Dark Water

HP has a great review of the Japanese original version of Dark Water on his blog M Valdemar. He raises many excellent points. My favorite is this:

Jennifer Conelly in scenes that have been modified from the original film to make them far less subtle (and consequently, less scary).

I have a theory about that. I don't think screen writers and directors of horror movies intentionally intend to make bad movies. But when they begin to see horror movies as "product," either themselves or the financiers begin to tell them to crank it up to generate audience appeal and such things. And what is lost is subtlety. In horror, less is often more. To paraphrase Stephen King in Danse Macabre, the movie cannot produce a monster more potent than the viewer's imagination can produce. It is one of the elements that made 1943's The Uninvited the finest haunted house movie ever made. Once shown the ghost, werewolf, alien, unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, etc., the viewer can say, "I can handle that. It's not as bad as I imagined." Or as HP says more eloquently than me:

If you show a CGI ghost-girl taking her hand, you're in Scooby-Doo/R.L. Stine territory, Pops.

Go read his much better post. We've not been getting enough M Valdemar lately.