First half was good, went downhilll after they 'get involved'

Did he actually kill the librarian though? I know she fell down and looked like she died, but it also looked like Ahab interrupted it all :S

He didn't kill the lybrarian

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if I could believe that the film crew were sociopaths too, they could have gone all the way with the direction of the first half, and they could just eat it all up and I could deal with that. I could also deal with them thinking he was kidding up until a certain point. But to change morality all of a sudden, and to be so terribly acted, I just can't say I enjoyed their role in the film. I thought the lead was funny and deserved the chance to be a star of this franchise, but everything else doesn't fall into place. I give it a 6 for effort though. I'm sure some people can enjoy this without being bothered by the lack of believability. That may cut it for Scary Movie, but if this was supposed to be thrilling and scary, it just didn't go the distance. Better death scenes might have really helped that though, and at least having someone else play the leading lady.

I've been thinking about this for several hours and I just can't decide if that's right. Whether or not it went downhill after they got involved.


****SPOILERS BELOW****


It was hard to for me to shift gears from the mockumentary to the traditional slasher film but I thought they did it about as well as it could be done. Like others have said, overt gore would have made the change even more jarring and IMO overt gore isn't necessary for a great horror flick. In fact, it substitutes all too often for real plotting and suspense. Still the about-face in tone was a bit hard to adjust to.

Yet, I thought there was a point to it becoming more "real." I thought stepping through that boundary made the deaths more important, more serious. It was necessary for the final girl twist, of course, but it highlighted what is so often missing in slasher films: the knowing complicity of the audience in finding entertainment in murder. We via Taylor are the voyeurs.

It made me uncomfortable. That was good.

Interesting discussion. I might have to watch the movie again to figure out what I really think about it.

The character Angela uses the mechanics of a documentary to examine life without really being part of it (that's a theme that's been explored in a number of works in the past few years; the idea of compulsively recording events instead of living in them).

There's a paradox illustrated in "Behind the Mask" in the third act, when it switches from the documentary to cinematic: the documentary camera makes things look more "real" while at the same time distancing the viewer because it's deliberately self-conscious; whereas the cinematic scenes, even though they're clearly artificial, nevertheless are more effective at getting into the emotions of a scene.

I think the deal with Angela as a documentarian is summed up in the scene where she's talking to Eugene about "supernatural killing sprees" and he tries to explain that people like him fulfill a need by embodying Fear. The cinematic third act drives that theme home by forcing the viewer to abandon the "safety" of the documentary view and get into the scene emotionally, with Leslie transformed into Fear on two legs.

Hmm. Maybe that really does work.

"The truth 24 times a second."