This post just sprang to mind as I have watched a few classic films recently that serve to illustrate the point very well.

James Cameron does an incredible job with “Aliens”. We see the lifeboat craft drifting aimlessly in space with Ripley and the cat (Jonesy, I think) still in suspended animation. The door is then burnt open as they are rescued by a deep space salvage team. As Ripley recuperates on a space station near earth, Cameron uses an inventive dream sequence to wrong foot the audience. Ripley’s mind is messed up and we begin to empathise with her immediately particularly as no one seems to want to believe her about the existence of the alien monsters. It’s like a pantomime response but very effective. The rest of the cast are saying they don’t exist while Ripley and the audience are effectively shouting “They’re behind you!”. We’ve seen the previous film, we know what they can do. Even worse to come, as Ripley is “on trial” for destroying the Nostromo and she loses her pilot licence. How unfair, we say. And she finds out that she has been in hypersleep for around seventy years. Her child has grown up, lived a full life and died before she returned. How terrible for her. We are hooked! And then she finds out that the planet where the alien craft crashed is now colonised by a group of terraformers including families with children. This provides the motivation for Ripley to return to the planet as an advisor (and her need to regain her pilot’s licence).

All this is played out very skilfully through fleshing out the back story with some emotional twists to provide the setting for the rest of the film and draw the audience in for the ride. Excellent.

Another good example of a stunning first twenty minutes is a film I have mentioned before in these posts – the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” directed by Zak Snyder. All of the George Romero fans know what is about to happen but the way it is achieved is quite stunning. We see the horror unfolding through the eyes of the nurse (Sarah Polley) as she is coming to the end of her shift at the hospital.  This is inter-cut with newsreels of unrest in the world gradually expanding into anarchy. We’ve all seen news items with video of riots and conflict before. But it quickly shows us that the anarchy is due to a mysterious infection. The nurse unwittingly goes about her routine and leaves the hospital just as patients start arriving with the infection. As she leaves the hospital we see the legs of a man sticking out from an ambulance. Is he infected? Is he dead? No, he’s just resting before the next call out. Phew! The audience starts feeling for the safety of the nurse. Something bad is happening. We know but does she? We want to shout out to warn her.

Cut to suburbia and her car driving back home. Nothing yet to suggest anything abnormal although the tension has been ramped up through the unease felt earlier. She has a conversation with a little girl. But there is a tangible unease established. She is the innocent about to be threatened. She arrives home and goes to sleep with her husband. All is normal until they are woken up by a hungry zombie who just happens to be the little girl she talked to before. Her husband is bitten and turns into a zombie and in turn tries to bite her! Talk about a maiden in peril. She manages to narrowly escape out of the bathroom window and get into her car only to be confronted by a scene of utter carnage and mayhem with neighbours shooting, killing and eating each other, cars crashing and fires breaking out all over suburbia.

The scenes are so effective because that is so like our home, a comforting if boring environment to return to at the end of a hard day’s work. Yet again we are drawn into the story with great skill. In this film,  our “little castle”, our homely comfort blanket has been ripped to shreds at the beginning of the film and we are empathising with the nurse, frightened and at a loss to know what to do next. The rape and mutilation of our home life is shown graphically in the film in a series of scenes as the Sarah Polley character tries to drive out of her suburban estate. Neighbours with guns shooting at anything, homicidal zombies chase the living to taste their flesh, cars collide and crash. There is even an aerial shot (with CGI) showing the mayhem from the air. Will she survive, or won’t she? Who will save her? Or, how will she save herself from this insidious disaster? Brilliant set up for the rest of the film.

Perhaps, one of the most brilliant beginnings to a film must be “Apocalypse Now”. In the opening sequence over the credits, we are shown a patch of jungle with instrumental music from the Doors (The End) playing on the soundtrack. It evokes an oriental and exotic feeling. We hear helicopters whizzing overhead and suddenly the jungle bursts into flames. We know, without a spoken word, we are in Vietnam in the late 1960s early 1970s. Brilliantly concise use of images and sound to set the scene for the movie. If that wasn’t good enough we are treated to a second sequence where the back story is narrated by the Martin Sheen character, a burnt-out special forces assassin on the edge of sanity who, as we find later can only find normality and comfort when on a “mission”, in this case the assassination of a renegade American colonel leading a native army against the North Vietnamese. There are many questions asked in the film about who is sane in a world of insanity and this beginning sets the scene beautifully for the journey to the heart of darkness.

One last and very different example is “Babel” – a recent film which weaves a story that spans a number of different countries and cultures. It intrigues the audience. It starts several seemingly unrelated stories cutting between them and as an audience we begin to feel curious about where this is going. Each story is interesting in its own right but we are not asked to empathise with the charcters involved. It is more intellectual. How are these stories connected? The director gradually unveils the connections throughout the film in very clever ways but you do not know the whole story until the end. It uses the audience’s collective curiosity to establish commitment and interest in the film.

Getting the audience involved as early as possible through emotion, curiosity or clever use of visuals and symbol can set the tone for the rest of the film.

I first tried to see the original in a cinema in Sunderland in the NE of England many years ago. I only managed to see about twenty minutes of it before my then-girlfriend decided that she could stomach no more and we had to leave. The sight of a zombie having the top of his head sliced off by a helicopter blade and the shooting of two young child zombies just about finished her off. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about (only kidding).

I eventually got to see it one video several years later. For the late 1970s this was graphic, gut churning stuff and extremely scary in a very creepy way.   The special effects make-up was great, pieces of flesh hanging off faces. Zombies blindly following the smell of live humans around. The rigor mortis-type walks. And the all-important eating of limbs with relish.

Any one could out run one of Romero’s zombies but they just kept on coming at you. Just wait till you run out of bullets.It was a case of how long could you postpone the inevitable. It created a siege mentality in the audience particularly in the scenes within the shopping mall. Could they escape? If so, which ones? Would there be a happy ending? (I don’t think we knew at the time that this was the second in a trilogy). It delivered quite a punch at the time and, although time has dulled its effect a tad, it can still shock and disgust in equal measure.

I was never one to invest much time in the notion that it was a hidden swipe at the consumer society (mindless morons going shopping?). It’s just a superb working piece of horror history.

In the intervening period the boundaries of horror have been pushed ever further outwards and our expectations have been raised. Indeed our constitutions have been lined with steel. It takes a lot to shock people any more.

So when I saw the remake I was a little trepidatious. I needn’t have been anxious though. The story was remarkably similar to the original but the realization was very, very different. It works more as a superior Hollywood action thriller with a few twists and turns and is all the better for it. Rather than creeping up on you, it slaps you in the first right from the get go.

The first twenty minutes of the film is absolutely fantastic. The threat and peril to the heroine is cranked up so highly that you are holding your breath to see if she can survive. And all set in a middle class housing area that any one can recognize. But in this case the zombies are like world class sprinters. There is a clear, present and immediate danger from these suckers. Which makes for a much faster pace of film (with much faster editing). The scenes in the shopping mall are a time to catch your breath before the final action sequences.

I think this is a case of a film and a remake being able to happily co-exist with detriment to one another. It is interesting to see the difference in the endings though. Remarkably, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has the happier ending with the survivors managing to land their helicopter on a deserted island. The remake has no such happy ending as, over the credits, you see that their escape by boat in an effort to try and reach an island haven is short-lived.