Steven Spielberg & the Horror Inside Blockbusters
Added 2017-03-30 19:29:56 +0000 UTCHey kids! It's a new video essay!
Anyone who knows me at all knew I was eventually going to get around to talking about Spielberg in one of these. If I'm being honest, this probably won't be the last time.
Last Thanksgiving my sister and I ended up getting sucked into a marathon of all the Jurassic Park movies playing on, I believe, Spike. I had just made my first video essay, and while watching the T-Rex attack for the millionth time, I realized I wanted to find a way to do a video essay about it.
(Also: The Lost World, while one of Spielberg's weaker movies, has enough brilliant directing to warrant its own video essay)
Over the next couple months I expanded that to a discussion of Spielberg's set pieces focusing on the T-Rex attack, but I still didn't have an interesting enough angle.
Then a few weeks ago director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange) went on a Twitter spree talking about the surprising amounts of darkness in Spielberg's films, and I had the breakthrough I was looking for: a look at Spielberg's set pieces and his use of horror cinematic vocabulary.
This was one of those threads that just got longer and longer the more I pulled, since the list of horror directors who became effective blockbuster directors is pretty damn long.
I had a lot of fun with this one, and it was a great excuse to dig into some of my favorite movies. Hope you guys enjoy it.
Next week: if everything goes according to plan, I'm going to profess my love for the best movie franchise around.
Tomorrow we shoot a big warehouse shootout for the next Alternate Universe Comic Book Movie. This one is gonna be special.
