Uncharted (2009) - 1/4

There are two basic schools of horror filmmaking. By no means are they mutually exclusive in practice, but it is fruitful to distinguish them in concept. One school recommends showing. The monster, the violence, and the gore is displayed to the audience. The other school recommends suggesting. The filmmaker hides the monster, the violence, and the gore, leaving the full scope of the horror to the individual imaginations of the audience. The Dead films of George Romero are clear examples of the showing school. Val Lewton's films are the apogee of the suggesting school.

There have been debates over which form is superior. The suggesting school is perceived as more artistic and intellectual, the showing school more exploitative. After making Val Lewton's greatest horror pictures (I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People), Jacques Tourneur made another classic, Night of the Demon. The film is infamous for showing the titular demon, a lupine puppet surrounded by smoke. The demon was the producer's decision. Tourneur protested vehemently against showing the demon. This is a neat microcosm of the debate. Tourneur believed showing the demon ruined the subtlety of the film, that the audience should be left in uncertainty and in the realm of possibilities conjured by the imagination. The producer thought of heightening tension. Both Tourneur and the producer are attempting to manipulate the audience, but to slightly different ends. Similarly, both the showing school and the suggesting school are trying to manipulate the audience, to horrify the audience. There are great films in both schools. Night of the Demon itself is still a masterpiece, employing both schools effectively. The demon bookends the film as a constant threat, while the middle of the film deploys the tactics of suggestion. The success of either approach depends on knowing how much to show and how much to suggest. Suggestion tends to be more unsettling and is ultimately less cathartic, leaving the audience disturbed after the film is over. If the audience is not given sufficient material to work with, however, the film is simply 'not delivering the goods.' It is more difficult to keep the attention of the audience with negation than with affirmation. The filmmaker must feed the audience suggestions. Showing tends to be more suspenseful and disturbing, but is ultimately cathartic. The audience usually leaves with the object of the disturbance resolved. If the audience is shown too much, there will be no tension but only a blur of concatenated make-up effects. This is an admittedly terse and monochromatic approach to the schools of horror filmmaking. I simplified the possibilities within each school for discussion's sake.

I mention this dichotomy because the inability to settle on either suggesting or showing is a major problem with Uncharted. Writer John Fuentes and director Frank Nunez make Uncharted a bit of both and fail on both counts. This indecision is related to another indecision, which I'll get to. Uncharted starts with a documentary crew crashing on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Leading the crew is Laine (Elizabeth Cantore) a beautiful, female David Attenborough sort of adventuress and Greg (Demetrius Navarro) her cinematographer. Laine and Greg gradually realize they are on a very dangerous island as they are stalked and harassed by mysterious creatures. Except for late appearance of the plane's pilot, Uncharted is basically a two-person story. The rest of the crew is vanished before the film begins. What we see of them is in found footage. This is the other indecision. It seems Fuentes and Nunez couldn't decide whether to make a mockumentary horror film like The Blair Witch Project or not. They compromised by incorporating unnecessary found footage within the narrative.

I want to look at how these two indecisions are linked. The Blair Witch Project is one of the great suggestion horror films of modern times. One never sees the threat in Blair Witch, but only its effects. The mockumentary format means all we see is what is captured by the handheld camera of the documentarians. In the climactic night scene, the camera captures the panic as they flee into the woods haphazardly in order to escape a threat. All the audience needs to see is how threatened this people are. The threatening object is itself withheld. The mockumentary format gives an oblique, refracted perspective on the object of terror, a perspective filtered through the effect it produces. In its found footage moments, Uncharted struggles to accomplish what Blair Witch does. This even includes an homage to the famous nostrils scene. But the filmmakers don't seem to have grasped how Blair Witch earned its power. There is no build-up. The found footage interrupts the main action of the film. We see the documentary crew introduce themselves. They seem like nice people. One lady kindly flashes her large breasts to the camera. Unfortunately, these people are not a part of the story. Eventually Greg finds their camera and discovers their fates. Without any time alotted to build tension, they immediately wander offscreen, scream, and their bodies are found. The last victim drops the camera in such a way as to reveal furry hands pawing his torso. If the filmmakers wanted to show, they should have at least invested in showing well. Suggestion requires build-up. This is a part of the film that needed more and better showing.

Blair Witch also immerses the viewer in the filtered experience of the handheld camera. There is no external perspective. Most of Uncharted, however, is filmed regularly. The found footage tends to undermine the Laine-Greg section. The Laine-Greg section is the most successful. Initially the creatures appear as silhouettes against the tent in the night. They appear as black blurs placed behind and beside Laine without her realizing it. This technique gives the creatures a sense of being physical, but still nebulous, mysterious, like creatures from a Lovecraft tale. This is good. The material is given and the suggestion is earned. Then the discovery of the footage undoes much of what is earned. The furry paws contradicts the ratlike creatures the silhouettes made me imagine. The paws are more suggestive of a cheap ape costume. In this Laine-Greg section, where the attempts at suggestion are successful, it was important that the monsters and the gore be withheld. Unfortunately the filmmakers chose to do the showing in the Laine-Greg section. The film's final shot is a punchline reveal of what the creatures really are. I realized then that many of the film's mistakes derive from the desire to deliver this punchline. It's not a very good punchline.

It also amazes me how a film about serious people in a serious situation can still find ways of presenting the few female characters as spectacle. There are only two women. One is seen briefly in the found footage segments. She flashes her breasts at the camera a few times. She remarks how proud she is with her "new boobs," though they look real to me. Her boyfriend is also pleased with them. Laine, too, despite being a serious presenter of nature documentaries, finds time to get drunk and deliver a belly dance at the film's center. The belly dance is nice, but out of place. Unlike The Pit and the Pendulum (2009), there is no motif of body-appreciation. Unlike the virgin dance of the double chainsaws in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, there's no sense of inventive fun. Unlike the great erotic dance Debra Paget dances in Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur, the belly dance serves no purpose for the audience, the characters, the story, or even for its own sake. The breasts and belly dance are presented in the most cynical way possible: because it's supposed to be there.

Uncharted is a film that does everything half-heartedly and cynically. There's no spirit of enjoyment. But perhaps that's uncharitable. Perhaps the hearts of the filmmakers were in the right place. Perhaps they copied the form but not the spirit of better horror films, not understanding that a good bellydance, a good gore scene, and terror are all things that must be earned.