By Nick Goundry
It would seem that shaky cameras are
cool. The release of Spanish horror [REC] is the latest
in a series of horror films shot on a digital camera from
the perspective of stressed-out operators who are themselves
a character in the story. [REC] presents the ‘footage’ captured
by a late-night news reporter and her cameraman as they
follow a team of Barcelona firefighters on a routine call
to a seemingly innocuous apartment block. A gruesome encounter
with an apparently demented old woman quickly escalates
out of control, and suddenly the lives of everyone in the
apartment block are under threat. With the news team present,
all the action is caught on camera, the images becoming
increasingly wild and frenetic as the situation worsens.
The digital format is certainly highly
suited to the horror genre, with low production-costs and
increasing technical flexibility proving especially advantageous
for independent filmmakers. Still, mainstream cinema has
taken nearly a decade to catch up with the box-office phenomenon
that was The Blair Witch Project. Meanwhile, words like ‘gritty’ and ‘real’ are
bandied about in the press as critics and paying audiences
alike respond to the stylish digital aesthetic. Where younger
viewers hail the future of filmmaking, and in particular
the horror genre, older critics grumble at the motion-sickness-inducing
visuals and the lack of anything resembling a good old-fashioned
tracking or Steadicam shot.
 Whereas the Blair Witch style arose
as much from necessity as from inspired editing on the
part of the filmmakers, it seems that replicating the shaky-cam
look on a mainstream studio production, where traditional
techniques and equipment are well-practiced and readily
available, can be just as tricky. It was the handheld,
amateur style that provided the hook for the recent Cloverfield.
Otherwise merely a bog-standard monster movie, director
(and pal of Lost co-creator JJ Abrams)
Matt Reeves decided to appeal directly to the YouTube generation
by shooting the entire $30m film in a shaky-cam aesthetic,
notably against the advice of his production team who didn’t
relish the challenge of having to look like they didn’t
know what they were doing. Reeves achieved the look by getting
his actors to shoot some of the footage themselves, and,
indeed, becoming a cameraman himself; “I qualified
for the job by being, well…not qualified!” he
told reporters on the press-circuit. Being a studio piece,
however, the trick was also in ensuring his crack team of
professional camera operators adopted an amateur style while
still capturing the right shots necessary for both maintaining
suspense and driving the story. The result is a riotous piece
of filmmaking which, while failing to live up to much of
the hype, shows the studios are finally paying attention
to the massive cultural influence of multimedia viewing platforms,
of which YouTube is the most recognised.
 Digital shaky-cam filmmaking is seen
by many as directly relevant to the everyday lives of the
cinema-going public, a fact which big-budget Hollywood
will doubtless be looking to on a larger scale now that
Cloverfield has paid off handsomely at the international
box-office (a sequel is already in the works). Matt Reeves
has stated that his film was “made
for an audience that does this daily,” as he refers
to the quantity of online material depicting ordinary people
simply filming their daily lives. With the lingering spectre
of terrorism still very much at the forefront of people’s
minds, converging the reality of modern media saturation
with times of crisis has been a topical theme since images
of the World Trade Center collapse were beamed to a live
global audience. Cloverfield is at its best and most poignant
early on when panic sets in across New York in scenes deeply
reminiscent of amateur footage filmed on 9/11, while [REC] and George Romero’s own Diary
of the Dead, an addition
to his original zombie saga (and follow-up to Land
of the Dead) seen through the eyes of a group of film students,
explore the now-common theme of infection and viral threat.
With the tragedy of 9/11 in New York, the fallout of 7/7
in London, and then the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina
documented by both amateurs and professionals alike to be
saturated across television and the Internet, firsthand experiences
of a world in chaos are accessible at the touch of a button.
Replicating this chaos in fiction filmmaking is therefore
fertile filmmaking territory that suits the digital format
and is a gift to the horror genre.
 This isn’t to say that the character-as-camera-operator
is limited to horror. Brian De Palma’s recent Iraq
drama Redacted, addresses the media-saturated world head-on.
Exploring the lives of a platoon of US soldiers on checkpoint
duty in a provincial Iraqi town, the story unfolds primarily
through the eyes of a young GI who films his experiences
in preparation for a planned film-school application on his
return home. The film uses this character facet to iron out
the familiar shaky-cam aesthetic (the soldier has raw talent
as a filmmaker, after all, so he knows how to use a camera),
focusing on the content of the soldier’s point-of-view
rather than the style in which he shoots it. De Palma also
uses streamed Internet video footage, CCTV and even pinhole
cameras to develop the story, in a marked difference from
the frenetic style that increasingly characterizes the horror
genre.
The problem comes when repetition
kicks in. Although still a solid horror, [REC] suffers
from a lack of originality, a frenetic zombie film following
hot on the heels of both Diary of
the Dead and The Zombie
Diaries, all of which linger in the shadow of 28
Days Later… The
question remains as to whether the horror genre can evolve
beyond the simple shaky-cam aesthetic, or whether multiplexes
will be cursed with a continuous slew of cheap knock-offs.
With Cloverfield arguably Blair Witch with a visual-effects
budget and a more conventional visual pay-off, it could
be that the next true innovation will be left to the shoestring
creativity of the independents.
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