Fear Itself

A documentary (or is it?) about fear and how horror films exploit our reactions to achieve the desired ends. After a few minutes I was left thinking this can't possibly sustain my interest for 90+ minutes, but the exceptional vocal performance of the narrator and the sound-design which gives her work a dream-like quality build-up to create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts could be. It provokes some interesting reflections on our own complicity with what scares us and how we deal with it and invites reflections that will linger long after you finish watching.

We've all seen these TV programs about cinema in which they review some recent movie and then go over the filmography of its director or its main actor by showing a few clips from previous movies.

Well, "Fear Itself" is 90 minutes of just that: a selection of clips from horror movies of different sub-genres, with a narrator speaking about things like what fear is and what things we are afraid of. It doesn't sound too bad, does it? The thing is: quite frankly, she doesn't say anything interesting, the script is trite and her dull and monotonous way of speaking doesn't make things better. It feels like someone had the idea but then couldn't come up with a good text.

The clips themselves are short and generally not from the climatic parts of the movies. There's nothing frightening there, and even less when all the scenes are shown completely out of context. In many cases you can't even guess what the movies are really about. But some look good and might make you want to watch the movie. Don't expect any jump scares or cliffhangers, the documentary doesn't spoil the scenes themselves, but it DOES show the ending of a couple of movies ("Brazil", "Gravity").

In the end I got curious about a few of the movies and now I would like to watch them, so if I have to say something positive about this documentary, it is that. But don't expect anything else.

Let me pretext this by saying, if you want a horror movie with a story line, do not watch this film. There will be screaming ladies, zombies, vampires, Technicolor, black and white forests, creatures from another dimension and a whole lot of creepiness, but if you want a story, go away.

This is more of an exploration of horror cinema, rather than a conventional horror film. Sure, there is a frame of a girl in an accident, recounting the fact that horror has helped her overcome her trauma, but apart from that, there is pure cinema. Suspiria rubs alongside Blow Out (the john Travolta remake of Blow Up), while we are sucked in with Night of the Hunter and Raat.

In my opinion, this is a masterpiece in reference; to be able to keep a mainstream audience impressed by an art film is a hard job, nut the BBC seems to have done it. It is a wonderful exercise in tone and suspense, and a very good film. Would recommend for anyone who needs to turn on their lights.

This "film" is boring.

Short clips of various movies are shown along with a monotonous Scottish-accented voice-over that is presumably intended to convey us into the psyche of the film-maker - or possibly into some kind of archetypal fear zone that exists in all of us...

However, an interminable and almost arbitrary sequence of extracts from horror or thriller movies does not a frightening experience make! On the contrary the effect is rather the complete opposite. The narrator's insistence on fear and tension seems to rob each clip of every vestige of fear and tension! Perhaps that's the "sly" subtext of this movie, I don't know...

Somebody has clearly taken a great deal of trouble to curate these clips from a wide range of films spanning several decades, some of which I had not even thought of as 'horror' before. The clips are accompanied by a drifting, almost dreamy monologue from a disembodied female voice that curls around the images, only occasionally linking to them before setting out on a new meander. Some relatively rarely seen clips include Peter Lorre in an early German-language role, and other reminders that black and white did not always mean monochrome. While it was fun to try to recognise the clips before the captions identified them, and nice to see the original titles used, it was frustrating that the English names by which such classics as Spirit of the Beehive are widely known were not included. My Japanese was not enough to help me track down some tantalising treats. More frustrating though, and the film's ultimate failure to break through to me as a viewer, was that the clips never quite reached the exciting bits. It is curiously unfulfilling to spend this long building tension but never finding release. Is the essence of The Birds really encapsulated by an indoor scene, curtains closed, where the only avian actors are two caged parrots?