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Jan. 15th, 2008 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sexy_romulanJust got home from seeing The Orphanage at the World Exchange, and it's a beautifully freaky ghost story. It has a fantastic eye for the spooky and the dread-ful - it does heart-stoppingly brilliant things with a children's game, for instance - and knows exactly how to ramp tension up to a pitch where you KNOW something is waiting behind that closed door/in that shadow/when the heroine turns around, but you're almost afraid to keep watching to find out what it is.
It's not genre-transcendent genius like Pan's Labyrinth, though, for all its class. There is one notable instance where it goes for the shocker gross-out, a moment I didn't care for, for all it made me jump out of my seat. It was shock and gore purely for the sake of shock and gore...pretty gratuitous, if effective. There were instances of violence and gore in Pan's Labyrinth that certainly registered on the shock and horror scale, but those moments were never just thrown away. That movie made brutal, violent people into real monsters, and the shock factor was important to that. In this case it's pretty clearly just about freaking the audience out. I admire the story's internal logic and the way it's shown rather than explained, but it doesn't become real in the same way.
It's not genre-transcendent genius like Pan's Labyrinth, though, for all its class. There is one notable instance where it goes for the shocker gross-out, a moment I didn't care for, for all it made me jump out of my seat. It was shock and gore purely for the sake of shock and gore...pretty gratuitous, if effective. There were instances of violence and gore in Pan's Labyrinth that certainly registered on the shock and horror scale, but those moments were never just thrown away. That movie made brutal, violent people into real monsters, and the shock factor was important to that. In this case it's pretty clearly just about freaking the audience out. I admire the story's internal logic and the way it's shown rather than explained, but it doesn't become real in the same way.
