Scare Tactics: Pervasive - The Insinuator

^ On the one hand, there's the performance values that might be shared between dungeon mastering and being a fancy cannibal that the FBI needs to help them solve crimes. On the other hand, there's how these great actors responded to the challenge of playing a fancy cannibal that's been played by other great actors. 

In the video the Mads Mikkelsen Hannibal isn't very good. And I think that has to do with a kind of dread that is accessed through pervasiveness.

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Truth in Advertising

The Hannibal show was a show when Peak TV was supposedly a thing. Peak TV was a buzzword meant to describe both

1) a period when TV was as good as TV could be and 

2) a period when there was so much TV that there was about to be more of it than anyone could ever want no matter how good it was. 

The period when the TV was good mostly describes when shows could achieve finally a level of realism that was associated with movies. They were famously able to do that because of the relaxed censorship restrictions on cable networks (like HBO) and that the writers got better. The period when there's too much TV is the enduring one, coinciding with the boom of original content on streaming websites. 

What's unique about HANNIBAL is that it did not premiere on a cable network or streaming service, but on regular network TV -- NBC -- the same channel as SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. NBC wanted a Smart Sexy Cable show so they did the Smart Sexy Cable show things: they let writers that had had writerly success push the envelope in terms of sex and violence. Which presented a creative challenge: you couldn't show nudity on NBC and as for murders there were perhaps a dozen police procedural network television shows then airing new mutilation innuendo each week. But the show was good -- and it was under appreciated -- for this same reason: that the movie-like quality it would finally achieve in order to meet this challenge had nothing to do with realism. 

There's a lot of reasons why a TV show doesn't have the presentation a movie like THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS has. A big one is that a TV show - particularly a network show ten years ago - expects to have its audience's attention regularly divided. In the compilation, Mads Mikkelsen seems clumsy because of how his scene has been re-edited. In the show the encounter plays out over multiple scenes. If it seems to end twice and start twice - it does. The performance was meant to be divided by an ad break. 

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Touch with Your Eyes

As it is, so there must be: A Horrible Thing Out There Some Place. In the case of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, I know what that thing is and where it is. Hannibal the Cannibal, in a cell. Sooo: nothing to be afraid of?

Then why is my boss looking at me like that. 

And the warden like that. 

And this orderly like that. 

I know what the Horrible Thing is and Where it is and even what it is capable of -- it's right there in the name -- and yet... something, which -- considering how small of an adjustment it would be for it to not exist at all, fractions of an inch, between the pupil of an eye in a face facing forward that seems to be looking at a person in front of it, and the pupil of an eye in a face facing forward that seems to be looking at a camera that's in front of it -- something that is that small of a difference -- but which should make a reality-breaking difference -- is telling me BEWARE.

So many people have talked about these shots in the movie because crossing the line is easy to identify once you know to look for the line. However what's more important for making the sequence dreadful are probably the shots that walk right up to the line before crossing it.

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He Doesn't Blink

Matching eyelines is a technical term for making sure that if an actor is looking at a thing in a scene, on camera they actually look like they're looking in the direction of that thing. This often has to be faked. In the case of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, it's clearly faked: actors looking in the direction of Clarice in fact will sometimes be looking directly into the camera: and it feels like they're looking at us watching the movie. Why would filmmakers want to be careful of that? Basically, to create a deliberate sense of place: like: the stuff in a room that's in a room is in the room even if we can't see it on screen, and the stuff in the room that's not in the room -- like a big-ass camera filming it all -- isn't -- even if an actor knows it is. 

Clarice meeting Hannibal is a great scene but especially because of how it is the culmination of an entire sequence of scenes. The sequence goes:

I. Clarice getting the mission debrief from Jack Crawford at Quantico.

II. Clarice at the asylum learning about Hannibal from the warden Frederic Chilton.

III. Clarice journeying into the dungeon-ass floor where Hannibal stays.

IV. Clarice meeting Hannibal and it's fucked. 

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I. Educator Helps Eager Student Achieve Success: Jack Crawford

 

1. shot that pans across a bunch of creepy stuff pinned to a wall

2. super close up shot of a girl from the side and at an angle where we can tell there's someone else watching her - but we don't know who they are - cuz they are out of focus - but they know the girls name and when they say it she turns to look - and the focus changes as she turns - which helps to camouflage that there was a change in focus at all - and after the focus changes we can make the guy out - and as the guy moves the shot pans around the back of the girls head tracking him

3. shot of the girl - close but not as super close as before

4. medium shot of the guy as he sits down - from the girl's shoulder 

5. medium shot of the girl as she sits down - from the guy's shoulder

6. close up shot of the guy - he's looking directly into the camera...

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II. The Doctor Will Check Your Vitals Now: Frederic Chilton

 

1. establishing shot of a dreary asylum - somebody is talking -

2. close up on the guy who's talking - he's glancing down - its just a regular close up - oh wait no what the heck - when he glanced back up he was looking directly into the camera...

3. wide shot of the girl that he's talking to.

4. close up of the guy still looking into the camera - he's trying to flirt...

5. close up of the girl curving him

6. wide shot of the guy - not looking into the camera anymore - he's behind a big desk 

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III. Totally Regular Guy No Agenda: An Orderly 

 

1. medium shot over the shoulder of a girl: a guy letting the girl into a room

2. close up of the girl looking at something in the room sideways

3. wide shot - a slooooooow pan of the room - which is dungeon-y and shows us other rooms - we don't know where they are - on security camera footage - but which makes the prison feel suddenly vast in spite of having only seen several nearly identical hallways and now this one room of it - and in this room there's prison bars and a prison orderly who is maybe looking into the camera for a moment it's hard to tell-  and another guy - a guard - who isn't looking at the camera - and then another guy - its the guy who let the girl in - except he's close - we pan into a close up of him - and he's definitely looking into the camera - and he says hey

4. medium shot over the shoulder of the guy: the girl introducing herself to the guy

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IV. Hannibal: The First Part

 

1. wide shot handheld that pushes in while panning - its a wide shot of a man in a cell

2. a wide shot over the shoulder of the guy - its a wide shot of the girl - but the shot is mostly the guy's blurry shoulder 

3. a wide shot over the shoulder of the girl - a wide shot of the guy - and it's also mostly her blurry shoulder

4, 5, 6: shot-reverse-shot as they talk

7. a wide shot of the girl - she takes out her badge - she holds it up. - then she holds it out - bringing it closer...

8. close up of the guy - telling her to bring it closer...

9. close up of the girl bringing it closer - a shadow passes over her face - helping to convey movement

10. close up of the guy as he moves closer into the most extremely-close close up yet - also passing under some messed up shadows that briefly make his eye looks like the dark hollow sockets of a skull - and now he's looking directly into the camera...

11. extremely close close up of the girl being like what the what.

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IV. Hannibal: The Money Shot

 

1.  close up of the guy - he's all the way off to one side of the frame - the right side - he's leaning against something all casual like

2. close up of the girl - note that she's also off to the side of the frame - the same side of the frame as the guy - the right

3. close up of the guy

4. close up of the girl - buuuut with a slight push in and a slight sideways movement so that the girl looks like she starts to leave the side of the frame and is getting moved towards the middle of the frame instead

5. close up of guy but there's a dramatic push in with an ever so slight pan - until the guy is in the extreme close up

6. close up of the girl - the shot pushing in and going sideways still - so that the composition keeps changing around the girl - and she goes from the center all the way now to the opposite side of the frame from where she started - all the way to the left side

7. super close up of the guy

8. close up of the girl - moved all the way to the left side of the frame 

9. medium shot of the guy putting the dossier he was reading into the chute thing - SLAM

10. close up of the girl  - a regular one - like she's in the middle of the frame not off to one side - jumping nervously as he slams the chute thing

11. a close up of the guy - he's looking into the camera - he's saying something terrible - and then - he makes a super weird tthththththth noise and jerks forward - like he was gonna tththththt all over us - we can just barely see the tip of his nose flattening for a second where it presses up against the glass wall of the camera  - errrr - the glass wall of his cell.  

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Not Just in Your Head

Working up to the cross is a careful game, but coming away from it is sudden. Whatever the watchers want from Clarice they are going to keep on wanting it from her, regardless of what they look like from her point-of-view. Clarice's head is then like an angle for seeing how even in a cell the Horror can get to her. 

Though crucially the SILENCE OF THE LAMBS doesn't go so far as to take place in someone's head (like the filmmakers who steal from it often do), it does dramatize how Clarice may be sentenced to a feeling of dread, one which we in the audience may also feel, albeit in a different parallel way, being directly addressed by characters in a movie who were, for all intents and purposes, inhabiting a very realistic, very grounded, the-stuff-in-the-room-is-in-the-room -type movie just one second and one millimeter ago. The sequence makes pervasiveness dreadful by dividing attention with extremely fine repetitive details.

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Here's a Monster That Does That

 

The Insinuator is a psychic abomination who tortures people with color. Once he was a man, now he is legion. 

R 1 

A 3

T 4

P 5

A 0

C 2

K 7

Special Abilities 

CURSE

Each time a player says the name of the Insinuator's favorite color they are effectively targeted by him -- and he gets an extra throw for an attack he might make against them now or later. As these cards accumulate, at any point the Insinuator may expend them for a Surprise Round versus the target's Max Calm. It does Standard Damage and the player has to throw on the Curse table. Each curse continues to affect the victim until the Insinuator voluntarily puts an end to it or is slain.

1 - 2: 

There's an awful taste in your mouth. Your spit is now the Insinuator's favorite color and you can't stop drooling and gagging on it and also your breath smells disgusting. Disadvantage on Appeal checks, probably.

3 - 4: 

You have a searing migraine. Your eyes are now the Insinuator's favorite color -- that's cool -- but if you look at anything that is that color you will have to make a Calm check against a 4 or else be rooted to the spot with fascination -- that's bad.

5 - 6: 

You go deaf in one ear. A song that references the Insinuator's favorite color is now playing in the other incessantly. Lose a point of calm each day and have disadvantage on most checks requiring thinking straight.

7 - 8: 

You have an insatiable thirst and hunger for things that are the Insinuator's favorite color - Calm Check versus a 3 to not immediately eat or drink whatever it is when you see one.

9 - 10: 

Anything held to your skin that isn't the Insinuator's favorite color will soon catch fire.  

EMERGE FROM THE DARKNESS 

If unwitnessed (which he often is, as he’s invisible to most creatures), the Insinuator may step into any shadow cast by something that is his favorite color and reappear through any other alike shadow within the same city. 

INVISIBILITY 

The Insinuator is unseen by all except those who observe him against a background of his favorite color.

INVULNERABILITY 

The Insinuator cannot be touched or directly harmed by anything that is his favorite color and only then by those able to see him. 

SIXTH SENSE 

The Insinuator is supersensitive to danger, hostile emotions, and signs of past trauma or the supernatural. 

Weaknesses 

The Insinuator is magically bound to honor people’s requests for space, and will move out of the way if politely asked to do so. Those who are already subject to his curses, unfortunately, lack the ability to make this request. 

The Insinuator has a vast appetite. He may be distracted fairly easily by copious amounts of quality, home-cooked food.

The players are doing their thing and they keep coming across stuff that's the same color. Say: red. Eventually someone says, another thing that's red? Pull a card -- don't turn it over. They'll be like what the... Someone else might eventually offer, well dooooo you think its because you noticed it's red? Pull a card for them, too. They'll probably get wise and stop saying the word red. Which should make figuring out and exploiting the Insinuator's weaknesses a fun challenge. Adding the Insinuator as a sub-boss to a bigger conspiracy should make any conspiracy a lot weirder too. If you have a Thoth deck, when someone asks wait what color is this thing you can throw and go off of whatever color the card is. 

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Scare Tactics: Empty - The Ditto

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Nothing Going On

We were talking about movies in the demon city discord and someone asked this good question.

The quote is Andrei Tarkovsky, who among other things made a movie in the 70s that had a long train-riding sequence of passing landscape, the backs of people's heads, and nothing going on, in sepia - and it was good. 

 

In film school there’s an idea that a marked difference in movie-making occurred when people starting making movies like this. Someone inclined to say about them, it’s just nothing going on, might’ve preferred the theoretically previous kind of movie: which star movement. Granted that there is something going on, what it is, in the Tarkovsky case, would be more like the kind of thing a movie is made from than the kind of things movies can depict. These other movies might be said to have made time-keeping the star. 

Like if someone were to think to themselves, the train to the Zone was five whole minutes longggg, they would be using the sequence to tell time, like it was a clock. If they thought it was zoom crash bam look out aiiiiiiieeee and Buster Keaton almost died on it, it would be like it had moved. And these two modes correspond to different periods of film history, goes the theory. 

"Clock-watching" is, like the question suggests, inherent to movie-watching. Kind of like how watching paint dry is inherent to seeing a painting (typically all-the-way dried).  Jackson Pollock's paintings, like clock-watching shots, take something obvious and inherent to their existence as things, like that a painting is stuff that starts wet then gets dry, and with other details, like say, the exclusion of any recognizable figures, make this material fact one of its stars. So: Tarkovsky’s train ride has a mysterious destination. The movie starts in sepia and arrives there in technicolor (exactly when it arrives there is an interesting question - made interesting by the shot's length). 

Horror movies may have long clock-watching-esque shots of nothing going on. But the shots will often instead star - with dreadful anticipation - movement. There's a Thing and it's out There, waiting some Place. It may be that to get such dread involves a wandering mind like with Tarkovsky's shot. But in a Horror movie our boredom doesn't have to get farther than the image on the poster to reach the Zone. To understand the long empty Horror shot we would be better off considering the techniques in movies that star movement. 

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It's Out There

The opening sequence of It Follows very clearly spells out for us that There's A Horrible Thing Out There Some Place. 

It goes:

1. Shot that is long and wide and moving and that will give us a clear view of the whole street from both angles, a view which includes one house with something bad in it that a girl comes running away from - a shot that in effect contains within it a couple of other shots - such as a shot of the girl in the street reacting to something - which, because it is a reaction, suggest to us another shot (like in our heads) of the thing being reacted to. So that's four shots in one. Time is money and mounting a camera onto a crane is expensive.  

 

2. Shot of desperately speeding away 

 

3. Shot that is from far away: of the girl and her abandoned car in the middle of nowhere. 

 

4. Shot that is of the girl but closer. Note the light over the water far away behind her. 

 

5. Shot of what the girl is looking towards: her car, far away. 

 

6, Shot of the girl dead by morning.

That the Thing is horrible and Out There is understood; the question is, how's it going to get to her? From the road, like she thinks, defensively illuminated by her car's interior lights? From the water like I'm convinced of, trying to outmaneuver the inevitably scary failure of the road-approach defense? Shot 4 is especially dreadful. I imagine someone striding out of the dark, up the hidden side of the beach dune, from where the girl thinks she safe from having to watch. The sequence makes emptiness dreadful with excessive information about distances. 

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Finally: A Toy

Movies have lots of tricks for deploying scare tactics, but there's one big thing that they rarely ever have, which RPGs do: nobody - but you - the host - knows what horrible thing is on the movie poster.

Here's a Horror:

Dittos are aliens that can assume the appearance of any inanimate object nearby. They can do it nigh undetectably, in the blink of an eye. Because of this, they often hunt in plain sight of their human prey, hiding as a duplicate across open terrain, office spaces, gas stations, waiting for the target to turn to get closer. Dittos in their true liquid form are incredibly fast and capable of squeezing through slivers of space. 

R -

A 9 (liquid) 0 (solid)

T 6

P 2

A -

C -

K 6

 

Special Abilities 

Dispersed Form

The Ditto can only be hurt by weapons or tactics that move large parts of its body away from the main mass or by area effects. Firearms are useless, though explosives can work. 

Asphyxiation

The Ditto can swallow a creature, depriving it of air, causing Standard Damage each round until the victim is freed.

Regenerating Metabolism

Any time the Ditto throws the Sun it gains a point of Toughness.

Acidic 

Touching a Ditto causes Standard Damage at 8 Intensity  

Mimic  

Dittos can assume the form of any inanimate thing - but they dont change their mass so: their copies are nearly always lighter or heavier than the original thing. One Ditto weighs about 250 pounds. It is rumored in UFO conspiracy circles that certain buildings are in fact an enormous mass of mimicking Dittos, waiting for something…

Weaknesses

Use of weak bases (alkaline compounds) like ammonia can neutralize or drown acidic Dittos, causing Standard Damage each round. Defeating Dittos can be an opportunity for clever uses of real-world chemistry by PCs.  

 

Once PC notice there's two of something that there was one of a second ago - they'll probably try to light it up. They get a flat 50 chance to guess right. Otherwise the Ditto will evade and liquify and slip between the cracks of something. PCs may try to identify Dittos by making note of how close suspicious objects are to them in the room. As Host, you can make any empty space suddenly seem suspicious by noting in your description what inanimate objects are closest to the PC and how many of that kind of thing there are. Or tell them that there's one less chair at the table than a minute ago. 

"HORROR WANTS PSYCOED"

In The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film, it says there's seven scare tactics in horror movies -- 

1. dead space

2. the subliminal

3. the unexpected

4. the grotesque

5. dread

6. the uncanny

7. the unstoppable

I keep forgetting what they are so I came up with a mnemonic:

PSYCOED

as in

HORROR WANTS

P        ervasive       (the subliminal)

S        hocking        (the unexpected)

Y        ucky            (the grotesque)

C        orporeal         (the unstoppable)

O        dd                  (the uncanny)

E        mpty             (dead space)

D        read      

I think when it comes to scares in movies, the name of the game is Dread and there’s six ways to having it. 

As for why Corporeal for Unstoppable: I think the unstoppable-ness of the Horror is usually most dreadful in scenes where the Horror can wreck people in spite of a capacity to be targeted. I figure what The Book of Horror calls The Unstoppable must be the Horror's terrible transcendent impossibility when its impossibility seems most scraped out -- when we have to deal with the fact that it is indeed there and it really did all that, and so we may fail to stop it purely because it is just that good.