Undead Backbrain

There’s another viral apocalypse taking place in genre cinema, thanks to the US giant monster film Cloverfield: the “found footage” technique. This is where the movie adopts the conceit that it was not “constructed” artistically by the cinematic equivalent of the literary “omniscient author”, but was filmed ad hoc by an involved party — often supposed amateurs — as the events took place. The highly successful ghost film The Blair Witch Project (1999) was the first film using this method to gain a high profile in recent times, but its success didn’t seem to inspire others to do likewise. Even the makers of Blair Witch abandoned it for their sequel.

A major problem with the methodology, of course, is the danger that your audience will end up suffering from motion-sickness thanks to the continual and highly frenetic onslaught of jerky camera movements. This is a big problem with Blair Witch, which was actually filmed using the type of equipment featured in the scenario — camcorders and video cameras — and therefore the creators couldn’t (or didn’t) ameliorate the effect by controlling the relationship between movement and stillness in post-production. It was what it pretended to be — discounting the supernatural involvement, of course.

Cloverfield was more artistically self-conscious in its use of the conceit. Except here and there, its “found-footage” wasn’t filmed using the small hand-held digital camera that was supposed for the sake of the story to have recorded the monster’s New York rampage. Here the same cameras used to lens major mainstream movies were used to replicate a hand-held effect. Like most films, it is all pretense, an artifice used to artistically mimic “reality” rather than to simply record it. As a result the motion-sickness effect is less intrusive — though still there.

Now the “found footage” virus has latched onto the zombie apocalypse trope. George Romero has extended his Living Dead mythos with Diary of the Dead (2007) — in which a bunch of film students are making a horror film of their own (just like Romero and crew themselves back in 1968) when the events of Romero’s first film, Night of the Living Dead — the one that started the whole genre — were supposed to have taken place. Instead of making their fictional horror film, the film students are on hand to record “real” zombie mayhem. The fact that we’re dealing with film students using hi-tech cameras, however, allows the whole thing to be even less visually unstable than the imagery of Cloverfield.

But Romero isn’t alone in undertaking a “found footage” zombie film.

In [Rec] (Spain-2007; dir. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza), what we are ostensibly watching is footage taken by a young reporter and her cameraman while on night-shift duty with the fire department. Accompanying the rescue crew when they are called out to rescue an elderly woman trapped in her apartment, they find themselves caught up in a cannibalistic nightmare as the apartment building’s inhabitants turn into zombiesque monsters.

The film is a multi-award winner and has been getting excellent reviews.

Now a US remake of [Rec] called Quarantine (US-2008; dir. John Erick Dowdle) is set to hit screens across the country.

Synopsis:

Television reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman (Steve Harris) are assigned to spend the night shift with a Los Angeles Fire Station. After a routine 911 call takes them to a small apartment building, they find police officers already on the scene in response to blood curdling screams coming from one of the apartment units. They soon learn that a woman living in the building has been infected by something unknown. After a few of the residents are viciously attacked, they try to escape with the news crew in tow, only to find that the CDC has quarantined the building. Phones, Internet, televisions and cell phone access have been cut-off, and officials are not relaying information to those locked inside. When the quarantine is finally lifted, the only evidence of what took place is the news crew’s videotape.

The strength and the limitation of this form of pseudo cinema verité lies in its immediacy. To work effectively the events shown need to take place more-or-less in “real time”, giving the narrative an urgency and compact breathlessness that suits certain types of story. The audience feels like it is there, on the spot. By the same token, this cogency of narrative — the contraction of the film’s timeframe — of necessity limits the depth of characterisation involved and confines the temporal (and spatial) development of the scenario. Nor is this a cinema of reflection or contemplation. It is action-oriented and movement heavy. In general it can offer a high level of existential involvment, but can make no pretension towards philosophical or cognitive depth. It is about surface experience, offering little by way of explanation and limited complexity.

But it can provide one hell of a rush!

• Diary of the Dead website
• [Rec] website
• Quarantine website