CLOVERFIELD Directed by Matt ReevesWritten by Drew GoddardWith Michael Stahl-David, Odette Yustman, T.J. Miller, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, and Mike Vogel
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The giant-monster movie is a slightly different breed because of the special effects required to bring the big guys to life. The original King Kong (1933), with its abundant and ambitious use of stop-motion animation, was so expensive that few imitators followed in its wake until the 50s, when Godzilla arrived in the form of an actor lumbering around in a rubber suit. The computer age let Steven Spielberg breathe new life into the subgenre in the 90s with his three Jurassic Park movies—budgeted successively at $63 million, $73 million, and $93 million. But the most frightening movie of the decade turned out to be the $60,000 sleeper The Blair Witch Project (1999), ostensibly the video diary of three young people who journey into the woods in search of a legendary witch. It grossed almost $249 million worldwide, a jaw-dropping 4,144 times its production cost. Imagine spending millions on digital effects to create lifelike dinosaurs and being outdone by a movie whose scariest scenes consist of a darkened screen.
These images of the disaster are all shot by Rob’s goofy friend Hud (played by Chicago comic T.J. Miller), and they’re terrifying precisely because they’re limited to his point of view. A fair amount of screen time is taken up by the jarring movement of blurred light as the characters run for their lives, and Hud’s fleeting glimpses of the monster prove Val Lewton’s old dictum that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one. To spend millions on digital effects and then present them badly may seem counterintuitive, but the verite device renders the viewer as powerless as the characters.
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