Holy cow. I saw Cloverfield on Sunday night with a my friend, D.C. Basically, it scared the hell out of me. I realize that the director was using all of the Blair Witch and You Tube tropes available to him: handheld camera, first-person narrative, minor sightings of major monsters, screams and hysteria, and lots of good, all-purpose suspense, plus a little true romance to drive the story forward. It had all of those things in spades.
But what really scared me was its ability to tap deep into my primitive consciousness, pushing around memories of my experiences of 9/11 in lower Manhattan and mixing the imagery up with modern nightmares. At a certain point, perhaps 20 minutes in, I couldn’t quite breathe and I had a minor epiphany along the lines of “Andy needs to take better care of himself. Going to a replay of 9/11, even if fictive, is not a good mental health break.”
What more? Well, another friend, V.S., has started a fantastic new blog with his friend A.D. dedicated to the cinema and, well, movies and films and reviews of films. It’s called Cineblog and I urge you to give it a read. You might start with the review of Cloverfield.