Tag: movies

“I wouldn’t open that door.”

“I wouldn’t go down that alley.”

“I wouldn’t answer that phone.”

“It’s a trap. Run away!”

I love horror movies. Part of the genre’s fun is in imagining what you’d do differently as you watch the characters navigate their world. Of course, we all believe we’d be smarter than at least first victims–we wouldn’t open that door or answer that phone.

But last night, I learned I shouldn’t be quite so confident. I was leaving my improv class. It was late, dark, cold, and rainy. As I unlocked my car, there was a sound. It was just like a car door closing. It came from just a few feet away, but there were no other cars around. The block was deserted.

I looked at the car. I’d been half-distracted, still on some adrenaline from class. So I focused up and tried to replay the sound in my head, wondering whether I’d imagined it. Had someone been crouching behind my car and gotten in? Almost certainly I’d misheard. That I knew. So I got in the car. Still it nagged me.

“Obviously, no one is here. But I may as well check.” Phone flashlight on. Back seats clear. “May as well finish checking.” Out of the car, open the trunk, all clear.

I could see the whole block under the yellow street lamps, there was nothing around, nowhere to lurk. There was only one more place to check–under the car. But now my heart rate was way up. In the horror-movie version, the killer would be lying prone on the street under the car. I knew there was no one, but still I had to psych myself up to look …

… all clear.

Or was it? (yes it was)

The best horror movies create a world in which the character has options, but none of them are good. You the viewer can’t imagine what you’d do differently.

I could have started home, 99.9% sure I had no unwelcome passenger. But probably I’d have arrived home only 99.5%. If I’d still resisted checking once in the garage, I’d have been thinking about it as I lay in bed.

In the moment on the street, I was more embarrassed at myself than I was scared. In the gentle light of day, I’m laughing at myself. I’m replaying it again, enjoying memory like a little movie in my head. But on that empty block, in that yellow light, just a few blocks away from the actual setting of many famous horror-film murders, I wasn’t 0% scared.

We saw Dune Part 2, and OMG.

We saw Dune Part 2, and OMG. I’ve never been in a theater so packed where the audience was so imperceptible. One of the things about going to the movies is you hear the people around you … crinkling wrappers, chewing popcorn, whispering to their date, whatever. Not Dune 2. For two hours and forty-six minutes straight, it felt like the entire audience was holding its breath as one, and digging its fingernails into the Music Box’s 90-year old armrests, not a muscle twitching in any of a couple hundred bodies. Go see in theaters, on the biggest screen you can. Look for a theater showing it in IMAX or 70MM. It’s worth it. To anyone in Chicago, I always recommend the Music Box.

Even more than the picture quality, the reason to see it in a special format like IMAX or 70MM is the sound. Just like the first installment, the sound design and sound effects for this movie are like nothing else you’ve ever seen heard. Part One won the Oscar for sound, and I’d be shocked if Part Two doesn’t win that, and probably more*. I joked coming out of the movie that they should just retire the sound category from the Oscars altogether, because this feels like the pinnacle sound effects in the movies. One of the big rewards for those who read the book (humblebrag) is hearing their bone-rattling depiction of “the voice,” a mind-control technique used by the Bene Gesserit.

A few days after seeing it, the other thing that has stuck with me is how scary this movie is. Not with jump scares or atmospheric creepiness like a horror movie. But the genuinely terrifying villains, who are scary in their delight for violence, their naked power seeking, their disdain for freedom and the law. It’s the worldview on display that is scary, more than the individual villains and their mobs. Because the parallels to our world today are so easy to see, where territorial imperialism, ethnic violence, drawn out trench warfare, and threats of atomic escalation are all back with us.

Edit: I realized I hit publish without finishing this post. I still hope everyone will see it, don’t let my downer of a review stop you. The movie is fun and it’s always darkest before the dawn!

May Shai-Hulud clear the path before you (to the Music Box or the nearest IMAX theater).

*PS speaking of the Oscars, how much of a bummer was it for the filmmakers who made shorts this year … when they heard WES ANDERSON made not one short, but several! I’d have been so mad!