Haunted Cabaret's Top 5: Movie Special Effects

By George Goner (The Haunted Cabaret)

Yesterday I had a discussion with a couple of movie special effects enthusiasts, and ruffled a few feathers when I suggested that there is no such thing as making a movie special effect look real.  The best we can hope for, I said, is to fool the mind into believing something looks real.  Not quite the same thing; but, on the plus side, the human mind is usually willing to be fooled.  After all, we have been trained since childhood to suspend our disbelief and accept all manner of magical and ridiculous ideas, from religious rituals to Santa Claus.

This childhood training  will hold true so long as there is no attempt to achieve seamless realism in a given sequence. It does not matter whether the sequence appears in religion, a spoken fairy tale, or a movie.  Because seamless realism is impossible to achieve, the human brain will destroy its willing suspension of disbelief searching for the flaw it insists must be there.

In the days of rubber suits and animatronics, this flaw was known as "the zipper down the monster's back."  In these modern days of Computer Generated Imagery, it's known as "this jungle/animal/spaceship/(choose your image) is too clean, it can't be real." Making the situation worse, good special effects, like beauty, are always in the eye of the beholder.

That being said, here are five films with scenes that make me believe in the magical:

1) Gojira. (1954)  The original Godzilla movie contains 3-5 minutes of the most perfect effects footage ever shot. I'm confident you'll know the scenes when you see them.  Unfortunately, most of the rest of it should have been left on the cutting-room floor.

 

3) 2001: A Space Odyssey. (1968)  Hard to believe this one was done with miniatures, before CGI.  Director Stanley Kubrick gave some unlucky tech the thankless task of going frame-by-frame through the film, erasing the blue outline around the rear-projected models by hand.  Well... I thank her.  Kubrick's attention to detail guarantees this is still the most convincing space fantasy movie ever made.

 


5) Dawn Of The Dead. (1978)  The best flesh-eating scene ever shot in a horror movie!  The moment in the Spanish tenement when a hungry zombie takes a bite out of a woman's plump shoulder is as vivid to me years later while writing this as when I saw it for the first time.  Classic!

2) King Kong. (1933)  The stop motion monsters look clever but dated.  The amazing effect is the matte-constructed prehistoric jungle itself.  It looks and feels eerie and unearthly.

4) Gone With The Wind. (1939)  The producers were faced with the challenge of bringing to life a Southern Confederacy of mansions and plantations without the budget for location shooting.  All of the panoramic shots of Tara Plantation, the Wilkes Plantation, and the city of Atlanta in this romantic fantasy were paintings on glass.  An ingenious solution to the filmmaker's problem!  (The big fire scene, by contrast, was a genuine Big Fire, achieved by setting alight the sets of past movie epics - including King Kong - and filming the results.)

So there are my top five.  I'm sure yours are different... So tell me why you disagree.

 Next week: Top five movies with special effects that suck, but the movies are good anyway.  Stay tuned.