My ghost movie 100 FEET with Famke Janssen gets a tribute article on Arrow In The Head at JoBlo.Com.
Monday, July 6th, 2020
Huge thanks to Arrow in the Head at JoBlo.com for a terrific tribute video article on my ghost movie 100 FEET. This is the best piece anybody has ever done on the film. Informative, fast-paced and full of great stuff about the flick, it is must viewing for fans of my work and horror fans in general.
During this period of everybody locked down in our homes sharing anxieties of isolation and dread, audiences can personally relate to 100 FEET in a way they couldn’t before, making the movie more frightening than ever. We’re all in lockdown inside our homes just like the movie’s heroine Marnie played by Famke Janssen but her problems are worse than yours since she’s shut in with the violent ghost of her dead husband who doesn’t believe in social distancing. The suffocating claustrophobia of Famke’s situation in the movie is so identifiable to us these days, viewing 100 FEET now may be unbearably intense for some of you, get in your head and give you nightmares. You have been warned.
100 FEET is my personal favorite of the films I’ve made and my best job as a director. It’s easy to frighten people with gore and jump scares but true skill in suspense lies in the creation of tension without any of that. It’s about manipulating audience expectations so just when they think something is about to happen, it doesn’t and when they least expect it, it does. 100 FEET is basically an entire movie with a woman alone in a house with a ghost. The ghost is almost never seen, and when ghost attacks are always terrifying and unexpected. This is a very Hitchcockian film of elevated suspense.
This movie got made during the trend of torture porn horror films so I wanted to go completely in the other direction and scare the hell of the audience without relying on kills or gory violence like everyone else was doing. And it worked. 100 FEET keeps you on the edge of your seat for ninety minutes and there is only one kill in the entire movie! What interested me making 100 FEET was using classic techniques of point of view and visual subliminal suggestion to generate tension and lead you around by the nose rather than hit you in the face.
As a director, it was a wonderful challenge. If you’ve seen 100 FEET before watch it again because you’ll get more out of seeing the film now than you did then. If you haven’t seen it, I would definitely not recommend watching it alone locked down in your house late at night.
Or maybe I would.
