i like the beginning of the trailer for the haunting. the screams, the music. the laughing at the end is very evil.

formula for scary movies

SCARY MOVIE FORMULA
(es+u+cs+t) squared +s+ (tl+f)/2 + (a+dr+fs)/n
+ sin x - 1.
Where:
es = escalating music
u = the unknown
cs = chase scenes
t = sense of being trapped
s = shock
tl = true life
f = fantasy
a = character is alone
dr = in the dark
fs = film setting
n = number of people
sin = blood and guts
1 = stereotypes

making scary movies

Shining named perfect scary movie

The Shining is the perfect scary film, the formula found
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson, has been named the perfect scary film, according to a new mathematical formula.
The secret of making a scary movie has been calculated by university experts.

Scientists have worked out an equation to prove why thrillers like Psycho and the Blair Witch Project are so successful at terrifying audiences.

The formula combines elements of suspense, realism and gore, plus shock value, to measure how scary a film is.

Researchers spent two weeks watching horror films like The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs in pursuit of the formula.

The model focuses on three major areas: suspense, realism and gore.

Shock impact

Factors considered include the use of escalating music, the balance between true life and fantasy, and how much blood and guts are involved.

As suspense plays such a pivotal role in the success of a scary film, its elements - escalating music, the unknown, chase scenes and a sense of being trapped - are brought together and then squared. Shock value is then added.

n addition, the experts say a film needs to be realistic to be truly frightening. Accordingly, they tried to balance out the parts which made a film either too unrealistic or too close to life.

They then looked at how many characters were in the movie, assuming audiences empathise with a smaller number of people.

The team at King's College, London also took into account the darkness of the film's setting.

The Shining's isolated setting, with the family living in a huge hotel closed down for the winter, and the shower scene in Psycho, were perfect examples of the winning formula, experts said.

The formula also looks at the levels of gore and offset this against the number of stereotypes present in the film.

Jaws was the perfect example of appropriate levels of gore in a film, researchers found.

"Steven Spielberg reached the optimum level perfectly allowing the viewer to see just enough blood to be scared of the Great White Shark, but not so much that it repulsed us," experts agreed.

The research was commissioned by Sky Movies, to launch a season of scary films.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/3537938.stm

alfred hitchcock

Hitchcock was a director who was a household name and star in his own right, cherished not only by the paying public but by his cinematic peers, by cultural commentators and by film academics. He accomplished this through his expertise in one particular genre. "If I made Cinderella, audiences would be looking for the body in the coach," as he put it.

"I have brought murder back into the home," he would say, adding, with a twinkle in his eye, "where it belongs." Part of his power was precisely the creation of terror in places where normally one would feel secure - whether it be a public arena such as London's Royal Albert Hall (The Man Who Knew Too Much) or somewhere as mundane as a motel shower (Psycho). Nowhere is safe in Hitchcock's world.

Where did all this come from? Hitchcock's favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, once told his wife that Hitchcock had revealed to him "a terrible secret" which he could not disclose before the director's death - but then he died before Hitchcock.

He knew that suspense was sexy: all about foreplay, fraught expectation, release. But if suspense was sexy, sex was also suspenseful, so romance in his films is always full of tension: think of the torments of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946). He saw the darkness behind Cary Grant's debonair facade, and disclosed the neurosis lurking beneath James Stewart's apparent normality.

His heroes strive for dominance and power in their relationships; his ice-cool, blonde heroines, like Grace Kelly (To Catch a Thief) and Tippi Hedren (The Birds), resist submission and subservience. There are highly charged moments in films such as Suspicion (1942), Spellbound (1945), and North by Northwest (1959). Hitchcock's most loyal disciple, Francois Truffaut, once said: "He filmed murder scenes as if they were love scenes, and love scenes as if they were murder scenes."

Murder in Hitchcock is rarely part of a narrative puzzle: it is an inevitable eruption of overpowering feeling. He thought cinema was essentially emotion, and therefore suspense served his end perfectly, for a thriller compels an audience to identify with the events on screen. He wanted to make audiences feel, and he would talk not just about theme, but about the way technique induced response. Audiences scream at the murder of the detective in Psycho, he explained, because of the way he cuts from the smallest image he could contrive (a high shot of the assailant rushing out at the victim) to the largest (a huge close-up of the detective at the moment of attack). "It's like music, you see," he would explain. "You go from the violins quietly playing to suddenly bringing in the brass."

Hitchcock's technique also demonstrates the power of the visual. He is superb at setting up a counterpoint between dialogue and image, where verbally a scene seems to be about one thing but visually it is about another.

Did Hitchcock appeal to the baser side of human nature? Even though a murderer is finally caught in Rear Window, there is a troubling peeping-tom sub-theme and a moment in the middle of the film where the hero and heroine are plunged into temporary gloom when it appears that that their suspect might not be a murderer at all. He believed he was being truthful about human nature, and one thing you could never accuse his films of being is sentimental. Yet he balanced this observation of human frailty with a saving comedy that seems peculiarly modern.

He thought the secret of his success was his understanding of the psychology of audiences, their willingness to dip their toe into the fear-experience, their pleasure in the terror of the game. Oscar Wilde expressed this wittily: "The suspense is terrible," says Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, adding, "I hope it will last." In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, it certainly will.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Film/The-suspense-still-kills/2005/06/03/1117568359543.html

rob ryan

Rob Ryan's elaborate paper cutouts have appeared in Vogue and on book and record covers. Now they illustrate the pages of his own book, a modern fairy tale describing a magical journey. By Eithne Farry. Photograph by Tom Hunter

If you apply the pets-and-owners rule to artists and their art, then by rights Rob Ryan should be a spindle-shanks of a man, possibly dressed in velveteen, but definitely wearing a melancholy expression of sweet romanticism. Ryan's charming papercuts are fantastically intricate, garlanded with flowers and fountains, birds and leaves, peopled with silhouetted lovers who pass dreamy hours wandering in meadows and pausing at kissing gates before heading back into town to admire the beautifully decorative skyline.

His work has graced the covers of records and novels and decorated the windows of Liberty. He has collaborated with Paul Smith, fashioned a fairy-tale paper gown for British Vogue and decorated the yoke of the jewellery designer Harriet Vine's wedding dress with miniature jellyfish, fronds of seaweed and a mermaid and merman. And now he has finished his first book, This Is for You, the dreamy tale of a lonesome man who has lost his place in the world, and who sets out on a magical papercut journey, through jewel-coloured landscapes, to rediscover his sense of belonging. There's a palpable sense of loss and longing to the story, but every page is a wonder, with something to delight in. The more you look, the more you see.

'If you were to take one picture out of the book and hang it on the wall, it would make sense on its own. But the book as a whole tells a big story,' Ryan says. 'It's a yearning; you can almost feel the emptiness that needs to be filled. When I was making the pages I had a kind of walking around feeling, as if I was on my own and I was very lonely.'

The real Rob Ryan has haywire hair, is dressed in shorts and a scrabbly T-shirt, and could double as a jovial roadie for a country-folk band. That indeed was the role he embraced last year when he volunteered himself as the driver on a two-week trip around Europe with his musician friend Jeb Loy Nichols. 'It was the most un-rock'n'roll tour ever,' Ryan says gleefully. 'Jeb is a vegan who's never drunk in his life, the keyboard player sipped the odd glass of wine, and one night the bassist went as far as having a Cinzano and lemonade.' As soon as the band went on stage in the evening, Ryan set to work on huge glasses of beer. 'I knocked them back, and when the gig was over I handed over the keys and let them drive me back to the hotel.'

Ryan's mother and father were both Irish, his dad from Tipperary, his mother from County Cork, and they came to England in the 1950s to find work. Ryan was born in Cyprus in 1962. By then his dad was a mess officer with the RAF, working behind the bar. 'Kids would ask me what kind of planes my dad flew, and I had to explain that it wasn't quite like that…' The family lived a peripatetic existence for a while, traipsing from base to base. 'It was a bit strange, I suppose, married quarters in the service. Well, it's much like moving from one council estate to another.'

He is the youngest of three, with two older brothers, and they left him pretty much to his own devices. 'I did a lot of drawing. It's like jokes, isn't it? If you're good at telling jokes then that's what you do. For me it was art.' He spent his time felt-tipping imaginary pop groups, rockers with guitar axes, huge banks of speakers. On his website (misterrob.com), Ryan says, 'When my dad bought a new shirt he would give me the smooth white card that came inside, this was a real treat, the best surface ever to draw on.' These days, Ryan carves into creamy white bible paper from Faulkners in South-ampton Row, London - 'It's very cabinety in there, it smells nice and it's just the right temperature.'

He did the usual teenage things, dancing at the Wigan Casino and climbing out of the window at night when his strictish parents would not let him out on the town. Then he got into art school and spent the summer meandering around, making no arrangements whatsoever, and turned up at Trent Polytechnic with nowhere to stay. His lackadaisical approach to accommodation did not extend to his art. 'People think art students are lazy, but I'd head into college for 9.30 and stay until seven or eight. And I'd go in at the weekend, too. You commit to what you're doing if you're serious about it.'

Work has been a constant; he still thinks about it all the time, wants to try new things, improve, learn, create, and he is more than prepared to put the hours in. 'Even now I work six days a week,' says Ryan, who cycles from his cosy south London flat (he shares it with his wife and two daughters) across town to his studio in the East End, tucked away in a little courtyard.

There is a downstairs room, with a fridge and a microwave for re-heating mugs of tea. The Vogue dress dangles from a wall, the papercut shapes looking a little ramshackle now. Upstairs there is a computer, a picture of Brian Clough over the stairs, a big cutting table and a stack of spray cans in every colour imaginable. It smells deliciously of paint. Ryan shares the space with his assistant, Hazel, and there are other artists and designers in adjoining rooms. 'I couldn't be on my own in the studio. I'd be desperately lonely. I need company, I need to be able to talk to people. I want to be normal, not live in an arty, lofty kind of way.'


He gets up at 6.30, leaves the flat at 7.30, arrives at the studio for eight, gets his fix of Radio 4 before anyone else arrives. Lunch is at 12.30. He does the crossword. Works some more until six and then cycles back home to his family. 'I might wander through a park, or a bit of the City. You have to make time to do it, you have to stop and look at things, find the things that refresh and recharge you.' Those things include Lego bricks in vibrant colours, trees, corners of buildings, doorways, gates, decorations, tiles, alleyways. 'I prefer the Victoria and Albert Museum to the Natural History Museum. I'm a makey kind of person.'



Ryan is not a fidget; he does not jiggle pens or tap his fingers on surface edges. But underneath the calm there is a current of electricity that suddenly sparks into life, sending him loping up the studio stairs or along the hallway of the flat to bring back, say, a blue and cream tile that he has recently designed for the shop Shelf. At some point in the day Ryan will be wielding a Swan Morton scalpel, handle 3, blade No 10a or 15a, and trying not to give himself 'art wounds'. 'My fingers are usually fine, but sometimes I leave the scalpels on a tabletop and walk into the blade. They're really, really sharp.'

He began making papercuts a few years ago. 'I used to concentrate on screen prints [he has an MA in printmaking from the Royal College of Art], big and bold and graphic, with lots of words.' So he set himself the task of banishing words because he felt they were taking over, and cutting intricate patterns out of paper seemed to be the way forward. 'But the words snuck back in. It's like a picture of a sculpture and there are words on the sculpture, or there's a picture of a tree, with words carved into the wood. They're just there somehow.'

Everything he wants to remember he keeps in a series of sketchbooks. 'All of them are packed with snippets, doodles, words; ideas for pictures. I think about the idea for a while and then I draw it. Then I might draw it again. And then I'll draw it on to the paper it's going to be cut out of. It's not very intuitive, it's not like Jackson Pollock. I am quite calm and decisive, but the other times, if I'm in a rush to get it done, I can be fast and furious.'

The end result of this careful cutting is a body of work that celebrates the tiniest of details, as atmospheric as a Charles Perrault fairy story or a tale by the Brothers Grimm. 'People often say that, but for me it's quite often about patterns and silhouettes, symmetry, the shapes in nature - leaves and branches.' Even his to-do lists turn into family trees. 'They go down and then they go sideways, and then they go up again, they start spreading everywhere.' And there is always lots to do, another book jacket, some textile design, the Christmas range for Daimaru, a chain of Japanese department stores; he finds it hard to say no. 'But I've been thinking about the balance thing recently. I was thinking, if you were really, really beautiful, would you just sleep with anyone who asked you? I think I know the answer to that…'

spooky poem

ideas on how to make it spooky, trees infront of camera, dark shapes, same colours. dark or red.

visual ideas.