4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!
For today’s horror on the lens, we have a real treat! (We’ll get to the tricks later…)
Long before he achieved holiday immortality by playing the father in A Christmas Story, Darren McGavin played journalist Carl Kolchak in the 1972 made-for-TV movie, The Night Stalker. Kolchak is investigating a series of murders in Las Vegas, all of which involve victims being drained of their blood. Kolchak thinks that the murderer might be a vampire. Everyone else thinks that he’s crazy.
When this movie first aired, it was the highest rated made-for-TV movie of all time. Eventually, it led to a weekly TV series in which Kolchak investigated various paranormal happenings. Though the TV series did not last long, it’s still regularly cited as one of the most influential shows ever made.
Anyway, The Night Stalker is an effective little vampire movie and Darren McGavin gives a great performance as Carl Kolchak.
Remember that video yesterday for this song by the same group? It was reminiscent of something like Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order. It looked like it could have been put together with grindhouse trailers, but was probably all original footage. It would have quick flashes of things that could be weird or unsettling. It didn’t completely work. Still, it was quite good. This video is none of those things.
In 2016, Glass Candy reworked the song Halloween–cutting about a minute from it–and released it with a new video. That video is a little girl played by Isla Ferrier trying to act creepy while the directors…they certainly are shooting short videos that would do well in a fashion or photography book as static photos. Kind of like what photographers René & Radka actually do. You can go over to their website and see some of their work. It all looks perfectly serviceable for glamour shots. It’s the kind of stuff you’d expect to see in a magazine or as someone’s main IMDb photo. I guess i’m saying it all starts to blend together and is a bit bland to me. It doesn’t automatically translate to shooting a short film. A couple of their other videos do look better even if they are along similar lines.
The closest this video gets to something creepy is the following shot:
Close, but no cigar. That’s because of two problems:
It’s the kind of shot you’d flash to without calling attention to it or have in the background to set an uncomfortable atmosphere. This video lingers on it and makes it the entire thing. Then it also cuts to a close up shot just in case you didn’t see it. It gives us time to get over it and let our mind wander.
It comes in at 1:13 into the video. We have already spent a fair amount of time with her. We’re comfortable with her being there. She’s not this disturbing little girl that we see the for the first and only time. That could leave us wondering who or what that is. Here, she’s a little girl playing around trying to look scary. I don’t think that’s what they were going for with this video.
The part of the video that I have the hardest time with is when she is playing with the webs.
I think, “Mommy, I look scary, right?”
Both of those images on their own probably look just fine. That’s the problem. It doesn’t look like a short film. It looks like a series of behind-the-scenes videos of photography shoots strung together with the song playing in the background. Something like that can work. Check out What If I Go? by Mura Masa. I just don’t think it works here.
It’s not an awful video. It’s a video that didn’t need to exist. I also think that René & Radka need to look more with the eyes of a filmmaker than a photographer. They’re related. They’re not the same.
Through the Shattered Lens 