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THE SECOND TEST OF HDC IDOL 2008-09


- Alkytrio666 : Visual media is non-existent. The only popular medium which people use to get entertained is the radio. You are in charge of a local horror radio station and desperately need listeners to tune into your broadcasts. What can you possibly do to get people tuned into your station's wavelengths and make it a popular one?

Originally Posted by alkytrio666

Old-time radio (for those who didn't know) is one of my dearest interests, and I spend a lot of time visiting the golden age of the living room box via radio stars like Jack Benny and Vincent Price.

Radio was a fantastic medium for entertainment because of its obvious restrictions- a listener could not see anything, so one relied entirely on the power of storytelling, and many broadcasts are still regarded as some of the finest pieces of entertainment of all time.

The obvious example is Orson Welles' dramatization of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" on radio's premium drama program Mystery Theatre on the Air. Orson realized in 1938 what filmmakers today are just discovering- that horror really becomes terrifying when it is told in a non-fiction manner. Radio was the world's form of communication, and there was a kind of literal blind trust between the citizens of the world and that brown box that sat on their mantels- the radio held them together. That is, until Mr. Welles put on the most sucessful trick in history.

For those unfamiliar with the broadcast, Orson acted as though regular programming was interrupted so that he could announce to the world that martians had landed in Van Nest Park- and they weren;t interested in making friends.

Chaos exploded as panic-stricken families called friends and families to decide what to do in the heat of this apocalypse. For 60 short minutes, Orson Welles held the world in the palm of his hand as he transformed the freedom of the airwaves into a totally three-dimensional mode of storytelling.

Adolf Hitler was cited as calling this "evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy". I call it the beauty of free speech and the power of imagination.

If it were up to me, radio would continue to supply entertainment on a more widespread level. Like in the golden age, stars could make radio a second form of expression, really utilize the power of speech rather than visualization.

As a radio station specializing in the art of horror storytelling, I think I'd bring things back to the basics, the way they were so long ago now. First of all, if I learned anything from radio shows like Suspense it's that sometimes silence can be the most terrifying element of a thriller. Unfortunately, horror movies today have gained such a strong focus on noise that it seems like an audience needs to be cheaply deafened with a bang rather than startled with a creative scare. If a story is built well enough and characters are developed on an honest level, than a climax can hook listeners in the most powerful way- via a chilling, quiet finale.

More important an element than silence is the inescapable feeling of the presence of something evil but not being able to see it with your own eyes. In the golden age of radio, imaginations were exercized far more often. If movies like Alien have taught us anything, it is that more is less- the more of the monster we see, the less we fear it. Americans fear the unknown, through fiction and war, past and future. Simply re-introducing the power of this method would hook horror fans old and young alike.

Radio is an underrated form of entertainment and expression, one that has influenced movies from Psycho to Cloverfield, and I would love to see a re-emergence of it in the world of horror.

- ChronoGrl : Several critically-acclaimed flicks have failed miserably at the BO - Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Jaws etc. all have been flushed down the toilets. For some reason, the audiences arent willing to accept any of those horror flicks. You are a talented and eccentric filmmaker who is hellbent on making the audiences turn towards horror. What ideas can you use to conquer such hard-headed audiences of the world?

Originally Posted by ChronoGrl

I’ve decided that my alternate reality brings us to now, present day and this I why: I am assuming that, in this alternate reality all horror has been panned, all “Blockbusters” leading up until now, which encompasses the aforementioned Night of the Living Dead, Exorcist, and Jaws. Of course, this will also include everything from Kubrick’s The Shining (panned in 1980), to 1999’s utter disaster The Blair Witch Project, proving that the audience as a whole is not willing to embrace pure, non-diluted horror.

In coming up with my proposal, I did some preliminary research in terms of highest grossing films of all time. In order to bring horror to a public who does not like horror, one must encompass elements of the film industry’s past successes. Titanic, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, Shrek 2, and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial are the top 5 Box Office successes of all time. Recent Blockbusters of the last five years include three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, two X-Men sequels, two Spiderman sequels, and three Harry Potter movies.

The recipe for success seems to be a combination comic book heroes and anti-heroes, adventure, and pure fantastical escapism.

So we need to take that and turn it into horror.

I propose that, in order to introduce this public into the concept of horror, we must take elements of classic fairy tales (a recipe for success year after year with early Disney as well as a baseline of familiarity) while also using the vehicle of serial comic book adaptation that proved to be successful over the past few years. As an upcoming filmmaker I propose that, specifically, we take Zenescope Entertainment’s Grimm Fairy Tales’ comic spin-off mini-series Return to Wonderland and adapt it to the screen. Since this mini-series is already a cult success amongst comic book enthusiasts, we’ll already have a base for our audience. For the rest of the general public, the success in recent years of Shrek and its sequels, shows that it is clear that the public is romanced by the concept of the redone fairy tale. I think that we can springboard off of the midrange success of 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth and push the envelope farther. Return to Wonderland possesses a decent cross-section of horror sub-genre that had been previously rejected when presented holistically in an entire film (Carpenter’s pure Slasher Halloween caused some audience members to actually vomit into their Raisinets). So, with Return to Wonderland, we introduce the audience to horror little by little: Parts of the Slasher can be found in the Queen of Hearts and her gardening Playing Cards (literally painting the roses red with the blood of their own), the Monster sub-genre can be found in the horrifying, stalking, larger-than-life Cheshire Cat, and even the sub-genre of Cannibalism and Pulp in the Lecherous Mad Hatter. The movie(s) as a whole will play delightfully with the Surreal/Fantastical horror sub-genre, which seems to be a bit more palatable to the general audience. What’s great about adapting this entire comic mini-series is that it will enable us to create a series of sequels with which to ease the public into the genre of horror while simultaneously keeping them in familiar territory with a known fairy tale.

(Contd.)