George Romero is Static

I just saw one of the better horror flicks I've seen in quite some time on Sci-Fi. I hate that I pay extra for all these channels and, excepting IFC and occasionally TCM, the best movies I see are still on basic cable. It was Tobe Hooper's Mortuary.

This is a rocking, little, by-the-numbers horror flick. I'll try to find an unedited copy and write a review of it one of these days.

But I was going to post last night (early this morning), after watching TCM Underground's tribute to Romero, that I just don't like his style. I've said this before, particularly in relation to Monkey Shines, but I knew even then that it was his style and not just that particular movie -- the camerawork, center composition in every frame, the colors -- because I feel the same about everything he's done except Night of the Living Dead. And the greyscale is a boost to that flick, as well, because Romero would have doused the whole thing in muted solids (primary colors only, please) anyway.

But that aside, it's the camerawork I hate. Watch it closely: almost every, damn shot Romero does is a static shot. That's what makes NotLD stand out within his canon of work, the cinema veritae camerawork (handheld) for the documentarian, newsreel feel notwithstanding, the very fact that he actually used the camera to engage the audience instead of as a "Kubrick Window," where we're all just watching the whole thing unfold. Every shot is a static camera picture in which the subject is perfectly centered. He apparently considers any shot with a rolling camera to instill a frenetic energy antithetic to what he is trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, Romero's writing isn't very exciting either, so it doesn't turn down the volume so much as mute the sound.

It's a matter of pacing and Romero just doesn't get it.

Romero's a coverage-and-edit director. He shoots more than he needs and makes the movie in edits, relying on coverage shots to edit-in suspense. Instead of a pan to a character's response, it's a jump-cut to the character (perfectly centered) having reacted -- they're still pictures, remember, framed shots -- it's passive tense all the way. I don't know if he realizes this or even cares, but it is; the characters do not react, they have already responded, and we are seeing that. Without seeing the movement from one emotion to the next, we are not a party to its development, and we lose connection to the whole event -- removed from the event, we see it, we do not feel it.

He violates the most basic storytelling rule: Show, don't tell. Worse, he does it with motion pictures. It's also a deeper matter of basic cause-effect development. We see the cause, then we see the effect (the characters' reactions), but we do not see the process. It's like getting the details from a report instead of actually witnessing the event; you know the facts as they occurred, but you do not know the chain of events and emotional content of the episode. And the worse thing is that Romero always starts in-media-res; he "takes the bold move of not including the audience," to quote MST3K.

If you want to see muted, slowly-developed horror done the right way, check out Mortuary by Hooper.