasant film, riddled with open, still-bleeding wounds of trauma. It is, at heart, a horror film about abuse, and the ghosts that linger long after the abuse has ceased.

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Lovely Molly evolved organically. On the directors commentary for the Blu-ray release, Snchez says the film was originally going to be more Blair Witch-y, implying a rougher, jerkier experience, until cinematographer John W. Rutland turned it into something more polished. The house the film was using for production was owned by an equestrian, and consequently filled with horse images and memorabilia. As a result, Snchez layered a surprisingly ominous undertone involving horses: heavy sounds of hooves clattering in dark hallways; the wet, thick sound of horses exhaling; hints of the demon Orobas, a horse-headed creature dubbed in demonology as Great Prince of Hell. The horse element is never fully explained, though, which makes it all the more eerie and unnerving.

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Traumatic Horror of ‘Lovely Molly’ by Chris Evangelista

By Yasmina Tawil

image

Molly stares into the camera, a woman undone, with bleary eyes close to the color of the red REC icon tucked away in the top right of the screen. She shivers and shakes, ready to make her confession. “Whatever happened,” she says in a quivering voice, “it wasn’t me.” She produces a knife from off camera, pressing the blade up tight to her throat before pulling it away. “He won’t let me,” she exhales.

This confessional start to 2011’s Lovely Molly will seem familiar. It’s the same sort of tearful, emotional, one-on-one-with-the-camera breakdown made famous in 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, where documentarian Heather apologizes for dragging her cohorts into certain doom. That familiarity isn’t an accident—both Lovely Molly and Blair Witch came from the same filmmaker, Eduardo Sánchez. Yet while The Blair Witch Project has entered the horror pantheon, Lovely Molly has slipped through the cracks. This film did not benefit from the same “is it real?” hype that lifted Blair Witch and it takes a different approach to fear, using its slow, cerebral sense of dread to explore mental illness. But its blurred line between supernatural horror and mental illness is equally compelling. Unlike Blair Witch, Lovely Molly is not purely a “found footage” film but a commingling of traditional narrative style and the mysterious, voyeuristic footage that Molly films with her mini-DV camera. The film traffics in a queasy, unentertaining dread that even Blair Witch didn’t approach. The plot is similar to the wildly popular first Paranormal Activity film but found none of the same renown. Perhaps this is because instead of being filled with harmless jumps and loud bangs that fade from your mind the minute you exit the theater, Lovely Molly is more visceral, more unrelenting. It’s an unpleasant film, riddled with open, still-bleeding wounds of trauma. It is, at heart, a horror film about abuse, and the ghosts that linger long after the abuse has ceased.

image

Lovely Molly evolved organically. On the director’s commentary for the Blu-ray release, Sánchez says the film was originally going to be more “Blair Witch-y,” implying a rougher, jerkier experience, until cinematographer John W. Rutland turned it into something “more polished.” The house the film was using for production was owned by an equestrian, and consequently filled with horse images and memorabilia. As a result, Sánchez layered a surprisingly ominous undertone involving horses: heavy sounds of hooves clattering in dark hallways; the wet, thick sound of horses exhaling; hints of the demon Orobas, a horse-headed creature dubbed in demonology as “Great Prince of Hell.” The horse element is never fully explained, though, which makes it all the more eerie and unnerving.

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Columbine Movie in the Age of Mass Shootingsby Scott Tobias

By Yasmina Tawil

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You know theres others like us out there. Eric, Elephant

On April 20th, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed a massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 of their fellow students, a teacher, and finally themselves, while wounding about two dozen more. Much would be reported in the aftermath about their motives and other particularsprecious little of it true, according to Dave Cullens definitive accounting, Columbine, published a decade later. But the incident was one of those where-were-you-then moments, a horror that unfolded on television and forever colored our thinking on school safety, gun violence, bullying, and a catch-all of possible toxins within the culture, from first-person shooting games to Marilyn Manson records. According to their journals, Harris and Klebold intended mass murder on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing, and while they failed in that respect, the event nonetheless put an exclamation mark on a decadeand a century, and a millenniaof violence.

Four years later, when Gus Van Sants Elephant, a thinly disguised meditation on Columbine, picked up the Palme DOr and Best Director at Cannes, critics were fiercely divided over the question of representation. Was it even appropriate to make a Columbine movie at all? And was Van Sant successful in adding some perspective to the incident without succumbing to artsploitation or immortalizing the falsehoods that flourished in the aftermath? Writing for the Boston Globe at the time, Wesley Morris, one of the films most fervent champions, summed up the controversy thusly:

The film is either a tightlipped essay on the Columbine massacre or a sub-pornographic piece of exploitationist hooey. Its either a pretentious art director showing off what he can do or the grisliest John Hughes movie ever. The brilliance of Van Sants movie is that it’s all of those things.

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At the time, there was a too-soon-ness to Elephant that seemed to fuel the criticism against it, like Van Sant had answered one obscenity with an obscenity of another kind. But what does it look like in 2016, when school shootings have become so commonplace that only a handful of the worst ones make the news cycle? Everyone remembers Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 killed), Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 (28 killed, 20 aged six or seven), and Umpqua Community College in 2015 (10 killed), not to mention the recent horrors at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a black church in Charleston, and regional center in San Bernadino, California. And yet, can we even remember the names of the perpetrators? Its like a cancer thats metastasized across the entire country: The sickness is so widespread now that any one case cannot be examined in isolation for too long. The days when pundits could safely bloviate about violent video games on cable TV now seem positively quaint.

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Columbine Movie in the Age of Mass Shootings by Scott Tobias

By Yasmina Tawil

image

“You know there’s others like us out there.” —Eric, Elephant

On April 20th, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed a massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 of their fellow students, a teacher, and finally themselves, while wounding about two dozen more. Much would be reported in the aftermath about their motives and other particulars—precious little of it true, according to Dave Cullen’s definitive accounting, Columbine, published a decade later. But the incident was one of those where-were-you-then moments, a horror that unfolded on television and forever colored our thinking on school safety, gun violence, bullying, and a catch-all of possible toxins within the culture, from first-person shooting games to Marilyn Manson records. According to their journals, Harris and Klebold intended mass murder on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing, and while they failed in that respect, the event nonetheless put an exclamation mark on a decade—and a century, and a millennia—of violence.

Four years later, when Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a thinly disguised meditation on Columbine, picked up the Palme D’Or and Best Director at Cannes, critics were fiercely divided over the question of representation. Was it even appropriate to make a Columbine movie at all? And was Van Sant successful in adding some perspective to the incident without succumbing to artsploitation or immortalizing the falsehoods that flourished in the aftermath? Writing for the Boston Globe at the time, Wesley Morris, one of the film’s most fervent champions, summed up the controversy thusly:

The film is either a tightlipped essay on the Columbine massacre or a sub-pornographic piece of exploitationist hooey. It’s either a pretentious art director showing off what he can do or the grisliest John Hughes movie ever. The brilliance of Van Sant’s movie is that it’s all of those things.

image

At the time, there was a too-soon-ness to Elephant that seemed to fuel the criticism against it, like Van Sant had answered one obscenity with an obscenity of another kind. But what does it look like in 2016, when school shootings have become so commonplace that only a handful of the worst ones make the news cycle? Everyone remembers Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 killed), Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 (28 killed, 20 aged six or seven), and Umpqua Community College in 2015 (10 killed), not to mention the recent horrors at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a black church in Charleston, and regional center in San Bernadino, California. And yet, can we even remember the names of the perpetrators? It’s like a cancer that’s metastasized across the entire country: The sickness is so widespread now that any one case cannot be examined in isolation for too long. The days when pundits could safely bloviate about violent video games on cable TV now seem positively quaint.  

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