This is a continuation of my post on “found footage” horror.
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The River is a fascinating show. Not fascinating in the sense of being well-written, or suspenseful, or really any good at all. Rather, it’s fascinating because of how thoroughly shitty it is. Despite high production values and experienced producers, The River sucks at everything. It’s a rare accomplishment, even by the low standards of broadcast television.
Created by Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity), The River is a horror series about Lincoln Cole (Joe Anderson) and his mother, Tess (Leslie Hope), who are searching for Lincoln’s long-lost father, the famed explorer Dr. Emmett Cole (Bruce Greenwood). Emmett disappeared several years ago in the Amazon rainforest. The expedition is funded by TV producer Clark Quitely (Paul Blackthorne), who offers to provide a boat and a crew, but only if he gets to film everything that happens. So Lincoln and Tess become the stars of a reality TV series, along with a tidy group of stock characters. There’s the cute love interest for Lincoln, the ethnic engineer and his daughter, the evil mercenary, the sassy black cameraman, and the nerdy, Jewish cameraman. After leaving the Amazon River to float down an uncharted tributary, the group is soon beset by ghosts, magic, and sundry evil things.
What sets The River apart from other horror series is the found footage concept. Every shot comes from either the (in-story) cameramen or the stationary cameras mounted around the boat. Presumably, the footage somehow made it back to the U.S., where the suits at ABC broke it down into hour long chunks (with commercial breaks!) before airing it. It’s a silly premise, but no sillier than any haunted house or slasher movie. It’s a decent enough idea for delivering cheap thrills each week. But a decent idea doesn’t amount to much when the execution is garbage.
The first problem is the cast, or really the lack thereof. As any slasher fan knows, horror stories need big casts to kill off. And a horror TV series needs either a very large cast or plenty of guest stars to bump off, otherwise the story cannot generate any suspense. The audience instinctively knows that the core characters are not going to die early in the series, because if they died the story couldn’t go on. But The River has barely half-a-dozen characters, and with such a small cast it must conserve every character like they’re water in the desert. So only one person has died after three episodes (the Jewish cameraman of course, as he was just too Woody Allen-ish to survive in the jungle).
The horror is further undermined by the hokey family drama that passes for a sub-plot. Did Tess leave Emmett or did Emmett leave Tess? Was Tess having an affair with the sleazy TV producer? Will Lincoln ever forgive his dad? Does anyone care about this shit? Of course not! I don’t care about these characters and I don’t want to care about these characters. This is supposed to be terror in the Amazon, not Days of Our General Hospital.
At least with the producer of Paranormal Activity at the helm, The River should be a technically flawless example of found footage horror. I say “should,” because it’s actually a terrible example of the genre. As I discussed in the previous post, found footage copies the shaky camerawork, the crappy angles, and bad lighting of amateur video, which makes it easier for the audience to suspend disbelief and buy into the lie that the footage is real. The River occasionally uses these techniques, but then it ruins everything when it switches to perfect angles and soft lighting for those oh-so-dramatic moments. And the actors, despite being in the rainforest, always look clean and pretty. My disbelief is not suspended, because the show is too slick for its own good.
And then there’s the censorship. I understand that this is broadcast television, which is regulated by the FCC. I understand that a good portion of the American public is deeply offended by the female nipple and the word “fuck.” And I understand that it must be frustrating at times to work for a lousy network like ABC. But there’s something far more pathetic than a show where no one ever curses. It’s a show where characters regularly curse but the profanity is carefully bleeped out (even the mouths are shaded, just in a case an easily offended lip-reader is watching). Excuse my French, but what the fuck are they trying to prove? Presumably, they want the audience to believe that the characters are real and speak just like normal, foul-mouthed Americans. But the censorship wrecks the found footage conceit. The whole point of found footage is that it’s supposed to look like someone found a camcorder lying in a gutter. The content is raw and uncensored, creating the illusion of reality. As for The River, the only plausible assumption is that ABC “discovered” the video recordings of an expedition that encountered real magic, ghosts and other crazy shit. And naturally the suits at ABC bleeped out the profanity before sharing this earth-shattering footage with the public, because they’re insane.
Can anyone name a decent horror series on the broadcast networks? I loved The X-Files when I was a kid, but that was a long time ago, and many of the episodes have not aged well. Perhaps broadcast television – with its censorship and commercial breaks – is simply not a suitable medium for the content and storytelling techniques of the horror genre.
Re horror on television…I think you’re right it’s a hard task for continuing series. Maybe something like The Day After or V? (Neither of which I saw….) There are individual episodes of Star Trek which flirted with horror and scared me as a kid (there’s that one…”Charlie X”? Where the guy makes the woman’s face disappear — that freaked me out when I was 8.)
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Richard Cook says:
Can anyone name a decent horror series on the broadcast networks?
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Does it have to be “all-horror, all the time”?
Millennium, from the X-Files folks
The Twilight Zone (original and later incarnation)
The Outer Limits (original and later incarnation)
Night Gallery
Fringe
Surely I’ve forgotten plenty! Ah, here we go…
http://io9.com/5803321/the-ten-most-frightening-tv-horror-series-ever-made
There was that scene in the original V mini-series that everyone remembers: the woman giving birth to a reptile baby. That was pretty damn freaky, but the series overall wasn’t scary.
The old Dr. Who series scared me when I was a very young.
Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Night Gallery are clearly inspirations for the X-Files (being more episodic rather than serial in their storytelling). They’re also very old.
Millenium was pretty good for its first season, but it went downhill fast. And is Fringe supposed to be horror? I thought it turned into some funky sci-fi/alternate reality thing.
It’s had some horror episodes; though yes, it’s become more “funky sci-fi/alternate reality”…
Twin Peaks pulled off some monumentally creepy moments. I think the tools are there, but that horror has always been harder to pull off than a lot of other genres because it depends so much on non-intellectual mood elements that you just can’t fake if you don’t land properly. And broadcast television has always been a harder place to pull anything off properly. So, odds stacked against it, but not impossible.
Jason – I guess Twin Peaks is horror, but honestly it’s one of those shows that doesn’t fit neatly into any genre (which is not a bad thing).
Broadcast television has screwed up plenty of genres, but I think it does basic soap opera well enough, and the appeal of soaps is usually non-intellectual. But I think you’re onto something: the episodic nature of television seems to lend itself to romance more so than to horror.
Although not American, there’s those two Lars von Trier series, The Kingdom and its sequel. And there was at least one episode of the anthology show Amazing Stories that left me, as a kid, absolutely traumatized for years and years (it’s the one Scorsese did).
There’s some sense in which Buffy and Angel are ‘horror’, tho’ not usually of the scary kind. And there’s a sense in which the climax to Ringu/The Ring happens in TV…
Buffy and Angel are interesting, because they borrow many horror tropes, but neither is really horror. Buffy was actually a superhero show that happened to contain vampires (kinda like Blade). Angel evolved into this wonderfully weird fantasy series.
Angel was not horror, but was really, improbably good in its last season. Twin Peaks is definitely horror.
Jones, television is often a horror trope in film. Not just Ringu, but Poltergeist, Videodrome…I’m sure there are others. I haven’t really thought this through, but you could argue that the way that tv embodies horror (essentially because of its links to mass conformity, and its anonymous intimacy) are also the reasons that as a medium it has difficulties with the horror genre.
Parts of Twin Peaks were horror (the Laura Palmer storyline). The rest of the series was too horrible to even classify.
Your second point is very interesting, though now I’m wondering how home video (and the Internet) affect the experience of horror films (as opposed to TV series).
Well, the TP finale was spectacular.
anybody have any opinion on the recent series, “An American Horror Story” I’ve only seen the first few episodes, and while their is much soapiness, and some silliness, i had a moment where i felt genuinely creeped ouot as I began to wonder if they had met anyone who was actually alive, or had they become hopelessly encapsulated in this shade world.
I enjoyed Tales From the Darkside (another speculative fiction anthology) as a child. It’s mood and tone ranged widely.
I loved Von Triers Kingdom, and surprisingly, enjoyed the more recent american adaption, Kingdom Hospital.
I was enjoying The Gates well enough. definitely a soap – about verious monsters and witches who live hiding-in-plain-sight in a wealthy gated copmmunity.
From the UK, there was Hex, and now Being Human. The best horror I have seen on television in recent memory, also from the UK was The Fades. A serialized horror story that took itself quite seriously and pulled it off well.
I think the problem when trying to think of anything “scary” is that horror is a broad grey edged genre that encompasses anything with any of the right tropes, say monsters, or ghosts; even moreso, trying to think of something scary as an adult viewer is far different than for a child/youth/adolescent. That is the golden age for being frightened.
I don’t know how many times I have seen it in a forum where some person is asking if anyone remembers a film with title X or story Y that scared the bejeezus out of him when he was young, and it is a film I saw as an adult and thought of as cheesy. I think of the original Amityville Horror as a truly terrifying film, one that people older than me think of as a laugh riot. if you could bottle a child’s perspective/imagination and naivety, you would make a fortune.
Adults work hard to get themselves into the right mode just to feel uneasy or a little creeped out for a scary movie or show. It seems to be only once in a while we hit that sweet spot of sweaty palms and a reticence towards the dark.
I think American Horror Story does pay off in the end. It has its lull periods but the penultimate episode is pretty good. A lot of homages and there’s definitely a black comedy vibe about it (more Beetlejuice than Rosemary’s Baby). It definitely benefits from the fact that the first season is a self-contained story. The characters won’t be brought forward to the second season.
And, yes, The River is truly horrendous shite.
I really want to see American Horror Story, but I don’t get cable TV, and the series isn’t on Hulu. So I have to wait for it to come to Netflix. Oh well…