Scare Tactics: Shock - Doll's House

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I wanted to write about shock next and thought it was pretty clear how horror movies get it: jump scares. Being loud and all of a sudden. Jump scares, often maligned, are cheap. Some might say they're too cheap to work. A patented Rotten-Tomato-Meter horror movie would never be so crude. 

Jump scares being lowbrow is ironic since their origin is what was once the artiest thing you could do in a movie. 

A jump cut is a kind of cut where - that there was a cut - is obvious. The person who made it cool was a director named Jean Luc-Godard, who was French and a critic and wore a beret and in France. 

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Entertainment Values

There was an entertainment industry in America before there was a movie industry. What early movies had to compete with it were pictures of those entertainers - dancers or comedians - manipulated in ways that added to what was already pretty entertaining about them: how they moved. Dancers danced. Comedy duos beat each other over the head and chased each other around.  

But with movies the stage wasn't exactly the stage anymore - it was a composition factor. Where should I put the entertainers on the stage inside of the picture I take of them there? The critical term for this, adapted by French critics from its usage in the theater, was mise en scène. And as it became easier to manipulate the sequence of the pictures made of entertainers - something was discovered. Changes could be put in with such a fineness that the fact there was a change put in at all could be hidden from the naked eye. 

Anyone who's fiddled with a camera and editing software - so like anyone with a phone - so like everyone reading this: you know: 

You have a person standing there. 

Then: that same place without them in it. 

Because the sequence of images appears continuous it looks like that person - all of a sudden - disappeared. 

What it didn't look like - was what had actually happened: someone was standing there - they walked away - and we kept looking at the place they used to be at - with the walking away left out.

That part of the theater - stagehands in black shuffling backdrops in and out - actors hustling to their places behind a curtain - movies could hide with immediate and actual invisibility. 

In France, where movies were being observed not as bread-and-circuses by critics in the magazine Cahiers Du Cinema, Godard wrote about the value of never noticing the changes, attributing it especially to that industry where movies were made to achieve it: a Hollywood style, starring an Invisible Cut. 

Godard also made movies and he was like, but what if noticing the cut didn't suck? What else could it feel like?

So he made BREATHLESS which was a pretty good name for the thing it could feel like: something like:

ihadmorethingsicouldsayaboutthisthanicouldsaytoyouorshowtoyouandsoitgetsintomymoviefuckingmymovieupasyoucansee 

Some might hear that and think: Ok you're fucking your movie up. A more generous take could be there's an intensity coming across. BREATHLESS broke the rule and did something with the pieces. It was cool about it. 

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Written and Directed By

There's a director I can think of who makes cool movies that shock without being loud and sudden. He named his production company after a Godard film. Like Godard, he's also a critic. Like Godard, his movies can be didactic about the movies.  

Imagine you never tasted the word postmodern - what's a Quentin Tarantino movie? Very simply: 

 one where cool people are depicted in the style of the kind of movie they would want to talk about with each other.

Sharp-dressed smart-asses, babes, nazi-killers, regulators, filmmakers, those who go medieval on the asses of the Confederacy, the various and merciless, Zoe Bell as Zoe Bell, Pam Grier as Pam Grier as Coffy, Sharon Tate as Alive and Happy. Y'know: cool people.

Making a movie these characters would want to talk about together means cutting out all the stuff they wouldn't want to talk about. What we don't want to talk about makes a lot of hay in dramas touted for their psychological acuity. Movies where characters for good or bad kill and steal and lie usually take pains to depict tortured consciences. I'd argue Tarantino does include the not-talked-about sex and violence stuff, but just in a way that is - conscientiously - hard to discuss. But anyway. 

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So Good It's Bad

DEATH PROOF (2007) was the only strictly-Horror movie Tarantino ever made. He says it is his worst movie and most people agree. It's sticky though because the movie is supposed to be bad. 

What does that mean, well: 

DEATH PROOF was one half of a double-feature presentation called GRINDHOUSE. Grindhouse was the name for a kind of theater exhibition featuring cheap thrills, which GRINDHOUSE directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were admirers of. 

There's been a lot of movies like GRINDHOUSE since. Way worse ones. Most of the random independent horror movies you can find on Amazon are lazily-made but with half an eye toward being post-modern-y pastiche of older movies that couldn't help but later on seem lazily-made. 

DEATH PROOF is not lazily-made or bad. It may though have had a forbidding or incomplete structure that - based on what has later been added in the unrated version (really a cheeky name for the director's cut) - Tarantino himself may acknowledge. 

It has, on purpose

- scratched film 

- jump cuts that are not from arty experiment but from just the putting together of a scene backwardly - going from a picture of a person to a picture of the person someplace in a way that makes it for a moment incoherent when and where they are

- an audio track that dips in and out - like someone didn't have the fine-tuning devices to smooth them into each scene one to the next

- people talking about pointless bullshit

- people looking into the camera and winking at it

- the director - recognizably the director - in his own movie - enjoying himself

- shots of cute butts for no other reason than the butt is cute

- long stretches without violence, without anything sinister

- half-way through it introduces a whole other movie's-worth of characters

Lazy-movie stuff. Unless, like Godard and his jump cut, it expressed an intensity. 

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T.P.K.

The most dreadfully shocking moment in DEATH PROOF is its singular and most spectacular moment of violence - when Stuntman Mike kills all the girls at once with his car. 

It happens in the middle of the movie, clears out all the protagonists from the first half of it, and creates for the villain absolutely no extenuating consequences whatsoever. No scratches on the new car. 

So on the whole it's shocking. Shocking in the way of "how long have I been watching this movie and this is what's happened in total?" The totality of a movie though, you only get an idea of when it's over. So to understand how the moment is so dreadful we have to look at the entire movie. 

All we have to know about the second half of the movie is that it doesn't refer at all to what came before. 

What comes before it is an hour of people bullshitting in bars, wondering if they're going to have sex or not. Sometimes in the bars - like in real life - there's other people there wondering about if they're going to have sex or not. One of those people is psychopathic serial murderer Stuntman Mike. Okay, saucy. Well: Stuntman Mike is in that bar talking about bullshit too and wondering not if he's going to have sex but if he's going to kill four women with his car. It's still a lot like normal life for the most part. 

Except that in the movie it's fascinating. In a Tarantino movie it often is. The dialogue, the way people talk to each other, what they're talking about, there is a rhythm that is shockingly realistic - a sound like fumbling out of tape but that wastes nothing. 

How? 

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For A Little While

Let's take a look at this large sequence - the second bar the girl's go to - which seems to be  them kicking back and nothing changing except eventually the villain is there kicking back too. What does change? The weather. 

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- There's Arlene going out for a smoke to see that it's, to quote the scene description from the script, "fuckin' pissin' cats and dogs."

 

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- Then there's another scene of Arlene on the porch, but with Nate, who wants to make out. It's still fuckin pissin raining cats and dogs. So hard that note the highlights placed in the background of the shot, where the rain on a tin roof create white showers. 

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- The kind of rain this is makes problems. People arrive places late with their hair dripping and mussed. We get a shot of the new people arriving, with an angle on the spattering outside through a fogged up window pane. The bar inside must be warm then. The kind of warm it is must be from body warmth. Austin, Texas doesn't need the heat on for a little rain. 

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- We find out more about the rain: it's not not one you have to run away from exactly. The rain feels good. It's a cooling rain, breaking the heat. The girls let it dry on their bare legs and wash their feet. 

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- The next change: the rain just about stopped. There's a fine amount of liquid in this shot of Kurt Russell. It's a couple heavy drops of rainwater dripping off from where it's collected and pooled somewhere above him. It's not a drop from the sky. It's precisely twinkling leftover drops. 

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- Then the next minute of rain we notice is that minute after a rain has stopped when everything it has gotten wet has also stopped dripping. All of the wet it made is on the ground. So we have this shot high above the parking lot to show us glistening asphalt pebbles. 

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- There's big puddles which tires hit with a kind of visual exclamation mark like saying "look here now it's about to get serious."

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- The final minute of rain we are sensitive to is that dried minute of rain and how this shot creates it is by very slightly peppering the windshields where droplet stick and are held in place oddly by the aerodynamics of a car moving. Then that utter blackness outside the window - which wants to be opened so as to perfect the temperature. The cool-off is dissipating, or the heat is back on. We need to make a breeze. But the kind of breeze it is must be warm. And not with a desiccating contact like from an open oven but a contact which only warm breezes made from driving cars with the window open after a cooling rain would have: because of the moisture in the air - not even the moisture anymore - the after-moisture. And the speed of a car pushing through. 

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A Little Blue

An important detail about all these shots and the quality of rain differences they suggest that is totally missing from this essay and must by nature be missing from this essay is The Beam.

The Beam is the thing which, while it existed, cinematography was designed around. 

Like the fact that the picture cinematographers were making would be something projected in a beam from behind a bunch of people and onto a big screen in front of them - all the magical depth pulled out of the actual flatness of the final image came from re-applied sensitivities to the literal beam of light passing over an audience's heads.

Like: you were in a dark room. There was a point of light behind you which became an enormous lit thing in front of you. But the picture in front of you also had darknesses. And those darknesses would be the same quality of darkness of the room you were in, and the brightnesses would have the same quality of brightness as that single point behind your head. 

So you could steal people's sense of the actual darkness and illumination of the place they were in to trick them into thinking they were looking out into actual rooms of darkness and illumination. 

This is why the cinematographer John Alton, who shot several iconic film noir movies, wrote in his book on the subject of cinematography, that for creating depth in a shot - which was the secret key to the looking glass dream of the cinema - whatever you do: the farthest away thing in the shot must be the brightest-looking thing.

Painting with Light, John Alton

But none of that applies if there's no beam. 

And it seems likely to me that it may not apply for a beam that's anything other than from film projection. What film projection preserves of the active play of light that digital projection sharpens out I think may be essential to what John Alton's talking about. 

TVs and computers and smart phones only glow. Their light is not played off of a wall with the source behind you from a single point. All of this is especially important for the movie we're talking about because to watch DEATH PROOF you were meant to go to the theater and spend a long ass time there doublefeaturing in a way which by then was no longer economically feasible and had to be the pet project of a Palm D'or winner. 

GRINDHOUSE was made for The Beam - and in color. 

So:

Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, David Hockney

In addition to The Beam having the darkness of the room, it could also have the quality of the colors of the illuminated day outside the room. 

Glancing yellows, departing reds-on-blue-black, diffused pinks-through-blue and blues-through-pink, baths of tangerine, the white of never-looking-at it, gone-away purples. Colors of light recall times of day - which create mood. 

This can be literal. When you are in an enormous partly illuminated box and you are catching that light onto yourself you receive light not just through your eyes but as something on your skin. Our skin has a sensitivity to the light of day which cinematographers in color may trick. 

If there's a scene of heavy downpour rain and the color is correct and you have the god damn beam then your skin is sensitive to the light of rain as though there was actual rain. Your skin may know something about an everywhere-at-once blue-silver your eyes don't.

The cinematography of DEATH PROOF, shot by Tarantino himself, accomplished both a hyper-specific genre detail we talked about before (the sleaze shots and the janky set-ups) as well as a hyper-real mis en scène, here defined by sensitivity to the light of different minutes of a Texan rain. 

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Not Tripping

So we set our scene. We put some rain in it. What else is put in it? Actors. What are they doing? They are fucking acting. 

The most evergreen thing said about acting is from Shakespeare: speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue - rudely translated, means: oh my god just say the fucking line asshole. For an example of this advice going all the way wrong, here’s the Coen Brothers:

The script for DEATH PROOF is interesting in the filmography of Quentin Tarantino because there’s a lot in it that’s not in the movie. He’s said that in the editing room he played the character of a passionless grindhouse movie producer, and killed all his arthouse darlings.

In the video below you may see there are slight changes from the script. Some lines go missing. There’s “And”s inserted, and other filler phrases like “Now look.” Why do actors do that?

You could think of the dialogue in a screenplay like tablature for a guitarist. Sometimes guitar tabs ask for a movement from chord to chord that playing will twist your fingers up. Actors, with their tongue teeth lips and lungs playing the instrument, may sometimes find smoother finger-placements to get the right sound.  

Here's what's going on in just 12 lines of dialogue - 

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The scene begins by quoting from a poem. “The woods are lovely dark and deep.” The rhythm is iambic tetrameter. Which means it has an UP-down-UP-down-UP beat that goes on for four beats-long. The WOODS are LOVEly DARK and DEEP. 

 

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Then: the omission of “Stuntman.” The word MIKE has an IIII in it that makes you bare your teeth, and a K that is harsh. MIKE, like, FUCK. Russell is being short. He’s impatient and harsh with Julia.  

 

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The line “is that true did I miss my chance?” IS that TRUE and MISS my CHANCE have the same beat. It’s right there in the sentence as written then for Russell to draw out the didIIIIII in the middle and motivate the character’s playful vulnerability. 

 

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Vanessa Ferlito’s line comes out of a long silence and she puts the silence into the line by losing the front of it with a swallow before she talks. We still get the gist because the emphasis is on the last most important word: CAR. 

 

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The beat starts to pick up. “You’ve seen” “I saw him” “I saw you” “You saw my” “I saw your”. Russell, who is in fact stalking them, plays up the character’s deflection by repeating what’s been said. He also creates a pause between “I saw your” and “legs.” Without the pause there’s a triple emphasis: “iii SAW YOUR LEGS.” Instead, he stops, like not wanting to over-emphasize, then does it anyway, like he can’t help himself, and makes the line playfully immodest rather than only blatant. The next thing he says is about how he can’t help himself. NOW LOOK gives us a couple important sounds: Ls and Ws and Os and OOs and a secret Y in the Ws. Sta(L)kin (Y)a(LL) (W)asn’t (W)(O)(L)f. Wolf is the most important word at the end of the sentence and gets more weight from the additional NOW LOOK. The alliteration between WASn’t and WOLF motivate Russell’s vain pout.

 

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Ferlito’s first line to make as much music as this, that isn’t just a clipped response, is the line “why should I be wounded?” WHY should IIII be WOUNDed? This line has an iamb: UP-down-UP-down-UP-down. It also has rhymes: WHY with IIII, and SHOULD with WOUND. Usually you don’t have dialogue with recognizbly poetic beat or rhymes because it sounds too prettily artificial. That’s perfect for this moment. It allows Ferlito to affect the vanity the characters are discussing. 

 

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Next we have Russell laying on the seduction thick, with soft Fs and Bs and T-Hs, moan-y OOs, all culminating in a juicy G and L word an(G)e(L). (TH)ere are (F)(EW) (TH)in(G)s as (F)etchin(G) as a (BR)(UISE)d e(G)o on a (B)(EAU)ti(F)U(L) an(G)e(L). The OOS lean in, the small F and B and Th shapes the mouth makes lower the volume, pop with G and L, in order to get all the way to the romantic sigh: SOOhhh How about that lap dance?

 

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Once Stuntman Mike is rejected, he tell us about his book. BOOK is not a sexy word like ANGEL. BOOK starts soft and ends harsh and the OO is kooky in the middle. Russell says it a lot. It gives him a lot to work with, trying to make a joke. We can’t see the audience’s reaction to know if it’s landing, but from what we know about him, it’s not funny: whatever his obsessions are, charmingly confessed or no, we’re suspicious of. The K of book strikes five times like reminding us of the violence we fear. Note the change in angle too. 

 

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Ferlito comes back with “and what if I did it?” The line has a short III vowel sound like ihh and a long III vowel sound like eye. They make her show her tongue and teeth to give the line a requisite rawr-meow color. The pounce behind the meow is for Russell to take in luxuriously with his WELL, all the rest of his line, one romantic sigh from out of the WELLs inhale. 

 

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Ferlito keeps the growl: m(I)ke (I)’m butterfl(Y). Then she has a line that recalls Russell’s line, “few things as fetching as a bruised ego on a beautiful angel” by lowering of the volume. She does it with Js and Ss. (J)ungle (J)ulia (S)ay(S) that (J)ukebo(X) in(S)ide i(S) preeeetty impre(SS)ive. 

 

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The scene doesn’t end as written, with Arlene telling Stuntman Mike to pick out a song and establishing some ground rules. Instead it’s “Why don’t you go get ready for your lap dance.” Rather than make explicit the erotic situation of her command, the new line just suggests it. The question has an obvious answer. Gs and Ds firm up the silky Js and Ss of the line previous, and sound like insistence. 

 

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Julia drum rolls us into the next scene by rolling through a list of stuff as if it was all one sound. Rhymes, repetitions, alliterative Ks Ts and Xs, turn the volume back up. The line is long but has a place to take a breath in it - “HISterically” - which is good because it also emphasizes the word “hysterically” and puts the wink in “BUT NOT funny-looking.” 

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Impact

If you’ve been able to watch this whole long sequence we've been talking about, all the way through, all fourty-five minutes in sound and color, and by the time the girl’s car is hurtling toward Stuntman Mike’s duckie, noticed the droplets on the window of their vehicle do not in fact shiver like they were something on the surface of an actually moving car: well, I don’t believe you.

The car doesn’t actually move. The shots were done on a stage. The black outside is too black. The light on her foot is too consistent. We just spent $$$$ dollars making it rain. Why not spend $$$$ dollars lighting toes from a moving car? 

Because, for what’s about to happen, the shot must introduce - invisibly - stage-like qualities.

In the script it says what's about to happen is the “slow-motion equivalent of the crash test dummy footage we’ve all seen, but with real people.” The kill will use too-dangerous-to-film-from-within angles to imply something too dangerous to witness. Kurt Russell underlines it just before he gets on the road.

The bodies are dismembered like dolls parts - and they are doll parts - but with effects artist Tom Savini making them flesh-y and bleeding. The kill images, which are just seconds long, are full of vividly horrible information about bodies, like how skin might stretch if a tire sped over it and how a leg might bounce off the pavement if it was severed. Sparks, spectacular ejections, and the grind of metal on metal are all real.

And there’s jump cuts. 

Not one like the others, for genre detail, but like Godard’s: to express intensity. Four cuts. Four perspectives on impact. A kill four times more dreadful than expected. 

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Icy Hot Reality

When I asked people in the Demon City Discord about satisfying jump scares they got to talking about real life jump scares. Usually from out of a slight adolescent terror - someone taking advantage of someone younger. It's no brilliant artifice to hide behind a corner and wait until someone doesn't know you're there to get in their way. But people seemed to agree it ends up being satisfying in a way the jump scare in a horror movie no longer really is. 

You couldn’t call the crash in DEATH PROOF a jump scare. It does shock.

On the level of structure: 

the whole cast, dead forever. Here’s a new cast, a new bar.

On the level of character: 

Stuntman Mike was a scary guy in a cool car. There’s lots of ways we can imagine a scary guy with a cool car killing four girls. We kept hearing about a beach house. We maybe expected to see someone die there. Instead, Mike kills everyone in the most surprising way imaginable, all-at-once instantaneously and at the expense of the things which he most values, including, seemingly, his own life. 

On the level of this sound and color dream: 

Four beautiful women each beautiful in a different way have been holding forth drunkenly and convincingly and always-interestingly on the stuff that actually matters to them, such as having some dick or not, which is to say, the raw stuff of real life which lesser writers can’t put into our dreams without waking us up. The girls never existed and now in the movie its as though they never existed. Touché. 

The sequence shocks dreadfully by giving the obvious depth.

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The Monster That Does That

You’re sitting on a bench in a stranger’s house with your dear friend. You step outside. Outside is a familiar inside. Your childhood bedroom’s blue ceiling. Your first grade classroom. The last place you saw him before he changed and - with a little teamwork and some luck - was trismigestusly quartered and drawn. This is to be expected because: you’re dreaming. You’re passing through harmlessly or through you is passing harmlessly bits of old days and nonsense as you sleep. Only now its not harmless and everything belongs to her. 

Doll is a chitinous beast of mannequin parts sewn together helter-skelter out of the nightmares of a long-running campaign. She and her House may imperil the survivors of Horrors in their sleep. 

The Layout of the House

If you’ve ever made an investigation-as-dungeon map of some Horror conspiracy, like it says in the game book, that's great: imagine each clue-hallway piece was an actual interior connecting other interiors. If your conspiracy map looks a little more crackpot like the meme of Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny: that’s fine. The point is: the layout of the House comes from a conceptual map of campaign elements reimagined as if it were a literal map of a place. 

If you bullshitted all the way through your conspiracy and can’t remember how anything fit together: you could 

- Write down some things the PCs said or did that was especially memorable, making sure to fill the whole page. 

- Encircle the stuff in concentric rings. 

- Label the rings 1st, 2nd, 3rd. Those are levels now. 

- Box the things into rooms with at least two things in each room. If one of the things was a room and one of the things was a character - cool: put that character in that room. If it doesn’t make sense: that’s cool and like a dream. If one of the things was a joke and another thing was an event: make something clever up just make sure there’s a room with an NPC in it. 

What's in Doll's House 

Figments (Dream NPCs) C10

1-3 If hostile in waking life, is now friendly. If friendly: now hostile

4 Is engaged in some odd repetitive task involving the location of a dream door that if interrupted will make it hostile  

5 Is in their underwear and freaking out about a test they’re going to take on the location of  dream doors in this room. Will immediately become hostile if you question its intelligence or raise your voice for any reason

6 Speaks in a slow and spooky Twin Peaks Black Lodge accent and knows it got here through a dream door but has trouble remembering where it is. If asked will only tell you a place the door isn’t.

6 As awake except visibly endowed with the sex characterstics of the opposite gender, which it can’t get over how neat it is. Enthusiastically shares the location of a dream door. 

7 As awake except older and hotter and bearing this place an obscure vendetta. Will want your help destroying a dream door.

8 As awake except younger and luckier and looking for someone to help it find: you. Will not want to tell you where a dream door is for fear of being abandoned. 

9 Believes you’re in its dream and will be prohibitively smug about it especially with regard to the location of dream doors

10 throw for +1 more characteristics max 4

 Dream Doors

Familiar places now slope weirdly into other places. The entrances and exits are hidden. C10

1-5 as a picture of the adjacent room in a screen or poster or mural or painting or…

6-7 through a peephole found in the “O” of the bottom of a shot glass or a roll of toilet paper or a telescope end or a donut or…

8-9 underneath something heavy - a couch - or awkward - someone’s wig

10 outside of a window with a drop that looks like it will kill you. Helpful Figments will assure you its safe. It is. You'll enter the room below by waking up on its floor. You're still in the dream though.

The Dreamer

All of the PCs are asleep. One of them, however, is being harrowed. Significator Items are things from the life of the Dreamer PC that clearly belong to no one else but that PC: jewelry or a jacket or a trusty sidearm the character is known to have. Significator Items exploit Doll’s weaknesses and are clues to the identity of the Dreamer. 

"Her False Complexion Until Various Merciless Seethes"

Doll's incursion begins with a mysterious brand. It can be a reward or a curse-trap or an elective spell. The name of a PC appears as if sewn into the palm of another PC. The PC will gain the other’s aptitudes. If Bob gets Joan’s name on his hand, and Joan has Firearms +5, Bob now has Firearms +5 too. This is lucky - but weird - and bears investigating. The party may learn or already know this touched PC can gain the additional skills of any other PC its bled in battle with by cutting the name into the flesh of another hand or foot. 

A sewing PC gains a lot of bonuses. So will Doll.  

Doll 

Doll looks like the PCs bodies sewn together. Based on how many PCs are sharing stats, she gets bonuses. 

R -

A 6 +1 each PC sewn

T 6 +1 each PC sewn

P 6 +1 each PC sewn

A -

C -

K 6 +1 each PC sewn

 

Supernatural Abilities

NIGHTMARE

Nightmares don’t need to breathe or digest, don’t age, and are immune to poison, etc. and cannot be mentally controlled with psionic abilities. Knows the history of emotions of the Dreamer. Cannot be brought below 0 Toughness except by loss of control of the dream. 

CLIMBING

Can climb across any surface at a normal walking speed.

DISASSEMBLE

Each body (as many as PCs sewn) attached to Doll has the stats of the PC it’s modeled on.  Doll will only abandon a body if its health is depleted or the body is saying things that are embarrassing to it. 

AMAZING NAP

At 0 Toughness Doll will fall asleep. Doll regenerates all Toughness and has +1 advantage on throws after it sleeps 17 minutes. 

DENTATA

If Doll successfully attacks with one of its huge mutant starfish-hands-with-legs-and-arms-for-the-fingers it can grapples as if it were a bite attack.

HOST

Knows the location of all dream doors 

Has a sixth sense for prey in their domains and catch the scent any time one passes through a dream door.  

If a dream door is destroyed it will - violently and calm-checking-ly - emerge from a new one, effectively creating a tunnel from wherever they were before 

Weaknesses

Significator Items from the Dreamer’s waking life cause a Nightmare to make a Calm Check or flee until they are out of sight. The Intensity of the Calm Check is equal to the degree of significance to the Dreamer’s life of whatever is wielded (1–9). In the case of an incidentally encountered artifact (their car in a parking lot) the Intensity is 2.

Touching a Significator Item does damage to a Nightmare as an ordinary physical attack.

Invoking the name of the Nightmare’s Dreamer causes it great pain, and the creature must make a Calm Check against the speaker’s Calm each round to avoid obeying the attacker. 

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Doll's House is for people who've been playing together a long time. Old arenas become locked-room puzzles, fan favorite NPCs come back insaner, inside jokes are magical weapons. The immediate-individual benefit and eventual-collective-problem of the "Her False Complexion" spell jokes on player dynamics: oh you think I should do what? Here's my character sheet then.

As for how to enter the dream: the session starts as if the party is asleep with no indication whatsoever of a dream until the PCs are drawn to some location - ideally one they’ve been to before - that’s on your map of Doll’s House. Once they’re in - lock and load. The PCs are basically in a race to figure out they're in a dream and who's dream it is and where the hell is the door out of here before Doll finds them and rips them in half.  

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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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Q: What's an Extreme movie? A: Something cool I made a list of that you can watch a lot of for free

The public library system in LA County uses a streaming service called Kanopy. It's free, doesn't make recommendations, displays all titles uniformly (no annoying splash images or promo slideshows or god forbid autoplay). I love that. 

I like how deep and eclectic the selection is. Do I need to be able to watch a documentary about like, every single thing a documentary could be about besides a murder, or to be able to watch every single film by South Korean mumblecore director Hong Sang-Soo, who makes one or even two movies every god damn year - No. I like that I could. 

I reaaaaaally like that I could watch - and did - so many movies distributed in the 2000s under the brand Tartan Asia Extreme.

What's That

Tartan Films was a UK-based film distributor - that means it was The Money bringing movies to the different kinds of places people could see them: theaters, festivals, DVD & video-cassette players. In the period I’m concerned with, someone named Hamish Mcalpine ran Tartan. Larry Clark, famous for taking pictures of his friends shooting drugs, once tried to strangle Mcalpine for want of patriotism after a disagreement the two had about the incipient War on Terror. Mcalpine introduced Pedro Almodovar, Todd Haynes, and the Wong Kar Wai film IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE to Europe, and theoretically got the Gaspar Noe film IRREVERSIBLE through British Film Board censorship.

Asia Extreme was a brand created by Tartan to market crime and horror films made in East Asia. Reportedly what inspired the label was RINGU and AUDITION. AUDITION, which features torture, might be the kind of movie we'd expect to inspire a label Extreme, but RINGU is pretty lowkey. Maybe what it has that's so extreme is using something from the premise of watching a movie against you. Point is: the movies weren't Extreme just because they were violent. They got under their audience's skin in creative ways. What that has to do with Asia - which, in the case of the titles referenced in this post, means two very different countries, whose histories involve war and enslavement and xenophobia of the other, and the enormous burdens that may separate people therein - I don't think it's for me today to entirely know.

Horror is the genre par excellence of getting under the skin. But an interesting thing about Tartan's marketing brand is that it also included crime movies, and, in some cases, movies where there are no obvious genre elements, such as in the filmography of director Kim Ki-Duk. Crime and horror movies have a pretty convincing single origin - if you're attached to genealogies - German expressionist film. But I thought it'd be more interesting - as an experiment - to take for granted there could be something as Extreme for a genre of film. And from the movies, try to work out - independently of them being horror or crime or exoticized foreign imports - what makes Extreme extreme.

Extreme Trouble

What's not in any of the films? No, like, vampires, no science fiction really, nothing not roughly set in the present day - (just two: R POINT, during the Vietnam War, and BATTLE ROYALE in a near-future). Across the crime-horror-drama divide there are such things in the movies as: maniacs, ghosts, and something like, being down-and-out. The ghosts have different grievances, and the maniacs have different perversions, and the people who are down-and-out have different terrible luck, but these three dreadful things - across the small catalogue I'm working off of - seem ubiquitous. 

What ghosts, maniacs, and being pinched in the gears of industry have in common is that they seem to be modern problems. There might've been a great extreme movie released in Bangkok that year about a horrible monster that could not be confused for a ghost, or a crime movie about the Rape of Nanking, and for marketing purposes, movies set in the present day may seem more believable as cutting-edge contemporary. Or: a movie that is Extreme rarely stars something that is both dreadful and strictly fantastical. 

Ghosts

The ghosts in the ghost selection of the films are dead women, four of the six are specifically young girls. The most dreadful shot in A TALE OF TWO SISTERS is a sequence where we are told there is a girl under the sink, glimpsed in a second of out-of-nowhere chaos, a sudden seizure that brings someone down to the floor. When we do finally get around to seeing what's under there it's a necrotic hand. DARK WATER has, in its most dreadful moment - when the mother thinks she's saved her daughter and sees that actually she was cradling the ghost - a waterlogged corpse. The corpse in ARANG has been perfectly preserved, however, not because of ghostly glamor, but from - possibly bogus I'm not sure - it was convincing at the time - chemistry reasons: of being buried in a salt pile. Even the I suppose life-affirming gore of birth is purified by the salt in the also possibly unbelievable fact that the dead body delivered its fetus, also preserved. ARANG, like a TALE OF TWO SISTERS, is based on a fairy tale, and this must go far to explain the latter's convolution and the former's beggaring belief. R POINT isn't really that scary but there are shots of the wind in the grass at night. In RINGU of course the most dreadful scene is immediately after we watch the cursed video tape and find reflected in the dead television set's round, the ghost in the corner who was watching us watch it. The WISHING STAIRS also isn't scary but it does have one perfect shot of the eponymous steps at the end. SPIDER FOREST, a third not very scary film in this collection, has, again, for its most under-the-skin moment, a wonderful wide, which shows the ghost in the forest levitating with perfect stillness far above and ahead of the one observing it.

A good movie ghost has routines that are brutal. It does this on these days it goes here at night it wants only this because of the single horrible thing that happened to it: cause-and-effect become brutal - crude and exaggerated - in the matter of a ghost. Children know regimes - parents, soccer practices, homework - and in the case of certain of these countries, their educators corporal punishments. The ghosts are hiding under the sink, or in the art room, or in the salt pile, or in the viewing of a video tape, and seeking them out is usually the most dreadful moment in ghost horror movies. Because then you're playing its game. You subject yourself to the crude exaggerations of the regime. 

Maniacs

My personal favorite of the movies discussed, BLOODY REUNION, by Director Im Dae-Woong, has several of the most fucked-up kills I've ever seen in a horror movie, a deeply unsettling dramatic premise whereby the pathetic are also despicable, and a desolate twist. The scariest thing in it is probably when someone is force-fed broken razor blades. In I SAW THE DEVIL it is a script element: not only is there a total psychopath which the hero has to deal with, but that, with the breeziness of strolling over to a neighbor's front yard, one can find: even more fucked up people. It's the cannibal friend in I SAW THE DEVIL that is its most appalling feature. H is a messy movie, with a messy idea about reproductive health, but it does have a luxurious image of someone's personality destroyed oceanside. Director Takashi Miike's AUDITION - which started this whole thing - is good all the way through, with its nearly SCREAM-like postmodern-y refusal to straightforwardly engage with the conventions of a horror movie, dreadfully concealing its maniac in a blue little drama about getting a little old and being a little tired and wanting a little love. One second of its final sequence I can't forget: the way the maniac lopes away, like a child excited to surprise someone for a birthday party. 

A good movie maniac will pervert trust bonds. Whatever it is that's supposed to hold people together, a good movie maniac confuses. They make their tortures out to be happy birthday surprises. Their favorite teacher is their sworn enemy. Their mother is someone they want to have killed (I dunno I fell asleep during H). Or that to them, paying a visit is a tour of hell. The most dreadful sequences with movie maniacs in them are when the maniac is shockingly identified - and before that - their fetishes. 

Down and Out

The unlucky and unloved. Which are horrible get-underneath-your-skin type problems. It may be that in the way that RINGU leaps out of the screen with its premise, these movies do the same with the notion you paid $25 bucks to see them. Depending on what $25 dollars means to you, and what it can be like to think of what $25 dollars might mean to someone else, this is a very unsettling premise. To be down-and-out in a movie - when the movie is good - makes prices sharp. Most of them here feature kids sold-for-parts. And knives, lots of knives (Many East Asian countries have laws against owning firearms). 

The most dreadful moments in these films are when the children are ruined. SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE's drowning. THE MAN FROM NOWHERE's jar of eyes. LADY VENGEANCE (a possibly self-reflective example) parent characters who watch footage of their kids' tortures and executions. BATTLE ROYALE gives the kids a fighting chance - but maliciously. The movie, so much more hardcore than any of its later inspirations - which are, strangely, a lot of content marketed to kids, YA novels like the THE HUNGER GAMES, video games like FORTNITE - never cuts less than to the bone with the fact that in a kill-or-be-killed environment, one kid's fighting chance is at the expense of another. Its best scene is either every of one these murders or its first scene: when the kids first get distributed to them their provisions. Director Kim Ki Duk provides a few outliers with movies not primarily featuring kids. His down-and-out films have in common their best scenes taking place during brightest day, in the lucky people places: a mall where an insane former coast guard in the COAST GUARD does bayonet drills, and a park where the good and normal girls go walking around, and - when you're the bad guy in BAD GUY - you are irrepressibly drawn to kiss them. 

THE SCORE

So an Extreme movie seems to be one where 

something dreadful

is defined by

• the pervasiveness of a crude and exaggerated order 
• shockingly confused attachments to people and things
• the invincibility of high costs of living 

• in the vernacular of the present day

 

       

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So basically here's a list of some really good movies you can like watch for free dawg...

A Tale of Two Sisters	KIM Jee-woon	2003	South Korea	ghost
Arang	AHN Sang-hoon	2006	South Korea	ghost
Audition	TAKASHI Miike	1999	Japan	maniac
Bad Guy	KIM Ki-Duk	2001	South Korea	down and out
Battle Royale	FUKASAKU Kinji	2000	Japan	down and out
Bloody Reunion	IM Dae-Woong	2006	South Korea	maniac
The Coast Guard	KIM Ki-duk	2002	South Korea	down and out
Dark Water	NAKATA Hideo	2002	Japan	ghost
H	LEE Jong-hyeok	2002	South Korea	maniac
Horror Stories	IM Dae-woong JUNG Bum-sik HONG Ji-young KIM Gok & KIM Sun MIN Kyu-dong	2012	South Korea	maniac
I Saw The Devil	KIM Jee-woon	2010	South Korea	maniac
Lady Vengeance	PARK Chan-wook	2005	South Korea	down and out
The Man From Nowhere	LEE Jeong-beom	2010	South Korea	down and out
R Point	KONG Su-chang	2004	South Korea	ghost
Ringu	NAKATA Hideo	1998	Japan	ghost
Sorum	YOON Jong-chan	2001	South Korea	all
Spider Forest	SONG Il-gon	2004	South Korea	ghost
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance	PARK Chan-wook	2002	South Korea	down and out
Wishing Stairs	YUN Jae-yeon	2003	South Korea	ghost

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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.