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The horror film that's so scary you have to sign a scare waiver
by Dominik Bärlocher
Practical Effects: For the love of reality
16.5.2019
Translation: machine translated
Almost anything is possible on the computer. Hosts, aliens and conflagrations. But all that pixel rubbish gets old in the long run. Practical Effects, on the other hand, are and remain timeless. A declaration of love to a dying art.
Colleague Luca Fontana and I are having lunch. Sandwiches. We're chatting about this and that, films among other things. We often talk about films and there's hardly anything in life that Luca can't relate to Star Wars. Today, however, he has a different topic.
"The apes in <War for the Planet of the Apes> look great. Andy Serkis, man...", he says.
"I like the old apes from back in the day better. Or the ones from 2001," I say.
"Nah, man, the new films are better."
May be true, but the apes definitely looked better in the past. The reason: they look real and not like they were thrown up from a computer. Of course, Andy Serkis' performance as the fascist ape Caesar is unrivalled. But in the end, there's a bunch of pixels staring at us, as disrespectful as that may sound.
In short: I am and remain convinced that the less of a film comes from the computer, the better the special effects.
The problem with the computer
But the problem is not the small movements in the film. When Andy Serkis as Caesar blinks and the computer model blinks, it's right and impressive. It becomes difficult with computer effects when something artificial is supposed to interact with the real world. This always looks particularly ghastly in action or cameo scenes, and even standard-setting works such as the Planet of the Apes stories are not immune to this:
Of course, the filmmakers know this. That's why they've developed a few tricks over the years to work around the unrealism. Among them are:
- Slow motion: If time runs differently in the shot, errors in physics are not noticeable
- Darkness: If you can't see anything, you won't see the errors either
- Things in the foreground: If there's fake blood on the lens, you can't see what's going on behind it. The same applies to dirt and fog
- Things happen off-screen: If the CGI experts don't have to animate something, then you can't see that something would have gone wrong
- Quick cuts: If you can't watch something for too long because the camera is cutting away, you won't see the mistakes .
I find this kind of thing hilarious. It's also a shame that modern cinema relies so heavily on computers.
How it would go right
On the other hand, some filmmakers in Hollywood are still convinced that the way to make beautiful and good films is to make everything as real as possible. Directors such as Christopher Nolan or George Miller want to realise even the most ambitious projects in practice.
Where now CGI forges like Weta Workshop would go and use a clever algorithm to turn the corridor and then let actress Ellen Page's openly flowing hair rotate with virtual gravity, Christopher Nolan took a different approach in "Inception".
Christopher Nolan and his team built a set that depicts a hotel corridor and can be rotated 360 degrees. To prevent Page's hair from breaking the illusion, she only wears a bun in the hotel scenes. Clearly, Nolan can't say "We animated over 12,000 individual sheets of paper and inserted them realistically into the scene" but only "We removed a few cables by computer and made some things float", which is obviously not as impressive as animated paper.
Practical effects, i.e. special effects without computers, are simply better than computer effects. Because if something exists in the real world, then it doesn't have to be made to look like it's real. A prime example of this is "Mad Max Fury Road". Author and director George Miller has laid down some rules for the post-apocalyptic world. One of them is that every object must have two functions.
The guitarist with the flame-throwing guitar is called Doof Warrior. The guitar spits flames in real life. George Miller "doesn't like things that don't work". That runs through the film. The car crashes are all real, the actors did their stunts at around 110 kilometres per hour in the desert and the desert was real. No sets with loads of sand. The entire production took place in the Namibian desert.
If we leave science fiction and action aside, it's horror films that benefit most from practical effects. Because nothing looks as gruesomely bloody as when the intestines are made from real things - not necessarily real intestines.
The Void is probably the best-known film to come out of this movement. Filmmakers Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski wanted to create a gory horror film like those from the 1980s and with The Void they have made a strong statement in favour of make-up artists and gallons of fake blood.
Not all ambitions for horror films with practical effects become reality, however. Dutch filmmaker Richard Raaphorst began production of Worst Case Scenario in 2004. Three years later comes a trailer that promises a lot.
The film production is cancelled in 2009 due to financial problems. However, the design ideas and some plot elements are taken up in Frankenstein's Army in 2013.
The film lacks the humour of the worst-case scenario, as there is no need for a World Cup final to trigger the zombie apocalypse and the soundtrack is generic techno drivel. Among other things. What a pity.
The 1980s: the glorious period of Practical Effects
No article about Practical Effects can avoid mentioning two names: Rob Bottin and Rick Baker. Few men are responsible for as many film-related nightmares as these two. The make-up artists practically single-handedly turned the 1980s into the golden age of special effects.
Bottin is responsible for the wonderfully bizarre monsters from John Carpenter's The Thing.
He gave Robocop its barely non-human face in 1987.
Rick Baker has created aliens that a computer could never have done so well. He created aliens in Men in Black, set a milestone in body horror in Videodrome and invented the apes in the failed 2001 reboot of Planet of the Apes.
What makes 2001's Planet of the Apes so good is not the dorky story with Mark Wahlberg, but the look of the film. I believe the film that the apes on their planet are real. Because the actors and actresses spent hours in make-up and let Rick Baker make them look like apes. This gives the film a feeling of tangibility, of the physical and the real. And that's exactly what I miss about all the computer battles.
Practical effects as a game
If you want to know what practical effects do and can do and also want to take a look behind the scenes of the profession, then I can recommend the US reality show "Face Off". Hosted by MacKenzie Westmore and directed by her father, special effects creator Michael Westmore, a host of contestants compete against each other to create masks and costumes to impress a panel of experts.
So, that's it. I'm going to get more nostalgic and watch "The Thing" for the umpteenth time. But it's unlikely to be any better than the one cinema screening in Vienna. A topic for another day, perhaps. <p
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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