Why Most Modern Horror Sucks: Practical vs. Digital effects

In 1992 an amazing film about dinosaurs was released and it changed the way we view movies. Because in that movie audiences saw something they’ve never seen before. Digital Effects.

Now since then everything has been made digital. All our monsters are created on a computer and all actors do is scream at green screens. And I have to say it fucking sucks.

I'm sorry was I supposed to think that was real?

Oh I see I wasn't supposed to think at all when watching this movie. 

Jurassic Park worked so well because Spielberg used both practical and digital effects. Since then film makers have taken to using just digital effects and as a result our horror movies are suffering.

Practical effect for close ups. 

Digital effects for moving shots

Lets think back to a wondrous far away land called the 70’s and 80’s. Now in this land people had to actually build creepy effects and because of it the monsters actually looked scarier. By the way if you haven't already seen Alien, Predator, Dead Alive, The Thing, and The Fly you really need to.

In 1982 there was an amazing movie called ‘The Thing’. Many people consider it, next to Alien, the greatest science fiction horror movie ever made. In the movie they had the some of the greatest visual effects ever made.

And the psychic duel at the end of scanners still amazes me. Look what can be done without a computer. 

Now wasn't that unsettling?

But now we digitize everything and it just looks fake. While watching a movie if I notice a large creature or anything that moves really quickly I instantly know that I’m just looking at an effect and nothing real. We even digitize blood nowadays. And honestly I think for the most part that it looks crappy. There isn’t much creepy about what’s obviously a stupid effect. Lets look at a famous scene from Nightmare on Elm Street.

Image from Ohmar's blog

In the original 1984 version this shot was creepy and it looked great. In the 2010 remake they used a digital effect and it was..... boring.

What’s frustrating is this is a simple fucking effect. You put up a thin sheet of fabric made to look like wall and you light it from the front. Then have somebody rub against it from the back. It’s cheap, it’s simple, and it’s easy. Making it digital just ruined it. To me it seems like lazy film making. Producers aren’t willing to put out the money to pay a special effects team and films suffer because of it. 

Think all the digital blood effects in 300 look cool? Does it bother no one else that there is blood flying everywhere but not a drop on the ground? It basically makes your movie have the realism of Mortal Kombat. 

I mean seriously digital blood!?! How expensive is it to get a few damn blood packs. The problem with practical effects is that they are unpredictable and harder to control. When the effects are done on a computer by a team of programmers the director can make them look just like they want them. But if we really want to amaze people we need to have something real in front of them. 

Imagine what Audrey II would have looked like if she were all-digital. Imagine Jaws with a purely digital shark.

Imagine if the exorcist spider scene didn’t look like this.

It looked like this scene with the old woman climbing on the wall.

I understand that having a digital effect means that they can re edit it as many times as the director wants. But considering the hundreds of millions that these movies make, they can afford to hire a special effects team if they really wanted to. In fact it’s the work that goes into practical effects that make them special.

If that wasn't enough I have one more example. Check out what is probably the greatest werewolf transformation scene of all time. A werewolf in London, 1981

And check out what they did with it in the 1997 sequel American werewolf in Paris. 

Digital effects are great. The way they were used in some films are perfect. But we over use it. We make even the simplest of effects digital. This affects all genres but horror is hit the worst. When you know that you’re looking at something fake it takes away from the tension. There's been only three times in my life that I saw something and was unsure if it was digital or practical: Jurassic Park, Avatar, and that tiger in Life of Pi. Other than that, the digital monsters take me out of the movie. We need to petition Hollywood and tell them to stop fucking up.... well that could correspond to lots of things, but right now lets get some practical effects going. The new Evil Dead remake using practical effects is a step in the right direction. Let’s hope that the rest of Hollywood takes notice.