Tribeca 2018: The Dark

by Jason Adams

The creepy housekeeper in Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House gives an ominous warning to her newly arrived guests at that titular mansion - that nobody's coming to save them, not "in the night, in the dark." Turns out she was right! (Creepy housekeepers are always right in the movies.) It's a warning that's echoed across scary storytelling ever since, and there's an echo of it in the title for the Tribeca creeper The Dark, premiering tonight at the fest...

Click to read more ...

Blueprints: "A Quiet Place"

This week, Jorge dives deep into the unconventional formal elements inside the screenplay of the number one film in the country right now. 

A Quiet Place is an immersive experience. The film centers around a dystopian future, in which creatures that are attracted to sound have taken over. In order to stay alive, a family has to stay totally silent through their everyday lives. 

The film utilizes sound (the lack of, its intensity, its threat) as a formal device to guide us through the narrative. There is barely any spoken dialogue. Everything is conveyed visually, using alternative devices than those we are used to seeing in film. It is an experiment in form.  Its screenplay is much the same. Using devices that are rarely found in a regular script, the writers create an immersive, completely different experience that lets the reader know right away that this is not your regular horror flick...

Click to read more ...

Contrarian Corner: A Quiet Place

Contrarian Corner is an irregular series in which TFE team members sound off on a film that they just can't join the consensus with. Chris loved the movie (as audiences seem to). But here's Sean Donovan with quite a different reaction...

A Quiet Place is very very quiet, as all of the characters are keen to remind us, frantically throwing up a finger to their lips in a suppressed SHHHHH. The monsters can hear you, a mysterious species blind but intensely sensitive to sound, and capable of swinging in from far off distances to decimate any disturbance in the soundscape. As a result, one survivalist family of this ruined civilization (dad John Krasinski, mom Emily Blunt, children Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) have calibrated their lives perfectly to function without sound.

I, for one, wanted more of a sense of this family’s regular routine in their soundless environment: how do they communicate, how are their lives different, how do they have fun? You can imagine the Swiss Family Robinson or Rube Goldberg machine fun this movie could have had: what are Noah Jupe’s favorite sound-free toys? How does Emily Blunt make toast so the toaster stays PERFECTLY SILENT? 

Click to read more ...

Review: A Quiet Place

by Chris Feil

Family tragedy strikes early in A Quiet Place, with the sudden violent loss of the youngest of three children dividing each remaining family member by their own griefs and grudges. With this, his third feature, actor John Krasinski has made a rather astute portrait of grief with shades of Spielberg that is both lean and unpretentious. But this emotional family drama is more than just that: it’s also nerve-fraying creature feature.

The family, led by Krasinski and Emily Blunt, is one of the remaining survivors of a world decimated by an unspecified (but probably extraterrestrial) species. These creatures hunt people by sound alone and with shocking speed, turning survival into a tense lifestyle of sanded pathways, technological ingenuity, and softened surfaces. That A Quiet Place functions equally well as drama and horror is its greatest strength. The silence that keeps them alive reflects the emotional blockage that is tearing them apart, and the undiscussed loss catalyzes the film effortlessly.

Click to read more ...

Blueprints: "Psycho"

The April Showers series is back at The Film Experience, here's Jorge on how the most famous shower scene in cinema histor was written on the page.

One thing about iconic cinema sequences is that back when the script is written, before the movie is shot, released and gains critical acclaim (sometimes before it is even developed), they are not conceived to be iconic. They are simply a piece in a puzzle; one more segment in a longer story. 

But sometimes sequences transcend. Sometimes they become essential pieces of the cinema mosaic. And few scenes have stood the test of time better than the shower scene in Psycho. It has been recreated countless times, spun hundreds of homages and parodies, and changed the way horror scenes are shot, and what audiences should expect of the genre. Let’s take a look at how it looked in the page, before it acquired icon status, when it was merely three pages of a script…

Click to read more ...