The most surreal bruise in Motion Picture history

Aw Gaaawd... It's time for a look of the Ed Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead, that recently aired on Finnish state television. Praise God for socialism. To give some kudos is to say that the picture is by far the greatest stripper-horror film I've yet seen, the same way James Cameron remarked that his Piranha II is the greatest film ever about flying piranhas. Orgy is mightily awful to be sure, but its plotless ghoulishness, paired with painfully prolonged stripping sequences sink the viewer into a kind of vomitous hypnotic state.

And the tagline? Ooooooooh man, Orgy of the Dead has one of the pleasurable ever: "Are you heterosexual?". Good God.

The plot has a wholesome couple -- a horror novelist and his wife -- stumble upon a nightly graveyeard, where the mighty Criswell himself -- reciting lines from Wood's then-shelved Night of the Ghouls (the finest Wood picture in my view) is a sort of deity - like a sinister version of the benign Pull ze stlink!-Bela Lugosi character from Glen or Glenda? He is there with a sidekick, a Vampira knock-off called Booborel-- er, Ghoulita, to view candidates for damnation performing striptease acts, and suffering their sentence henceforth. Into the mix are thrown the most delightful characters in the film; a werewolf and a mummy duo, who act as a sort of twisted Greek chorus to this whole delirium (the mummy mostly does the talking, while the werewold nods his head and howls).

But enough! That's all for the storyline. The main thing about this movie for me is that weird blue color blob on the horror novelist guy's forehead. See it...? It comes on-screen every once in a while, when you've watched another twenty minutes of apathetic stripping. Wha da hell iz that? Some guy push the wrong button during the color timing process? Indeed - the movie generally has a weirdly saturated color scheme, so the thought of it being simply some reflection of color gel light came to mind... for sure. Only on the second viewing recently when I catched it on television, did the ghoulish realisation dawn on me - IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A BRUISE! Aaawww gosh.

I would like to take seize this opportunity, and nominate this particular one as the most interesting bruise in cinematic history.

  

But seriously fellas - the pleasures of camp films is usually seen as merely in low production or artistic values, resulting in the viewers having their giggles. This view is a far too superficial one. The attraction might more truthfully lie in the widly inconsistent aesthetics that these pictures have. This issue is suprisingly rarely even pondered upon, let alone succesfully - Pete Tombs' book Mondo Macabro is a commendable exception.

You gasp in wonder while watching Teenagers from Outer Space, when suddenly -- for no reason whatsoever -- in a fire fight with the police, the coppers' guns start to give out animated (? [?]) muzzle flashes. And -- it's also when seeing Orgy of the Dead; yeah, the werewolf and mummy are terrific, sure, the strippers are dandy ... but it's all ' bout that colourful, wildly surrealistic, gorgeous Salvador Dali-ish bruise.

Monsters to be pitied...! Monsters to be despised...!

Nor Man or Mailer, But...

Norman Mailer (born in 1922, died in 2007) was the greatest, most fascinating and puckish cultural personality of the 20th century. The bulk of his work was being a writer: a novelist, journalist, essayist (producing brilliantly unusual social criticism), and sometimes poet and playwright. Mailer was a celebrity, a fixture on talk-shows, who had a significantly sized ego and a wonderfully mischievous style that was forcefully sincere to the horror of many a politically correct and puritan. The slightly less-known aspect of his ouvré was his career as a movie director, producing three autobiographical avant-garde features in the 1960's and one camp classic for the Cannon Group (!) in the 1980's.

The Cannon film Tough Guys Don't Dance -- the only one of his cinematic works that's based on one of his novels -- is easily through MGM - the campy outing features many enjoyable moments of the characters uttering mailerisms; the three underground features have only been available on dvd thus far from France, released by the Cult Underground label. These discs have been hefty in their price and hard to find. Now to set the record straight, The Criterion Collection is releasing Mailer's underground trilogy on their Eclipse dvd label. They have touted the forthcoming release quite lovingly as follows:

Norman Mailer is remembered for many things— his novels, his essays, his articles, his activism, his ego. one largely forgotten chapter of his life, however, is his late-sixties kamikaze-style plunge into making experimental films. These rough-hewn, self-financed, largely improvised metafictions are works of madness and bravado, all starring Mailer himself and with technical assistance from cinema verité trailblazers D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock.

Mailer saw the world through his one-of-a-kind, spiritual, existentialist prism that's hard to define; endlessly provoking with his sometimes painfully sincere and unashamed remarks, which refreshingly lacked any rigid ideological ties and politically correct puritanism.

In addition to his artistic career, Mailer ran twice for the office of Mayor of New York, first in the early 1960's during the time that his infamous wife-stabbing incident happened, and later more famously in 1969. The economist of capitalistic libertarian persuasion, Murray Rothbard (the unofficial initiatior of anarcho-capitalism) lauded Mailer's campaign, and Norman became the first political candidate endorsed by Rothbard's newsletter The Libertarian, which normally did not dare to commit such acts.

Mailer defined himself politically first as an anarchist and a libertarian socialist (and as a Marxian anarchist, which is a contradiction in terms) during the 1940's and 50's; then he described his views as a far-flung mutation of Trotskyism, and starting from the 1960's, he used the label "Left-Conservative".

Starting from his breakthrough book, The Naked and the Dead, at age 25, Mailer created a prolific creative career through the help of his hard work ethic -- writing almost every day, sometimes for twelve hours straight, and treating himself as a working stiff with his own punched cards. Mailer's The Spooky Art, a guide to a writing career (containing about half new material, and half recycled old stuff, as many of his late books intended to do), contains many a intriguing trivia on his basic working habits.

Mailer wrote about politics, criminals, hipsters, grafitti, Picasso, boxing, poker, and Hollywood, amongst other topics. His novel An American Dream, overflowing with brilliantly self-indulgent metaphoric language, was characterized by one Finnish literary critic as the worst novel any major American writer has done, but it's a rather enjoyable package, filled with the kind of pseudo-deep remarks that a person high on pot could spew from his mouth - the only minus is that the story never rises to the level that it exhibits during its first 60 pages.

During the 1960's, in his own words, in an attempt to attack the nature of reality, Mailer started to create his underground features, all starring himself. These were the crime films Wild 90 and Beyond the Law, both shot in newsreel-like black & white 16mm film. Beyond the Law receives a wildly overblown movie review by Mailer himself in his chuckle-filled 1968 non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night, which features a cameo appearance by Noam Chomsky who ends up in the same holding cell with Mailer after the huge peace demonstration at the Pentagon that the book details.

Maidstone, Mailer's most ambitious underground effort, shot on color 16mm, features him as an arthouse-porny movie director Norman T. Kingsley running for president, with the supporting cast featuring a jumbled ensemble consisting of Rip Torn, some of Mailer's ex-wives and family, and Andy Warhol's starlet Ultra Violet (who can also be seen in the flashlight-horror flick Simon, The King of Witches). It's a heady and at times tedious mix of a John Cassavettes-style improvisation exercise, a hallucinatory avant-garde trip and a very narcissistic home movie. It sort of climaxes with the bare-chested Mailer lecturing his cast and crew about his aesthetic theories and approaches to the making of the film, and the brutal real-life fight between him and Rip Torn (now a YouTube favorite, thanks to the great Don Alex of Subterranean Cinema) ends things on a grave and suitably confusing manner. Speaking of Torn, one positive thing when the Great Man passes away might be that numerous Facebook updates will read RIP Rip.

Mailer's unique worldview makes, for me, him seem like a kindred spirit. Even those who detested him for his ego should acknowledge that he had no pretensions about this -- he was the first to admit it, and lampoon himself for it. Mailer has to be greatest in the art of both of glorifying, and making a fool of himself - on occassion, doing both at the same time.

A5p3ct Rat105

When tracing the origin of many a cinematic technique, Abel Gance's landmark 1927 epic Napoléon makes an entrance - this is also the case with the subject of film-makers operating with more than one aspect ratio in their films. Napoléon had the most of the movie in 1.33 ratio, but the finale expands to three cinema screens (Polyvision), which show three seperate images side by side, and at times one single very wide visual.

 CinemaScope is generally excepted to have arrived on the movie scene in 1953; this however ignores not only the early scope films of the early 1930's (The Big Trail and The Bat Whispers among others), but such unexcepted exceptions as William Dieterle's 1948 haunting, slightly boring ghost tale Portrait of Jennie. Most of the film was in full frame 1.37 aspect ratio and in black & white, but the final shot was in color. Ditto the color suprise (similar to The Picture of Dorian Gray movie released three years earlier),  some special theatres gave the storm sequence finale a green tint (restored for the DVD) and had a wider screen ratio of 2.18 (not restored on the current DVDs).

In the 1950's, to underwrite the way that a painter creates in many shapes of the frame, Henri-Georges Clouzot used two aspect ratios for his documentary The Mystery of Picasso (see previous blog entry on distorted visuals). Kubrick filmed Dr Strangelove using two aspect ratios (full frame 1.37 and 1.66) with in-camera mattes, which take turns during the movie to a little bewildering effect - the initial DVD release preserved this, but the anamorphic release changed the film visually to 1.66 only.

The act of using numerous screen shapes does rise its head from time to time, such as in director Alejandro González Iñárritu's cancer drama from 2010, Biutiful, which utlizes both the 1.85 and scope 2.35 ratios. Cartoon series like Samurai Jack push the concept of changing aspect ratios to self-consciously absurd extremes. IMAX productions have an endemic tendency to use numerous aspect ratios -- from a tiny square to utilizing the entire picture space that at its best fills the viewer's entire field of vision.

A film that is usually missing from the discussions on movies with multiple aspect ratios is Orson Welles' confusing noir The Lady from Shanghai - the lauded and much-copied (Enter the Dragon, anyone?) mirror finale has the film mutating to a letterboxed ratio of about 1.66, slightly wider from the full frame 1.37 that the film is in. According to Peter Boghdanovich, Welles' inspiration for the different aspect ratio -- done with in-camera mattes, was D.W. Griffith, and how he masked the image with the iris in his silent productions.

The finale of Lady from Shanghai however is not the only scene which dissents from the 1.37 ratio that the rest of the movie possesses -- the funhouse sequence earlier on instead goes the other route - an aspect ratio which was narrower, of about 1.19, conjuring up memories of early sound films which employed this particular shape (which was praised by Sergei Eisenstein for its dynamism), such as Fritz Lang's M and the excellent The Testament of Dr Mabuse (below), along with Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr.

...

 

SFX maestro Douglas Trumbull's 1983 movie Brainstorm is a proto-Strange Days tale of technology that records human sensations for others to experience. The narrative scenes are in 1.85 while the sensorial tapes shot in POV widened the screen to scope (2.20 in 70mm, and 2.35 in 35mm prints). The sensation recordings are reminiscent of amusement park contraptions, where people would go standing in a dark room, and POV footage of rollercoaster rides and such was blasted on a big screen - they had these as long as still during my childhood in the early 1990's. The widescreen video releases of Brainstorm faithfully preserve the screen sizes, but here the letterboxing gets bigger in the sensation recording sequences due to the wider aspect ratio, causing the image aperture to actually diminish - not exactly what the film-makers originally envisioned.

  
Update: There's a Blu-ray disc of Brainstorm out now -- it is presented in 2.35 ratio, with windowboxing for the narrative scenes to maintain the smaller aspect ratio - while this accomplishes that the disc stays faithful to the fact that the picture indeed widens for the Xperience-O-Helmet shots, it comes with the cost of a tinier image and lower resolution, which make for most of the movie. This decision of presentation seems to have gathered mostly negative reactions thus far from film buffs.

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Hiroshi Teshigahara's arthouse horror The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) from 1966 is one tough, neat film. It's a situation where the director seems (m)eager to take creative risks at seemingly every corner. The movie centers on a facially sca(r)red businessman, who receives an astonishingly life-like mask, which gives him a reneissance in identity.

Speaking of those creative risks I mentioned before, halfway through the story, we are apruptly introduced to a sub-plot, which is parallel tale of a woman suffering a fate similar to the main character. The jarring narrative quality is enchanced by the sudden shift of aspect ratio (!) from full frame 1.37 to about 2.00, which lasts for a brief time.

Teshigahara's film is a must-see, in both of the screen formats it deploys.

Ending on a light note, a Video Nasty that should be on your to-see list is the campy (!!) concentration camp and war turkey The Beast in Heat - the sic-happy on-screen title during the lonesome opening credits actually is The Horrifing Experiments of SS Last Days. Above is the Dutch tape from the appropriately named video label - the (w)hole pride and glory(hole) of my VHS collection.

I don't have a clue about how the DVD releases of the film handle it, but the VHS has at least three different aspect ratios at work. This eclectic quality about screen formats goes to pretty absurd measures during the silly war sequences that stand in for the dubious finale - at times almost every single shot seems to be in a different aspect ratio - it's a true conflict on a meta-cinematic level as well, it seems.

Tha Es0teric Pleasures of Colorized Motion Pictures

In the late 1970's and during the 1980's, an ominous process began to take shape with old black & white films, which looked like it could lead to having them computer-colorized. This trend, which had media mogul Ted Turner as its antagonistic symbol for many a folks, produced a strong condemnation from high-profile film-makers, such as Martin Scorsese. Colorization presents a philosophy that color image -- in these cases, a yuckkingly over-saturated color scheme featuring people with Umpa Lumpa skin -- is somehow inherintly superior to watching black & white. B&W is seen as something inferior, something that is limiting. The movie buff counter-argument goes basically that monochromatic films were designed to be viewed in that particular way, and that B&W ought to be treated as its own unique thing, possessing features that is as good as color imagery is, but in its own right. Colorization as a process is perhaps analoguous to dimensiolizing 2-D films into stereoscopic 3-D (as is the case in the re-release of the Star Wars films and Cameron's Titanic). But those of us who're not on the totally puritanical disposition, colorized cinematic art does indeed offer some perverted pleasures of its own. This blog entry is dedicated to give a hint of these relishes.

 

The Special Edition DVD of the twisted crackpotty anti-marihuana propaganda opus Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children!) has a new colorized version provided by Legend Films. This version, clearly justly created with tongue firmly in saliva-filled cotton-mouthed cheek, features several different color tones for the marihuana smoke, each color-coded, depending on the severity of the character's addiction to the Devil's Weed (rooted in Hell).

 This brings to mind a heart-warming memory of a Bela Lugosi B-mystery chiller The Death Kiss made in 1932  - it was on late-night Finnish television about a decade ago, and was broadcast for some reason in a n obscure colorized form - a scene showing a fire breaking out in a projection room had an added surreal touch as the smoke was colored orange for some nutty reason!

In 1963, a rumour began to circulate that the last movie before that Lee Harvey Oswald saw before he committed his ungodly deed was the Frank Sinatra vehicle Suddenly, from 1954, which depicts a planned assassination of a U.S. president - Sinatra again dived onto similar territory later with The Manchurian Candidate. In 1986, a colorized version became available, and the neat thing about this is that, "Ol' Blue Eyes" was given a Brown Tone to his Windows to the Soul in an inadvertently subversive touch!

The afore-mentoned Legend Films corrected this flaw in their colorization re-issue of the flick.

 

Skull Island does acid.

Aaaah... the original King Kong. We all know that the monochrome version was great, but experiencing the flick with psychedelic-looking dinosaurs is a real treat, I tells ya! This one is a real corker. What in God's Name were they thinking when they did the colorization?!

In the monochrome original, there's a strange sort of plausibility going on with Kong as a character, but this is just utterly artificial, making the poor creature look like the clumsy puppet that it is. It's a distancing device. Hurry! Someone colorize a Bertolt Brecht movie! Yo, Adrian...!

Speaking of adorable monsters, Larry Cohen's It's Alive cums to mind. Cohen sought that the visual style to aim for was like a colorized film, with its saturated, unreal pastel visions, and some moments in the movie do archieve this somewhat.

An apotheosis of the 1980's colorization controversy came with the rumor that Ted Turner's company would colorize Orson Welles' seminal Citizen Kane. An elderly Welles complained about this to indie director Henry Jaglom:

"Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons!"

 Welles' original unusual RKO contract containing unusual creative freedom finally did it for Kane, and the colorization never took place.... Alas, not so for Welles' mutilated Kane follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, slightly less accomplished in terms of craftsmanship, but more human. It got mutilated to another degree with a colorized Turner release.

OK, finally fellas, let me make my stand clear: colorizing B&W films generally makes as much damn sense as -- cue a Noam Chomsky-like drawing of an unexpected analogy -- re-releasing Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert in black & white.

The act of colorization possessing artistic integrity is not an entirely impossible concept. The best example that pops up is the 1935 fantasy film She, which was originally intended to be shot in an early experimental color stock, and the entire production was constructed with this in mind -- but RKO studios at the last moment called it off, and the end result was a monohrome flick. Some years ago, Legend Films (the company that obviously is some kind of warped hero of this blog entry) under the supervision of Ray Harryhausen, the legend himself, colorized the film in  order for viewers to experience what She would look like in color. This was further a propos by the fact that 1930's color film stock possessed a similar faded, pastel quality that colorized imagery has.

Originally in the 1980's, some film-makers were actually enthusiastic about the technology, including Frank Capra, who wanted to colorize some of his classics, like the excellent study of individual vs community, It's a Wonderful Life, but was barred from the colorization booth when it emerged that the films were in public domain. This led the bitter Capra join with the anti-colorization brigade.

On a general level, colorizing old films might be a dumb idea, but if you do do it - then go the Reefer Madness way, and actually be crazy and creative with it, and have fun!

Aaaaah, an' one final quickie nugget:

Roger "The Man" Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors - in its original monochromatic form, veeeery innocent and tame kiddie fodder; but GodDaaaaamn the way the more gory moments start to look in the colorized version - this is beginning to be quite heavy stuff, all of a sudden, soon it's kissing cousins with Blood Feast. I was shocked. No wonder almost all gore films in cinema history have been in (blood dripping) color...   ?

dIsT0rTiOnS

  A real tour-de-force in the esoteric category of cinematic visuals of a distorted nature is here.

                                                                          Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son (Mat i syn) -                                                                          one of the finest films of the 1990's -                                                                           uses distorting mirrors and lenses to create an unreal visual style through-out the whole movie; the majority of its images are distorted in one way or nother ("Nother died"). An outstanding and uncompromising feature about the work is that no apologetic clear justifications, or rather excuses, are given for the visual appearance -- no-one is hit over the head with a club nor are there any beer mugs revealed on the foreground, as, say, in the Francis Bacon bio flick Love is the Devil.

We are priviledged to be part of the final moments of a mother and son's relationship, taking place in a secluded place in the countryside. Intimate views of the characters are intercut with landscape shots, stylized to a degree that they're reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, than regular master shots from films. The thing distinguishing this marvelous attempt from simply creating tableaux vivant versions of the director's favorite paintings is the true sense of time flowing, passing - unique for the cinematic medium. Here the ambiguous nature of the crooked visions gives a sense that we're inhabiting a place somewhere between life and death, a place of transition, of reality being in flux.

But to give a little historical context, the first and most common strategy in using distorted imagery in cinema is to create a narrative context for it which establishes that the distorted visuals seek to convey the disoriented perception of a given character in the picture. There's a ton of examples of this in Hollywood and mainstream cinema, but let's throw John Carpenter's Christine as one title among many. One fairly interesting early example is from the silent era, in the 1928 Teutonic short film Überfall, from Ernö Metzger. A milktoast guy gets in trouble, and is knocked out cold for his efforts by a brutish thug; this breaks the film - until then shot and edited in conventional manner - into a prolonged, ritualized montage of distorted faces and sights.


A little similar experiment was conducted by the illustrious Abel Gance in 1915 with the short La folie du Docteur Tube, which features a conehead-looking mad doc experimenting with a mystical powder, which goes off everywhere, and distorts the surrroundings - the movie is basically a self-justifying showcase for the then-novel visuals created by an anamorphic lens.

An' speaking of anamorphic . . . . .

The fresh Finnish DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot's feature documentary The Mystery of Picasso from 1956 isn't really technically what it ought to be. The entire movie basically observes Picasso's pictures being made, and the twists and turns his creative process possessess. Perhaps a little too tedious for my money, at times feeling like watching paint dry - ha! - but it's an interesting little movie  (I do prefer Clouzot's documentary on Herbert Von Karajan) which not only mixes together monochromatic and color imagery, but also various aspect ratios. The original theatrical release, and also the U.S. DVD, have the film mostly in the square aspect ratio, but about halfway through Picasso remarks I need a bigger canvas, and the screen expands into CinemaScope. The U.S. DVD has these sections letterboxed, but the Finnish DVD - while being superior to its U.S. counterpart in terms of color and image sharpness - insanely has this stretched completely anamorphically, as you can see in the above screenshots, the Finnish dvd is the one on the left and the U.S. on the right - just like in politics, natch?

Weirdly enough, stretching these paintings even more than goo' ol' Eugene Tooms could bear, seems to give them an additional Picasso-esque quality!
But I still personally prefer letterboxes.

Too bad this anamorphicity (is that a reel word?) extends beyond the showing of paintings on the DVD presentation. This maybe takes too big a step towards making Picasso look like something out of Resnais' Night and Fog:

Meditations on Visual Style

    

 Usually visual styles are most self-evident when a film incorporates numerous of them, like in the Hollywood flicker Traffic, where each of the storylines has their style: yellowish and grainy for the Mexican portion (with Tomas Milian!), bluish and bleak for the Michael Douglas drug czar portion and so on. The most interesting moments are when the stories overlap and the characters tresspass on each others' territory; Catherina Zeta-Jones for example appears in a visual style that's unlike her own segment.

The presence of this kind of visual profiling is highly felt in TV series like CSI: Miami and CSI: New York, where both cities are given a visual style that tries to characterize the place. One crossover episode took place in both cities, where the contrast between the orange-saturated sunny Miami and the bleak, bluish NY became pretty apparant even to visual illiterates.

One of the cliches of visual styles, in Hollywood productions especially, seems to be the high and mighty Bleach Bypass.

Muted colors. High contrast. Don'tcha just love it... mothafucka.

The origin of bleach bypass is John Huston's movie adaptation of Moby Dick from 1956. The film-makers wanted to create a pastel-like faded color scheme to suggest the days past, and accomplished the feat by using a film developing process that could be summed up saying that both monochromatic and color versions of the image were fused together, with some added silver to spice things up. A very similar technical process would be at the heart of creating bleach bypass in the years to come - but in today's world of digital cinema, the question is more about plug-ins and pressing the right buttons than about lab chemicals.

The First Official Bleach Bypass Movie was a product from that finest species of numerous new waves, the one from Japan. The film in question was Kon Ichikawa's drama Her Brother from 1960; the results were much subtler than subsequent products utilizing this visual look.

One of the most outstanding examples of the process came in the 1980's with the Orwell adaptation 1984 made in... well, you know when - and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (Offret), wonderfully lensed by Sven Nykvist. The streak continued in  the 1990's - Spielberg's Saving Ryan's Privates deserves a mention. Slowly bleach bypass began to resemble a cliche in this decade... especially in the arena of still photography used in movie poster art.

But(t), can a visual style gain an importance to itself that seems unjustified? A case in point is the animated feature Metropia from 2009 - an entire film that's been made around its visual style. In the film what makes the visual style unique goes beyond mere color palette or grain structure, and arrives at the very shapes and appearances of things. Here you get a unique sensation that you're watching something that hangs in some weird middle ground between live-action and animation.

Even though this visual approach is very titillating, it's just ain't enough, buddy. It might be for a short flick - if that. The only item worth of interest content-wise is a dystopian, but oddly compelling depiction of a future Europe, where nation state borders have been more or less dissolved. The whole plot is forgettable claptrap, and the unusual appearence of the movie seems to have nil to do with the actual events, themes, the story and characters. Just watching the imagery itself has its dreadful pleasures, alas, not enough to sustain anything over thirty minutes.

Perhaps an example of something that has fared a little better in this ballpark is Richard Linklater's Dick Film A Scanner Darkly - the rotoscoped imagery at least takes some steps into being in union with the themes of alienation and the unreliable nature of reality that the story features.

Now, two brief examples of visual style glory in conclusion:

Carl Theodor Dreyer's excellent Vampyr (1932) features a shoddy, greyish, low-contrast monochromatic look, which is augmented brilliantly by the muddy soundtrack. The visual look was famously conceived when during the making of test footage, some light accidentally leaked on the undeveloped film, which gave unusual visual sensations - the actual execution of that look in principal photography was created through gauzes being used as filters.Watching Vampyr gives the sensation (unique for a 1930's film) like you're in fact viewing a film made in this day, which in some Guy Maddin-ish way seeks to mimic old cinema, but retains a vague modern undertone.

And on other hand, there's E. Elias Merkhige's 1989 arthouse horror Begotten. The movie's furiously dull, and a definite lackluster. The soundtrack is lame and fails to ignite the visuals, which do have potential in their unusual appearance, which strives to present only black and white tones in extreme contrast. Back in pre-digital days the creation of this look took hundreds of grueling hours worth of post-production work, while today it would take just a press o' a button. Begotten is the kind of movie that, if you view stills from and read a synopsis of it, it strikes as potentially tremendous, but the actual watching of it is a cruuuuuuel awakening. Merkhige later was hired as the director of the nosferatu movie Shadow of the Vampire in an interesting Eraserhead-David-Lynch-hired-to-direct-Elephant-Man sort of way.

That's it for this subject... for now... (insert ominous music)

Style: all that is not technique.
Robert Bresson in Notes on the Cinematographer