War of the Worlds

I found the abrupt shifts from reports to soothing classical music disconcerting. It reminds me of the abrupt shifts from the cabin to the control center in the Cabin in the Woods. As a member of the audience, tension lies in my inability to understand how I should be feeling. A commentator, Carl Phillips, visits a farm in New Jersey where a meteorite was believed to have crash landed. He describes a massive pit, and an object inside the pit that looks more like a yellowish-white cylinder than a meteorite. Phillips brings our attention to a strange humming sound that seems to be coming from the cylinder to which the professor replies that it must be the sounds of the meteorite cooling off, but admits that he no longer believes it to be a meteorite. Bystanders begin to shout when a creature Phillips describes as having tentacles begins to crawl out of the pit. He is interrupted before he is able to complete his report. The New York studio comes on air stating that there is trouble with field transmissions and fades into a piano interlude. While I appreciate the commentator's attempt at calming the audience through soothing music, its more unsettling than if he were to admit that the events taking place at Grover's Mill are a cause for concern.

Foreshadowing and temporal disruptions through filmic techniques in Primer

      In the movie Primer, director Shaun Carrath discusses the implications of time travel and temporal disruption, as well as human actions and morality when confronted with a power over others.  In the narrative of the film, competing inventors Abe and Arron both use the time machine to their own ends to accomplish different goals.  Abe uses a fail-safe time machine that he built in secret to try to prevent Arron from messing with time, while Arron discovers the Fail-safe machine and uses it to bring a portable time-machine back before Abe arrives, and uses it to ensure that their past selves will finish the invention.  This is all foreshadowed throughout the film through the use of quick, disjointed cuts, frame skipping and rewinding, and displaced narrative and video.  The first time that this happens is on the day that Abe first uses the time machine and subsequently tells Arron about it, and foreshadows Abe's attempt in the same timeline to stop Arron from learning of the time machine..  From the moment that he wakes up, the process of him waking up and going from the floor where he is sleeping to out the door is full of disjointed cuts and skipped frames, with Abe jumping forward and backward in frame, and repeated delayed audio along with audio that is ahead of the video or source.  Each of these jumps and discontinuities acts as a kind of oscillation between the two timelines, with the disjointed cuts and audio showing the slight disparities between the timelines, and jumping between the original and changed timeline.  This kind of foreshadowing is also evident when Arron gets an ear-bleed after the first trip in the machine.  During this scene as well, the cuts jump constantly with frames missing in-between, only to go back to those frames later, creating jerky, disjointed movements.  Again, this is foreshadowing the fact that there is an alternate timeline of this scene, where Abe gets an ear-bleed instead of Arron, and the jerky jump-cut nature of the scene serves to metaphorically show the disparities of the two timelines.

Primer

The screening of Primer in class was very confusing. I didn’t know what to think of the characters and the story overall. We first are introduced to the main characters at the very beginning of the story, but their motives and plan are never clearly stated. The experiment they worked on in the garage is very strange as well in the sense that we have no background knowledge of the machine or the experiment itself. As the story continue I found myself lost with what the characters were trying to accomplish and finally a double popped into the story unexpectedly. At this point of the movie I was more confused on how the machine worked in order to create a double or in order to time travel in general. At the very end of the movie I didn’t understand why one of the characters wanted to run away and make big money someplace else and I also didn’t understand why the two main characters were no longer friends. The ending was very confusing for me and to top that off I didn’t understand why the characters are losing their hand writing skills. This movie as a whole left me with more questions at the end than it did in the beginning and as a person who watched this for the first time I do not understand the meaning behind the movie. 

Cabin in the Woods

Cabin in the Woods starts off as the typical scary movie in which college students go away for a mini vacation in the middle of no where.  Watching this movie, the immediate reaction is that they are all going to get intoxicated, party too hard, and die.  But the plot is completely different and refreshing.  Having the cabin controlled by other humans shows how people's morals and principles can be so twisted when it comes to saving themselves.  The workers who are behind it all have almost no emotions or regrets when coming to kill these innocent people, in fact they enjoy it so much that bets are placed.  When America is in competition, these Americans are portrayed as the very monsters themselves, purposely releasing monsters and traps just for the pleasure of seeing innocent people die.  Being the top country is their number one priority, even if it meant killing people.  Although it was an act of sacrifice, the people behind it knew it was not right yet they went ahead with the plan to save themselves.  When people are put in a situation where their lives are in danger, they are willing to do anything to help themselves.

The Cabin in the Woods

I really liked this movie because although it started out as a typical horror movie with a few comical moments, there was a huge twist in the end. The end made me think a lot and how it feels like people have no control in their lives as if they were controlled by something supernatural. In this movie, it was human beings controlling their own race into doing things just to please the Gods by giving them their sacrifices. Even though there were some parts in the movie that were pretty ridiculous and hard to be considered as a horror movie, I liked the movie as a whole.

Cabin in the Woods

The film we watched in class, Cabin In the Woods is about six young travelers visiting a cabin to have fun for few days, but end up getting killed as a sacrifice to ancient old gods. It depicts the horror that comes from people not being able to have control of their own body, but being played by others as puppets do. It is a movie that references a various horror films. The creepy old man that warns the death of six young travelers is a reference of the film The Harbinger. The film The Evil Dead is clearly referenced by setting where the horror happens as a cabin in the middle of the woods. The directors use many methods to highlight the scenes such as use of metafiction and different lightings. It is a combination between horror and comedy and this is to make the gory and scary scenes more sudden and apparent. However, personally I could not take the film seriously because of this mix between genres. It just felt like it is neither comedy or thriller.

Cabin in the Woods: Free Will

While Cabin in the Woods had many terrifying, anxiety ridden moments, one such moment of extreme discomfort was when the characters went into the basement and were looking at all the little trinkets that had seemingly been left behind by past residents. This is the scene in which, as later noted by one of the characters, they essentially chose how they died, this was the one part of the movie when the characters were given a choice as to what was to become of them. In all other parts of the movie the characters were manipulated and controlled by hormones released into the air, by remote controlled doors, and by whatever other aspects of human behavior the scientists running the show knew how to control. What makes this moment in the basement even more terrifying is the music. As the characters are looking around in the basement, fiddling with whichever object caught their eye first the music became excessively creepy and innerving, and yet the audience was still at a loss as to what terrifying thing was about to happen. Even after the Latin text is read and the monsters are brought to life it is still somewhat unclear what all the trinkets had to do with anything. And then later, you find out that each trinket was connected to one of the many monsters designed to kill the characters, making that moment in the basement even more twisted and disturbing. Ultimately the characters had a choice in how they died, this was the only real free will or decision the characters were allowed to make the entire time, and they didn’t even know that they had that choice.