Talking Spectacles - Airplane!, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Bram Stoker's Dracula

Judy Harris — 2024-04-23T06:57:58Z

I spoke to film critic and stand up comedian Nick Bartlett about the Karl Strauss technique in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the mirror gag in Airplane! and the old school effects used to create the beautifully macabre world of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

1. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

I love the transformation scenes in An American Werewolf in London and The Howling but this scene beats even those. It's a POV shot where we see Dr. Jekyll (Fredric March) transform into Mr Hyde. They put red makeup on him and lit him using rotating red and green filters which changed the contours of his face - it's a technique invented by the cinematographer Karl Strauss. It's an optical illusion, using the camera as you would in a magic trick. It's truly unnerving because this trick, combined with his performance, means he really looks like he's transforming. Sh! The Octopus also used this technique and does it even more dramatically and creepily but this is a better film overall.

2. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
I tried to choose just one scene but it's the effects throughout the whole film that combine to create an eerie, uncanny world. It's full of time lapses, reverse motion, rear projection, painted mattes and forced perspectives. It has a really odd atmosphere, and the artifice is part of that. There are shadows that move independently, a coachman's arm that appears creepily long and all the vampires move with an awkward, unnatural gait. Coppola used techniques from the early 1900s and hardly any CGI at all. In the same way that today the strength of many silent films is how they look rather than the acting, here the performances aren't great (save Hopkins and Oldman) but visually it's stunning.

3. Airplane! (1980)
This is a small but brilliant moment. Robert Stack's character is adjusting his uniform in front of a mirror and suddenly he steps out of the mirror and walks toward the camera. It's a Marx brothers Duck Soup moment with the false mirror – a moment of wait, what? Some other scenes have a double in the foreground but not here. It's such a throwaway joke and I just love that. They had to go to the effort of creating another set just for this joke. If you read up about Airplane! apparently Robert Stack was one of the guys who didn't get what the film was trying to do, he just played it straight and that adds to the silliness of him doing this surreal gag. Edgar Wright is someone who is really good at visual jokes like the Texas switch etc and I wish more people did this. I love prosthetics but that can age a film and so can CGI. But these visual in-camera tricks are timeless, they don't date.

Talking Spectacles - Matt Houlihan

Judy Harris — 2024-03-03T19:26:31Z

In the first instalment of Talking Spectacles I spoke to Matt Houlihan from The Garden Cinema about the drooling aliens of Alien, Event Horizon's gothic spaceships and the wonderfully absurd animatronics of The Thing.

Alien - This is essentially a haunted house film since it's set in an enclosed space where people are faced with a malign presence. My favourite scene is where Harry Dean Stanton sees the alien for the first time. The way it's introduced is so clever, you don't see it enter fully, you just see its head. There's a real economy to it. So much of the let-down of horror films happens when you see too much, you can see it's a guy in a rubber suit, but here the way it's lit and shot means your imagination has to make up for a lack of visual information. It's a beautiful yet terrifying sight as it comes down, it glistens like it's covered in KY jelly, drooling and so organic - very visceral. And this glistening being is juxtaposed with the grubby, working-class environment where workers are engaged in industrial disputes. It's a gothic, cavernous, dirty space and within it is a real H.R. Giger biomechanical, sexual creature. The way it looks encapsulates the themes the film touches on - the terrors of motherhood, birth and sexual violence. I watched it when I was way too young – I think I was 8 but maybe younger. You can forget how revolutionary it is.

Event Horizon – This is another haunted house film, set on a possessed ship which is like a gothic cathedral. The ship itself is the antagonist, it has an alien feel to it, but it also radiates cold, hard indifference. Rather than only using vxf they combined them with 30 miniatures of different scales and that materiality is what brings it to life. It's such a leap of imagination to be in that place that you need a sense of the hardware. One of the models was incredibly detailed and 30 metres long, but it looks like it goes on for miles. You can see the mastery of the craftsmanship and the direction – the use of shadow and how it's shot creates a powerful, haunted atmosphere. And, as in all these examples, it's how the visual effects work with the sound effects and the score work to create a brutal, ghostly environment. It's like the Marie Celeste ghost story of a ship that disappears and comes back.

The Thing – This is a great film with incredible animatronics that look organic. It's another haunted house film where people are being stalked by something they can't see. What I really like is its absurdity, it's so extreme and comical at times. In the famous defibrillation scene the shape-shifting Thing is found to be a giant mouth within a character's chest that bites the Dr's arms off and then transforms into a spindly, spidery creature scuttling around. It's so bizarre but believable in the context of the film and there's a marvellous level of detail. It all works together including the script – when it scurries across the room in its new form someone says ‘you've gotta be fucking kidding' and it breaks the tension and horror so delightfully, it's a real cherry on top. The film is really smart in the way it straddles the line between horror and comedy because there is inherent comedy in the extremity of it.

myDylarama

Talking Spectacles - Airplane!, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Bram Stoker's Dracula

Talking Spectacles - Matt Houlihan