Fear Itself

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.

I gave up after five minutes. The narrator sounds like a high school drama student. Absolutely painful to listen to. Not soothing enough to be relaxing, just pure wood.

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?

I'm not saying it's boring, but Amy Watson narrates the documentary in a soothing relaxed voice while clips of various films pass by. One reviewer says that the clips don't seem to hold any context with the storyline, but I think they do, in some way they relate to what she is saying, and the subject matter is always of course, fear itself. I recorded this when it was on the BBC and watched it in bed. 90 minutes is just right and I was able to get through it fine.

I had watched many of the films that were featured but the clips that are shown are hardly ever climatic scenes, as in , the one you would normally see scattered throughout trailers or other documentaries, in fact some of the scenes made me question if I had seen the film properly all the way through.

It's not great but it isn't terrible either.

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.