An aspect of filmmaking that I often comment on when I do a review or analysis is special effects. Ever since I was a kid I have found special effects in movies fascinating. I got a DK hardcover book in elementary school called Special Effects in Film & Television from the book fair and it revealed some of the secrets behind Hollywood’s greatest cinematic illusions. That was my introduction, answering some of the questions I’d had about movies, and making me think about aspects I’d never even considered. How, exactly, did they make it look like a giant monster was destroying Tokyo in Godzilla? How are rain and snow effects created on an in-door set? What is the process for bringing a stop motion character to life? These questions and more were answered, and as I built up my DVD collection in my teen years I became more and more fascinated with the behind-the-scenes extras that revealed secrets about the making-of process.
One of the newer special effects techniques in that book was computer generated imagery (CGI), which was just getting its legs in the years prior to when I was born, and during my infancy and toddler years was when CGI learned how to run. But, nowadays, it isn’t special. CGI is used in everything, and special effects in general have lost their wow factor and become an expectation. You much more frequently hear about when a movie has bad special effects than you hear about a movie’s SFX looking unique and eye-popping. But, as digital artists continue to push the envelope to create more and more realistic-looking creatures, environments, and even fully-formed people that exist only in the virtual world, the line between what was a digital special effect and what was an effect done in front of the camera continues to be blurred.
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| Kevin Peter Hall: the man behind the mask in Predator | |
What I wanted to explore in regards to special effects though is something that has often bugged me in a number of movies. When we (viewers) sit down to watch a movie, we generally know what we are going to see is not actually real, in varying ways. Aliens are not actually invading earth, a cyborg from the future hasn’t actually travelled back in time, and a masked killer isn’t really murdering a bunch of teenagers. But, we suspend our disbelief to enjoy the entertainment. What happens sometimes is a movie will take a second to acknowledge its own fakeness, if you will. Let me explain with an example.
An unsuspecting young woman is walking through the woods. Let’s imagine her as the typical blonde-haired, blue-eyed, big-breasted archetype often seen in your average horror movie. She hears a sound behind her, looks back while still walking forward, and bumps into a ten-foot-tall reptilian monster out of your worst nightmare. She is initially startled, but then she looks the creature up and down, and smirks as it just stands there, looking menacing. “Nice try,” she says. “That’s a pretty good costume. Look at it, all detailed with scales and everything. I bet that blood smeared around those teeth is just ketchup, though.” The creature grabs her by the throat and lifts her off the ground. She gulps, realizing the creature isn’t a guy in a suit, it’s real, and she screams before being devoured.
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| The "Horrors" of Horrorland in Goosebumps |
Here’s another slightly different example from a real B-movie. A group of tourists are on a sightseeing adventure in the desert lands surrounding the little town of Perfection, Nevada. These tourists have heard about the worldwide phenomenon that is the Graboid: a giant prehistoric species of worm first discovered in Perfection that put the town on the map and became heavily marketed. There are comics, movies, and souvenirs, but the tourists want to see a real, living Graboid, and on this tour in Perfection you might just get the chance. Their tour guide, Jack, spots a puff of dirt behind some bushes—it’s a Graboid! The tourists freak out and he drives away, but the Graboid pursues them, knocking down fence posts in the same way they famously did when the Perfection residents first encountered them. But, this is a staged Graboid encounter, Jack’s buddy helps him create fake evidence for their staged arrival, and the phony tour helps Jack cash in on the Graboid craze. Later, a real Graboid shows up during a routine tour, and Jack at first thinks it’s another staged scenario, but then he realizes it’s real and his friend has been eaten, and naturally he freaks out.
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| Someone being eaten by a real Graboid in Tremors 3 | |
If you aren’t familiar with the series, this scenario is what plays out in the third Tremors film, Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001), and the “fake” encounters emulate some of the memorable moments from the original film, but unlike the original, these staged tours are just supposed to seem real, not actually be real, so then when the “real” Graboid encounter happens, Jack recognizes it as real, even though we as viewers can tell the effects to create the fake Graboid encounter are basically the same as the effects to create what’s supposed to be the real encounter, the only difference is we don’t see the Graboid animatronic or full CGI creature in the fake encounter.
What am I getting at here? Well, I don’t usually like when movies or shows use special effects and portray them within the movie as being real, but characters mistake them at first for what they are: special effects. They think what they are seeing isn’t genuine, then all of a sudden they realize it is genuine and they get scared and/or killed. It messes with the illusion too much for me, and the Tremors 3 example is along the same lines as this cliché, but bugs me in a slightly different way. In the original Tremors (1990) everything to do with the Graboids is real to the characters, so even if the SFX don’t always look completely convincing we can at least suspend our disbelief because the characters in the film believe what they are seeing. In Tremors 3 the division between what is real and what is fake in the world of the movie is clear enough, but to the viewer it all looks fake, so it makes the “real” moments come off as phonier than if there was never any fakeness or trickery to begin with.
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| The pranksters in Jaws |
This cliché doesn’t always ruin a movie for me, though. Let’s consider a moment from one of my favourite movies of all-time: Jaws (1975). Two kids use a fake shark fin to prank swimmers, and the first hint we get that this fin isn’t the fin of the real shark is when it seems to move backwards just before it flops over and the kids pop up. Another indicator is the music, or lack thereof. Director Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams also cleverly used the famous theme music only to indicate when the shark was actually present, and the music doesn’t play during this fake out, but then when the “real” shark swims over a minute later, the music helps us know this time the shark is not a fake. Again, this is about drawing a distinction between what is supposed to be real in the reality of the movie and what is actually a special effect. Viewers are supposed to believe the shark that goes after Chief Brody’s son and his friend is a real shark—even though behind-the-scenes photos and videos show that it was really just a robotic shark that didn’t even have a full body below the surface of the water.
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| Skeleton on strings in House on Haunted Hill |
One of the earliest examples I can think of for a movie/TV show shattering its own illusion of danger is Scooby-Doo. It has been a staple since the first series, Scooby-Doo: Where are You! (1969-1976), for the gang to unmask the seemingly supernatural antagonist as part of the conclusion. This isn’t really an example of actual special effects being pointed out, per say, since it’s all animation, but the reveal at the end of every Scooby-Doo episode is that the monster the gang thought was real was just some person in a rubber mask or costume, and that trope continued into the animated films—
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| The "real" monsters from Scooby-Doo |
—that is, until later made-for-TV movies featuring the Great Dane and his pals subverted expectations and introduced in-world real monsters. The most notable of these early films for me was Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988), but the first Scooby-Doo movie I saw where the monsters were real was Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998). This concept was later used for the first live-action movie, Scooby-Doo (2002). The first monster the gang encounters is fake, but the ones they encounter later are not—yet they are rendered in poor CGI, so the illusion doesn’t work, especially when Velma tries to pull on the monster’s face like it’s a rubber mask.
This topic is such a broad one with so many different examples that I’ll have to make this is a multi-part essay, so stick around for part two coming soon!
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