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Modern horror films
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[Deleted User]
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Unless it's a period film every horror film now contains one of the following variations of a scene:
1. Rural location: man/woman/child pulls out mobile phone, and complains about there being no mobile signal.
2. Urban location: man/woman/child pulls out mobile phone, and the battery dies.
I want to punch the screen every time I see this. Can directors/screenwriters not use their imaginations to avoid this purely functional scene?
1. Rural location: man/woman/child pulls out mobile phone, and complains about there being no mobile signal.
2. Urban location: man/woman/child pulls out mobile phone, and the battery dies.
I want to punch the screen every time I see this. Can directors/screenwriters not use their imaginations to avoid this purely functional scene?
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Comments
There was a scene in Luther where she knew the killer was in the loft and she was in the bedroom. She runs out of the bedroom onto the landing but does she run down stairs out of the house? Nope, she hides in the closet instead.
Today's horror films are very well written, but the HD and superb production values take away the 'scare factor' for me.
Yes I've said this myself many times, the threadbare electronic scores or complete lack of score also added to the atmosphere back then. When you have an 80 piece orchestra telling you when to jump it completely removes that queasy uneasy feeling older horror movies had. I do think some of the early 'found footage' horrors are good examples of modern horror before 'found footage' became a whole genre of its own for those reasons.
Take out mobile phone and have a regular land line and this trope can go back as far as the 70's maybe earlier, this is nothing new at all.
To be fair to film-makers, the phone cliches you mention are cliches precisely because they're true. You can argue they're over-used, but they happen in real-life, not just movies. There's still large parts of the UK that doesn't have reliable - or any - signal coverage, let alone the backwoods of America or somewhere, and if anything, the battery thing is even more likely now than it was, say, five years ago.
In an age where even the man's dog's dog has a phone, how would you get around this? If you make a point of someone leaving their phone at home, or saying how much they hate them, then immediately you know it's going to bite them in the ass at some point. I suppose writers could invent some 'new' cliches, such as dropping it in the truck stop toilet, or changing the language to Mandarin and forgetting how to change it back to English, but ultimately it serves the same purpose. The protagonist has a phone that he can't use.