Acknowledging “Special Effects” in Movies & TV: Part 2

Part 1: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/11/metacinematic-moments-acknowledging.html

 

Last time, I introduced the Hollywood cliché of characters in a movie thinking something created with special effects for the scene is, indeed, a special effect, and the characters think it’s fake before discovering it is actually supposed to be real. I gave a few examples, but this cliché extends into other similar meta-movie-territory, which we’re about to explore further.

First, let’s look at another example of the annoying old cliché from an otherwise good horror movie. In the seminal werewolf film The Howling (1981) Dee Wallace’s character turns into a lycanthrope on live TV during a news report, and in the last scene we get to hear/see the reactions of people who were watching the report at a bar. They think it was done with special effects and therefore not real, and I always felt like this ending undercut the whole movie, in a way. Some find it to be a darkly comedic end, but I found it made me think none of it seemed that real in retrospect, and shatters the illusion that had been sustained up to that point. The werewolf transformation midway through is one of the best ever done in a film, but that joke at the end just reminds me that all of the effects, despite their incredible realism, aren’t real at all.  

I don’t think I could talk about a topic like this and not at least mention M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), which has a big twist ending that makes the whole movie fall apart: the monsters that the characters thought were real all along were just people in costumes meant to keep them too scared from leaving their little village and discovering they were actually living in isolation in the modern day all along. It could have been an interesting idea, but the execution was handled rather unskillfully. The monsters don’t look bad, per say, and it’s actually an inversion on the cliché: instead of thinking a real monster was fake initially, the characters thought a fake monster was real.

As I think I’ve already made clear by this point, this cliché is usually something that happens in horror movies, specifically movies that have monsters or weird creatures, but it also happens in other genres, and in big productions, too. Remember when eagle-eyed fans spotted the Infinity Gauntlet in the background of the original Thor (2011)? Discussions online concluded it couldn’t have been the real Infinity Gauntlet, but it re-appeared in Thor: Ragnarok (2017) a number of years later, after we had seen Thanos put on the real Gauntlet in the post-credits scene of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). In Ragnarok, Cate Blanchett’s character Hela walks up to the Gauntlet in Odin’s treasure room and pushes it over, declaring it to be fake. This is a unique example of the filmmakers actually acknowledging something the fans had originally pointed out as being phony, even though I think the original intention in the first Thor was just to feature it as a fun Easter egg and not draw attention to it in a later sequel.

In some comedies it often works when jokes are made about the special effects because we may already not be taking it as seriously as a pure horror or sci-fi or action film. In Zombieland (2009) the makeup effects for the zombies are juicy and gross and quite well done, and when our heroes encounter Bill Murray (as himself) in his mansion for the first time, it seems like he has joined the legions of walking dead—but he’s actually not infected! He’s wearing makeup to blend in (I love his line about adding a little licorice “for the ladies” to his look) but his makeup isn’t too close to the way the other zombies look, so it doesn’t make the “real” zombies look less real.

Zombieland is still a horror-adjacent comedy film, though. Here’s a non-horror example of a character thinking something is an effect and then realizing it’s not: when Jim Carrey’s character Bruce Nolan at first thinks he’s being pranked by some guy claiming to be God in Bruce Almighty (2003). He believes the mile-long filing cabinet containing every piece of information about him is an illusion, he looks for a seam or a hollow spot on the wall, and as the scene goes on he comes to realize the guy is God and everything that he’s seeing is legit. Of course, for audiences watching, the effects are clearly movie trickery, and this is from a time when comedies were beginning to use more CGI to achieve these visual tricks.

Spoof films will often point out the fakeness of their own effects for comedic effect. The Scary Movie franchise is a great example of this, especially the first Scary Movie (2000). The killer stabs Carmen Electra in the breast and rips out her silicone implant. That is just one of many instances of exaggerated special effects, which only got more extreme with each sequel. What about when special effects-heavy movies that are intended to seem believable make fun of effects from other movies? Going back to Jaws for a second, in Back to the Future Part II (1989) Marty is walking around Hill Valley in the year 2015 and sees a hologram of the shark from the fictional sequel Jaws 19. He screams as it chomps him, then it vanishes into pixels, and he says “Shark still looks fake.”

Speaking of Jaws, the cliché happens (albeit in a much subtler way) in another one of my favourite films of all-time. Spielberg did it more explicitly in Jaws with the fake fin prank, but he also snuck in a similar meta moment in Jurassic Park (1993). When the lawyer questions park founder John Hammond about the scientists working in the lab during the initial introductory tour, Hammond says “There are no animatronics here. Those are the real miracle workers of Jurassic Park.” While those actors playing the scientists were real people, in reality, most of the actual dinosaurs in the movie were animatronic, created by effects legend Stan Winston. It’s a tiny moment, but still hinting at the true nature of these lifelike prehistoric animals. The reason the animatronic dinos work so well is because the characters interact with them in such meaningful ways, and they’re shot so well you don’t really question how they were brought to life, they look real, plus the way they are blended with the cutting-edge CGI sustains the illusion in a way hardly any other dinosaur films have been able to. Like I said before, this cliché doesn’t automatically ruin a movie for me.

Men in Black (1997) does an interesting reversal of sorts by acknowledging when something mundane that isn’t real is trying to look like something that is real. In the opening scene Tommy Lee Jones’ character Agent K identifies a weird-looking person who then turns out to be an alien in disguise. Our eyes can tell the imposter is initially played by a real actor, but then when the alien gets revealed it’s shown to be holding a fake human head on a pole, and when it cuts to close-up the animatronic human head looks almost like the real thing, but we can tell it’s not quite real, and the effect works, to the uh, well, the desired effect! The alien, on the other hand, is a practical effect when close-up and CGI when further away or in motion, but the SFX hold up pretty well today, and that is true overall of all the other effects throughout the movie. This trick was done in a similar way in the original Total Recall (1990), as well, with Arnold Schwarzenegger hiding in a robotic body of a large woman, though not as seamlessly.

These meta moments usually happen in small ways—maybe they pass by with a line of dialogue or a brief shot—but a couple examples I thought of take a broader approach. In Return of the Living Dead (1985) a character in the opening scene acknowledges that Night of the Living Dead (1968) was just a movie, but it was based on true events (which isn’t actually true), and in the context of this scene and beyond it works, because at no point in Return of the Living Dead is the reality of any zombie stuff that happens questioned. It’s one thing to reference another film as having been fake, but it’s another thing entirely to reference what is in the movie as it’s happening as fake, or potentially fake. Another example similar to this is how main character David Kessler is familiar with the original Wolf Man (1941) in An American Werewolf in London (1981), making multiple direct references to it, but it never undermines the credibility of the “real” werewolf lore David comes to learn about.

So, what about the sub-genre of “found footage” films? Everything is supposed to be taken as “real” even though none of it really is, but The Blair Witch Project (1999) cleverly avoided showing anything that might have been easily identified as a moviemaking illusion. Remember the part when they reveal some bloody human teeth wrapped in cloth left behind by the Blair Witch? The teeth they used for that shot were real teeth. In Blair Witch (2016), the sequel that tried to keep that same level of realism, we get an actual glimpse of the Blair Witch, and it’s clearly fake, accidentally ruining the intent of making us feel like we are watching footage someone had recovered as if it were authentic, almost like a documentary.  

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) is a great example of a mockumentary, which presents a fictional tale in a documentary format, and it makes fun of the horror genre as much as it celebrates it. The monsters in the movie live in our real world, so in much the same way that Zombieland’s Bill Murray cameo is an example of fake effects in an otherwise convincing reality, What We Do in the Shadows plays with the idea of the monsters sometimes being viewed by characters in the movie as fake, even though they aren’t. The TV series of the same name has even more jokes and references of this nature. I’ve focused more on movies than TV in the first two parts of this essay, but it happens in TV all the time, too, and a TV example is actually what inspired me to write this whole thing in the first place. I will cover that and more in the final part, coming real soon!