Ten Days of Terror!: The Shallows

Film: The Shallows
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I think it takes a certain amount of guts to make a shark movie. Jaws is not merely the definitive shark movie, but might well be the definitive “Man vs. Nature” movie. The characters are well-created and we genuinely feel for them and want them to survive. The shark is terrifying in large part because it spends most of the movie hidden. A lot of things have been attempted with shark movies. The Shallows goes the route of minimalism, and it’s genuinely the right choice.

One thing that makes The Shallows effective as a film is that it relies in large part on something that is true: the majority of shark attacks happen in shallow water and close to the beach. It’s true in the real world, and in the cinematic world, it means that the safety of dry land is always going to be visible and tantalizingly close.

Get Your Papers in Order

Films: Orphan
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on the new portable.

Orphan came recommended to me by a friend. It’s a movie I have known about in a vague sense for some time, mostly because in the minds of a lot of people, it gets confused with The Orphanage from a year or two before this one. I frequently had to explain to people that no, I was not talking about the movie where some people adopted a strange and disturbing child, but a Spanish-language movie that involved a haunted orphanage. So, in a sense, I kind of avoided Orphan because I was tired of having explain that it wasn’t the movie I was talking about.

Anyway, Orphan is classified as a horror movie for the same reasons that something like The Silence of the Lambs, Hard Candy, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Fear are classified as horror movies. All of these movies take place more or less in the real world with plots that could legitimately happen in that real world, but that are horrific. It’s what I would typically call a “thriller” more than anything else, but since it’s the sort of film that frequently gets put on lists of horror movies, well, here we are.

Melt It Down

Films: House of Wax (2005)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

There are horror remakes and there are horror remakes. The Mystery of the Wax Museum was given a very straight, standard remake in the 1950s starring Vincent Price, with the name changed to House of Wax. It was a lot of fun, adding in goofy 3D effects and playing up the camp. Someone had the bright idea to make a film with the same name, but with nothing beyond the presence of a wax museum in common with the original story. That’s a problem, because the original story was fun, and this version stinks on ice.

The House of Wax remake comes from 2005, right in the middle of a collection of horror movies that decided gore and torture was a good substitute for old-fashioned horror. What this means is that we’ll be focusing a great deal on gore here, using that to generate disgust more than it generates real fear. This is a gross-out movie wearing the clothing of classic horror.