By Guest Contributor Nathan Sturm
Editor’s note: can we improve the state of modern cinema with a few, handy, easy-to-follow rules? Our guest writer Nathan thinks that you can, and I’d bet my last banknote that a lot of Brutal As Hell readers will agree on a few of these. Check them out here…
1) Do not treat viewers as if they were stupid.
2) Never include a flashback to an earlier scene (unless it’s to show the protagonist focusing on some detail he hadn’t noticed before and that now means something different in light of new information).
3) Do not emphasize details with dramatic close-ups followed by someone’s face as they offer obvious, redundant commentary on what they (and we) just clearly saw.
4) Do not pound into the skull of viewers how they are supposed to morally judge a character by having that character do something really obviously good or bad that has no bearing on the plot and doesn’t fit with their personality, especially if their goodness or badness is already pretty clear.
5) Do not make movies that are really dumb in the belief that the movie-going public is composed entirely of morons who will only pay money to see dumb things. Many smart movies have, in fact, been profitable.
6) Do not go to excessive lengths to create implausible situations whereby the villain dies without the hero having to actually kill him.
7) Do not humiliate actors without good reason.
8 ) Do not attempt to use rectal trauma as a source of laughs.
9) Avoid casting actors unfortunate enough to be weasely-looking in minor parts as weasely characters who are devoid of redeeming characteristics.
10) Avoid casting actresses who seem attractive but vacuous in minor parts where their only function is to show lots of skin.
11) Do not create female characters who are indistinguishable from male characters except in appearance. (This can be waived for “authority figure / professional” type roles of middling plot importance, e.g. the hero’s boss, colleague, or doctor.)
12) Do not create female characters whose only function is to act as the sole representative of femininity in an otherwise all-male cast populating a world of testosterone (unless this is one of the major points of the story and can be articulated in some sort of meaningful and intelligent way).
13) If a female character is performing a traditionally-male role, do not draw excessive attention to the fact that “Oh my god, she is female, and yet, is performing a traditionally male role (while being a woman)!”
14) Avoid situations where the only function of the sole female character is to act as a prize coveted by rival male characters.
15) Do not assume that any and all villainous people of color are secretly being controlled by evil Caucasian masterminds.
16) Do not portray all American Southerners as physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to Orcs.
17) Do not create characters whose sole purpose is to say something politically incorrect, sentimentally immoral, or otherwise unpleasant, and then have something bad happen to them, all with little or no effect on the actual plot.
18) Never include an excessively sunny morning scene in which someone is cooking breakfast and everyone in the family sits down at the table to eat and is feeling chipper on their way to school or work, as this may be the single least-realistic of all Hollywood inventions.
19) Do not expect viewers to remember who a character is if the character in question never received a formal introduction and has no major distinguishing characteristics.
20) Never end with a statue being built of the protagonist (unless it’s a historical film and such a statue was actually built in real life).
21) Use less turquoise light.
22) Do not fill every second of runtime with music. Dialogue in quiet scenes is more likely to be ignored and used to signal bathroom-break time if the music is already telling us how we’re supposed to feel here. (This can be waived for movies with very minimal dialogue and an “operatic” feel, particularly if the musical score is exceedingly good.)
23) Avoid killing off characters just for the sake of having someone die right before or during the climax. This does not apply to climaxes where the whole point seems to be to kill off most or all of the characters.
24) Do not remake older films without valid artistic reason.
25) Do not make a movie to begin with if it’s going to end up with a title that includes a colon followed by a year.
26) Do not portray teenagers as being enamoured of things that were trendy ten years ago and then include some condescending plot twist whereby they stop “rebelling” and go back to being their “true self”, i.e. exactly the way they were as little kids (only now with an income), to the relief of their long-suffering upper-middle-class parents.
27) Create a sense of impact and force when something strikes something else, even if the computer-generated pixels can’t feel anything.
28) Do not have a character turn out to be a traitor at the end for the sole purpose of having a character turn out to be a traitor at the end, especially if this does not actually serve the plot in any meaningful way and if the character in question was likeable.
29) Do not create villains who are identical to the Nazis despite having arisen under different social, political, cultural, and economic circumstances.
30) Do not create heroes who are suddenly handed the opportunity to, without having to expend much effort, become really awesome and fulfil all their dreams, etc. for no identifiable reason other than to make viewers feel good about themselves for two hours before returning to their shitty jobs and underwhelming private lives, etc.
31) Do not further sully the reputation of the horror genre with the assumption that all horror is automatically schlock and does not require standards of quality.
32) Do not make a horror film just because you heard on the Internet that it’s the quickest way to “break into” the industry (i.e. by making a profit on a minimal budget) if you have no understanding of, or appreciation for, horror.
33) Do not make a horror film just because you heard on the Internet that “horror films these days are insufficiently extreme and overly predictable” and you want to show other Internet-people that you are more extreme and/or more ironically clever than they are.
34) Put the viewer in the characters’ shoes, and then scare the characters. Avoid trying to scare the viewer directly while bypassing the characters, unless you are really good at creating an unnerving atmosphere.
35) Avoid including socio-political-type messages that amount to beating a dead horse. If the reason you’re including a message is because you heard the same message in four or five other recent films, don’t include it (unless the message was garbled in each of those cases and you actually have something new and intelligent to offer on the subject).
36) Avoid populist themes in movies about things that are only of any concern to the social elite to begin with, such as country clubs.
37) Do not steal someone else’s idea and then water it down for mainstream consumption.
38) Never greenlight a project on the sole basis of a cool-sounding premise and a decent, special-effects-laden climax if the main body of the film is going to consist of nothing but characters walking around, opening and closing doors, making cryptic and/or redundant statements to one another, and occasionally having arguments over whose lover’s desk has the biggest donut-box resting on it until the actually interesting stuff happens at the end.
39) Never, ever, never under any circumstances include a scene justifying the use of torture in stopping terrorists.
40) Do not make “inspiring stories”. Please. Please.