Horror cinema
doesn’t often produce the kind of thing you’d hang on the wall, that’s a given.
Horror films, after all, are where filmmakers usually go to let their visual sensibilities
hang loose, taking apart one victim at a time without a care for whether the
viewer thinks this is Insta-worthy.
But, even in
this, there exists a baseline of acceptable imagery, a standard from which few
filmmakers are willing to deviate, most often as a precondition to mass
presentation. However, sometimes the director, the cinematographer, their effects
team, and everyone else with a hand in the aesthetic makeup of a picture, wants
to colour outside the lines and go out of their way to make things as ugly as
possible.
Think of the
ick you get when looking at an early Sam Raimi picture, the number of showers
you took after the sheer grottiness of the Grindhouse movies, or the nightmares
you enjoyed thanks to Mad God. Sure, none of them exactly made a killing at the
box office, but each has something unique about their look that makes them
stand out from the crowd of otherwise pretty bland and standard horror movies
the big studios churn out.
10 Great Horror Movies That Are Ugly On Purpose has of course been covered before, and now it’s time for 10 MORE great horror movies that are ugly on purpose.
It stops, it starts, it stutters; it’s Quentin Tarantino’s ode to exploitation cinema of yore; it’s Death Proof.
Presented alongside an array of fake film trailers created by some of cinema’s best but which look as though they were made in someone’s basement, the movie is an all-out homage to a kind of scrappy filmmaking that history has all but left behind. And Kurt Russell is front and centre as a stunt driver with a fatal case of misogyny.
Russell’s history in several classic John Carpenter films undoubtedly
snagged him this role, particularly as The Thing (1982) is one of Tarantino’s
all-time favourites, and Carpenter’s old aesthetic speaks to the kind of movie Death Proof aims to be.
Such a meeting of minds was this collaboration,
that Tarantino abandoned much of his usual practice and let Russell freewheel
his performance throughout the film, dropping in lines here and there and channelling
Marlon Brando. The results of this process are many, scattered all through the
film, but by far the most memorable is the smile down the barrel of the camera – breaking
the fourth wall just for the hell of it.
This faux pas is far from where the overall unsightliness of the film ends, however, as the effects are schlocky and OTT, there are cigarette burns, negative dirt, and reel changes prominent throughout, and everything looks like it needs a good wash. It certainly ain’t pretty.