I miss the simple scares of rubber and plastic monsters.
I know I’m not alone in the dark on this.
Prior to the current overuse of computer-generated imagery (CGI), you’d watch a horror movie and wonder where the creatures came from.
Even if the beasties looked demonstrably bogus — like the man in the rubber suit for the original Godzilla — the frights were completely real. Somehow your brain accepted what it was seeing, but also shuddered at the mystery of it. How did they do it?
Such thoughts are rarely aroused in the CGI era. Screen monsters are now digitally generated, or are assumed to be by the viewer. Ridley Scott’s new is loaded with digital nasties, all of them unconvincing.
We sense that there’s something missing, and for actors the feeling is even stronger. Watch closely to how an actor responds to a CGI beast, and it’s never quite as believable as in the old days when they’d be confronting something tangible, even if it was just a person in a paper mask.
CGI allows for perfect images. But perfectionism conspires against terror.
Just ask Steven Spielberg, who learned while making Jaws some 40 years ago that accident and ingenuity trump flawlessness for scaring people.
His special effects team created three mechanical sharks for the 1975 film, which were collectively nicknamed “Bruce†in honor of Spielberg’s lawyer. But seawater stalled Bruce’s motors and bloated his skin, forcing Spielberg to make limited use of the aquatic fiend.
The opening scenes where the shark is prowling the waters off beach haven Amity Island give us the shark’s lethal point of view, set to the ominous two-note “ba-dum, ba-dum†score by John Williams, now instantly familiar even to people who haven’t seen the movie.
The scene was sans shark because Bruce was balking that day, just as he was during the first attack scene. You see the water moving, you see the terror on swimmer Chrissie’s face, you hear the ominous tolling of a nearby bell buoy. You don’t see Bruce.
Yet even in the digitally restored version of Jaws that begins screening Friday at , you don’t question that there’s a shark in the water. Nor is it a problem when you finally see Bruce in all his prosthetic glory, munching upon Robert Shaw.
Watching Jaws at a recent preview screening, I experienced what you might call “retro terrorâ€: I was marveling at how well I was being scared by something that wasn’t created by computer.
Spielberg has similar feelings. Last year he told an interviewer for that the wonky shark was a “godsend†because it forced him to work harder on making his frights real: “The more fake the shark looked in the water, the more my anxiety told me to heighten the naturalism of the performances.â€
Fake is better for funny, too. The troublesome golf gopher in Caddyshack couldn’t be more ridiculous — director Harold Ramis said it looked like “a mink hand puppet†— yet it almost stole the movie from human stars Bill Murray, Chevy Chase and Rodney Dangerfield.
In an interview on the Caddyshack DVD, Ramis reminisced about how they’d tried at first to use a real gopher or similar mammal, even looking into trained ferrets at one point. But then they met with special effects whiz John Dykstra, who had worked with various puppet creations for Star Wars, and he made a gopher that was a howler in every sense of the word.
“People love it,†Chase says on the DVD. “They remember it. When you see Caddyshack is going to be on TV, you see the mechanical gopher. But who gives a flying f—k?â€
Think of all the great creatures of movie history. Most of them predate the digital era, which really began in the early 1990s.
Godzilla, King Kong, Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Yoda, E.T., Wicked Witch of the West, the Alien biters and many more.
They’re all the result of tangible materials and carefully applied makeup, rather than an arrangement of pixels on a computer screen. Sometimes all that was needed was a special camera placement: The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman simply used a technique called forced perspective to turn Allison Hayes into a sexy menacing giant. The same technique was used years later to make hobbits look smaller for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
You can see the difference between then and now by studying original movies and their remakes. The original version of Godzilla from 1954 is still memorable, rubber suit and all — there’s even a joke about it in The Amazing Spider-Man, which opens next week. But the 1998 remake of Godzilla, with a creature entirely made from CGI, was a colossal bomb. The terrible script and direction didn’t help, but the monster simply didn’t look authentic.
Try comparing the original Alien of 1979 with its unofficial prequel Prometheus that recently opened. The first film featured rubber and plastic chestbursters and “canoeheads†and it still gives people nightmares. of the actor inside the alien canoehead outfit recently appeared on YouTube, and it quietly chills.
Prometheus runs deep with CGI but there’s barely a moment of this movie that is truly frightening.
It probably has something to do with what animators call the “uncanny valley.†It’s the strange chasm of unreality perversely created when computer techs get too good at mimicking nature. The mind rebels at something that seems just a little too close to reality, yet isn’t.
Animators have discovered it’s better to look slightly fake than to look too real. The mind fills in the blanks for the fake. They learned this the hard way on a decade ago, an animated adventure with some of the most realistic animated people ever seen on the big screen. It flopped.
It’s not a hopeless situation. The advent of motion-capture technology, whereby actors wear diode-laden suits that allow computers to more accurately mimic organic movements, is a hybrid with much promise.
British actor Andy Serkis has made a career out of mo-cap, convincingly playing simians in the most recent King Kong remake and Rise of the Planetof the Apes, as well as mutant thief Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Serkis makes it look easy, and almost genuine, but few can match his skill. And mo-cap is still not quite the same as real interaction between moving physical forms.
Spielberg has come to understand this. He was an early practitioner and booster of CGI creations, which he memorably put to blockbuster effect in Jurassic Park in 1993. That was arguably the last time computer graphics inspired how’d-they-do-it? thoughts.
He now regrets how technology has all but replaced human ingenuity, being overused not only to make new films but to “clean up†old ones. He told Ain’t It Cool News that he now regrets using CGI to futz with his title alien for recent editions of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. He tells people to go back to the original 1982 version, advice he also applies to other directors’ films.
“If somebody put out George Pal’s War of the Worlds and took the strings off the machines I’d be very upset,†Spielberg said.
“When that machine crashes in downtown Hollywood, and you see the strings going from taut to slack, that’s the thing that allows me to both understand this movie is scaring the hell out of me and at the same time this movie is a creation of the human race.â€
For Spielberg, as for most other wonderfully illogical humans, fake fear is the real thing.
Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm
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