Blueprints: "mother!"

With the announcement of the Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations this week, we are officially in the awards race. So from now until Oscars, Jorge will be examining 2017’s most talked-about movies and their screenplays. First, he shows up uninvited at a party...

mother! is a fever dream. The stream-of-consciousness journey of a woman that just wants people to get the hell out of her space. It’s a biblical allegory, a metaphor for the destruction of the environment, a hallucination of the protagonist. It’s all of these, and it is none.

Watching the movie is a trip (take that word for whatever meaning). It’s more visceral than narrative. Trying to find a traditional, cohesive plot in it is useless, and it’s better to experience it through gut reactions of the vignettes presented. But how does the screenplay look? Exactly as you would imagine...

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It's Halloween-time at the Box Office

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (October 27th-29th)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
1. 🔺 JIGSAW  $16.5 new	1. 🔺 LET THERE BE LIGHT $1.8 on 378 screens new
2.  BOO 2! A MADEA HALLOWEEN $10 (cum. $35.5)	2. 🔺 THE FLORIDA PROJECT $539k on 145 screens (cum. $2.1) REVIEW 1, REVIEW 2
3. GEOSTORM  $5.6 (cum. $23.5)	3.🔺 LOVING VINCENT $449k on 114 screens (cum. $2.1)
4. HAPPY DEATH DAY  $5.0 (cum. $48.3)	4. 🔺  GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN $330k on 213 screens (cum. $633k)
5. BLADE RUNNER 2049 $3.9 (cum. $81.3) REVIEW | SHORTS | "BESTS"	5. 🔺 THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER $221k on 33 screens (cum. $392k)  REVIEW

Moviegoers were in a horror mood -- what else is new? -- which is appropriate for Halloween time. Three of the top five were specifically seasonal while It logged what is probably it's last week in the top ten with another 2 million for its historical box office winnings. It's the highest grossing horror film ever now but only #4 of all time (not adjusted for inflation) in terms of R-rated films. It won't be able to overtake any of the top three: The Passion of the Christ, Deadpool, and American Sniper since it will surely lose a huge swath of theaters next weekend when everything at the multiplexes has to make room for Thor: Ragnarok...

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Blueprints: "Scream"

In this Halloween edition of Blueprints, Jorge Molina looks at one of the most iconic opening sequences in horror film history. Do not hang up...

Creating and building tension is one of the most important things a successful horror movie has to accomplish. It’s done, among other tools, through a combination of music, camera angles, and juxtaposition of light and shadow; that is to say, it’s done almost entirely audio-visually.

But every successful horror movie was first a successful horror script.  How does a writer project escalating tension, that dreadful atmosphere so vital in horror, in the page, with nothing but words as a weapon? Let’s take a look at our favorite scary movie to find out.

 

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This Is Halloween

By Salim Garami

What's Good? We're less than a week away from the spookiest time of the year so let's talk about what the holiday means in the cinematic sense. These are personal impressions and I hope you'll share your own as well.

We start with the actual season in itself: the autumn colors are there in a very muted way that signify the beginning of the end of the year in all its resigned reds and oranges. The palette chases away the greens and blues that took over the summer, although one could certainly see faint glimmers of those colors to remind us of the months past. Such as in Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and its Halloween scene, glowing with yellowish twilight and orange rays in the sun that reflect on the suburban homes and streets Elliot and his friends walk...

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Joan Fontaine Centennial: The Witches (1966)

by Jason Adams

Tell me if you've heard this plot before: a closed-minded outsider with a sordid spiritual history comes to a rural UK village where they slowly unravel a plot involving each and every member of the town being in on the ritual sacrifice of a virginal young woman, with a twist. You're thinking The Wicker Man, right? Well seven years before Christopher Lee did his exuberant little dance beside that infamous flaming totem Joan Fontaine got there first in 1966's The Witches, an actual Hammer production (I always think The Wicker Man is from Hammer, but it ain't) that really doesn't get the love it earns...

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