"Just you wait a little while,
The nasty man in black will come
With his little chopper
He will chop you up!"
We have finally moved out of the silent era, and this is the best week so far: HORROR week!
Even though M (1931) is part of our horror week, I think it is not a horror movie at all. Maybe back in the days when it was first released M might have been scary, but now it definitely is not. In my view it is clearly a thriller movie since it has all the elements: the innocent, good people disappearing, nobody knows who the bad guy is, the entire movie turns around of the looking for the bad guy.
M is a talkie, but it has no score. Besides dialogue the sound effects added are those day-to-day noises, like children playing, footsteps, wall watch, and of course, the whistle every time the killer is on screen or around.
Along with M I have decided to watch another very known horror movie (this one fitting in the horror genre) The Blair Witch Project.
Blair Witch is a psychological horror movie released in 1999, and just like M it has no score, just the day-to-day noises. In this case having no score was totally planned since the whole idea is to make the movie looks like real life events. The entire marketing was based on "real footage recovered in the woods."
"It did it all with a unique hook and an ingenious marketing plan,
creating a viral Internet campaign back in 1999, when most studios were
still trying to figure out what the Internet even was. They promoted the
faux-documentary as a true story, indicating that all of the characters
had been killed (actors were prevented from doing publicity until close
to release to keep up the illusion)." Dustin Koski, cracket.com
About half way through the movie the three "filmmakers" are sleeping in their tend and we start to listen some children noises (they are in the middle of nowhere at this point), the images are all messed up, but the children noises are very clear. This scene is far the creepiest in the whole movie.
The filmmakers did an incredible job in creating such psychological fear, and stress. Nothing is ever showed, not the witch, or the dead kids, but the actors show so much fear and stress that it ends up getting into our heads as well.
In Blair Witch, as in every other movie, we will find the good and evil. In this one, though, we never see the evil, like I said before, the movie is based in what you believe it to be. Obvious the witch is the evil, and it is construct since the beginning of the movie as the idea is to make a documentary about her myth. In the beginning the "filmmakers" shot some interviews with the people who live around the forest, and for this reason know more about the legend. The evil's back story is set up. But it grows every minute, especially when the "filmmakers" get into the woods and weird things start to happen. Like when they keep going back to the same place even though they spent the day walking in the opposite direction. Or when they woke up and around their tend they found three piles of rocks.
The Blair Witch had everything to go wrong, after all, it doesn't follow the Hollywood recipe of making movies, but it turned out to be one of the most successful horror movies, especially on the topic budget/box office. The movie had an estimated budget of $60,000 and only in the opening week it made $1,512,054 (only in the US), the total box office World-wide was $140,530,114 (by November 5, 1999), according to IMDb.
References:
IMDb
Koski, Dustin. 5 Classic Movies that Seemed Like Terrible Ideas at the Time.
Lang, Fritz. M. 1931
Myrick, Daniel & Sanchez, Eduardo. The Blair Witch Project. 1999
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