There is a para­dox in the genre we call hor­ror. Its main engine has remained con­stant for millennia—primal fears of death (and after­life), and relat­ed­ly inescapable phe­nom­e­na like birth, aging, and sick­ness. At the same time, hor­ror is always con­tem­po­rary, reflect­ing “society’s col­lec­tive anx­i­eties through­out the decades,” writes Lau­ren McGrail at the Lights Film School blog.

We can see this in hor­ror movies, divid­ing them by decade accord­ing to their most press­ing con­cerns. 1920s Ger­man expres­sion­ism recoiled from the grow­ing threat of fas­cism. The 1930s and 40s cre­at­ed a cult of per­son­al­i­ty around death­less hor­ror icons.

“In the 1950s,” McGrail writes, “the fear of inva­sion and atom­ic war fueled films in which the effects of radi­a­tion cre­at­ed larg­er-than-life mon­sters.” The 60s saw devian­cy every­where, espe­cial­ly among the sup­pos­ed­ly nor­mal.

“In the 1970s, Hol­ly­wood looked inward, invent­ing threats that sprung from with­in,” some­times quite lit­er­al­ly. The ‘80s dealt in pan­ic over satanism, teenage promis­cu­ity, and child­hood abuse. The ‘90s gave us charm­ing socio­path­ic killers, hor­ror par­o­dies, (and bees). “More recent­ly, an uptick in pres­ti­gious ‘ele­vat­ed hor­ror’ films is tack­ling mod­ern social issues head-on.” Get Out uses dis­ori­ent­ing shocks and scares for a heady exam­i­na­tion of racism. Mid­som­mer rep­re­sents the fear of iso­la­tion­ist, homo­ge­neous com­mu­ni­ties (eth­nos­tate hor­ror, if you will).

Kanopy, the free film stream­ing ser­vice, has made its hor­ror film cat­a­logue avail­able online, allow­ing us to test this the­o­ry by watch­ing clas­sic movies from near­ly every decade of cin­e­ma his­to­ry. They’ve includ­ed a gen­er­ous por­tion of recent high­ly acclaimed hor­ror films, like Ari Aster’s Hered­i­tary, Robert Eggers’ The Witch, and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. There are clas­sic sub­genre-defin­ing films like George Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead and Robert Wiene’s Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari.

Even the old­est of hor­ror movie tropes get updat­ed every few years to illus­trate con­tem­po­rary social con­flicts. Franken­stein and his mon­ster, Drac­u­la: such 19th cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary char­ac­ters came to life on cel­lu­loid again and again in the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, when Hol­ly­wood hor­ror was still fig­ur­ing itself out. These oft-campy char­ac­ters aren’t well-rep­re­sent­ed in the Kanopy col­lec­tion. But there are off­beat psy­cho­log­i­cal thrillers like Denis Villeneuve’s Ene­my, crime thrillers about real mon­sters like David Fincher’s Zodi­ac, and hor­ror come­dies like Kevin Smith’s Tusk.

The hor­ror film arrived before the 19th cen­tu­ry end­ed, with Georges Méliès’ 1896 The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, a visu­al effects feast for 1890s film­go­ers’ eyes. Its imagery now calls to mind a sea­son­al can­dy aisle—bats, witch­es, dev­ils, skele­tons, and a bub­bling caul­dron. Fall is a com­mer­cial bonan­za for fun-sized can­dy bars and scary movies. Like phar­ma­cies stock­ing giant bags of can­dy come sum­mer’s end, no major stu­dio should find itself with­out a hor­ror release—or re-release—this time of year.

Halloween—the harvest-festival-turned-quasi-Christian/occult-ceremony-turned-major-shopping-season—may do as much to keep hor­ror alive in pop­u­lar cul­ture as Christ­mas does for films about fam­i­ly dys­func­tion. Whether they’re dig­ging up the corpses of ancient evils or invent­ing new metaphors for old-fash­ioned fears, hor­ror films give Hal­loween its best cos­tume ideas, and the best rea­son to gath­er up friends and fam­i­ly and get scared out of your wits togeth­er (ide­al­ly).

Should you be host­ing such a gath­er­ing, or look­ing to freak your­self out, you’ll find con­tem­po­rary hor­ror aplen­ty free to stream at Kanopy. All you’ll need is your local library card. (To check and see whether your library–or university–is among Kanopy­’s part­ners, just type it into the search win­dow on this page.) “We stream thought­ful enter­tain­ment to your pre­ferred device with no fees and no com­mer­cials by part­ner­ing with pub­lic libraries and uni­ver­si­ties,” says Kanopy­’s about page, explain­ing that you need only “log in with your library mem­ber­ship and enjoy our diverse cat­a­log with new titles added every month.” A very small price to pay indeed for such high-qual­i­ty con­tent. Enter Kanopy’s hor­ror col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

What Makes a Good Hor­ror Movie? The Answer Revealed with a Jour­ney Through Clas­sic Hor­ror Films Clips

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: Full of Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

If after watch­ing Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, you imme­di­ate­ly want more 2001: A Space Odyssey, then you are a true fan—especially if you don’t con­sid­er the sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Con­tact, to be any­thing of the kind, Arthur C. Clarke’s impri­matur notwith­stand­ing.

But how will true fans react to the three-and-a-half minute, “epi­logue” to Kubrick­’s film, above, set 203 years after 2001 and fol­low­ing astro­naut Frank Poole’s body as it tra­vers­es Jupiter’s space and encoun­ters a mono­lith?

Poole (played by Gary Lock­wood), you’ll remem­ber, was killed by the HAL 9000 com­put­er when he became an incon­ve­nience to the AI. In 3001, the final book of Clarke’s tril­o­gy, his body is found, pre­served, 1000 years lat­er and brought to life. Here, things turn out a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. No fan of Kubrick’s film will care much about the depar­ture from canon.

But what about the cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage? Is the epilogue’s cre­ator, Steve Begg, a pro­fes­sion­al visu­al effects artist, able to con­vinc­ing­ly mim­ic the master’s touch? I’d say he comes as close as any­one could, though the final shot does not feel par­tic­u­lar­ly Kubrick­ian to me. This labor of love was also a labor of cin­e­mat­ic art, “using prac­ti­cal mod­els and dig­i­tal ver­sions of the tricks used in the orig­i­nal,” as Begg writes on the project’s Vimeo page.

He offers his imag­i­na­tive adden­dum “with respect to Stan­ley K., Wal­ly Veev­ers and Doug Trum­bull” (the prac­ti­cal visu­al effects mas­ter­minds of the orig­i­nal film). Begg also admits to “ignor­ing 2010 and 3001 sor­ry, A.C. Clarke.” You’ll rec­og­nize the music as that of Richard Strauss and Gyor­gi Ligeti from Kubrick’s orig­i­nal score. The musi­cal cues, silences, abrupt edits and shifts in per­spec­tive, rhythm, and tem­po, and the ambi­tious grandeur all ring true.

If you don’t con­sid­er it a sac­ri­lege (and if so, fair enough), you might see Begg’s epi­logue as a work of art all its own, one that impres­sive­ly res­ur­rects the chilly epic feel of the 1968 clas­sic using dig­i­tal tools from fifty years lat­er.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick Explains the Mys­te­ri­ous End­ing of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a New­ly Unearthed Inter­view

Watch the Open­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Orig­i­nal, Unused Score

Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Edit­ed Ver­sion of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

“Kipling is in the pecu­liar posi­tion of hav­ing been a byword for fifty years,” writes George Orwell in a 1942 essay on the author of The Jun­gle Book and “Man­dalay.” “Dur­ing five lit­er­ary gen­er­a­tions every enlight­ened per­son has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlight­ened per­sons are for­got­ten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” A sim­i­lar truth holds for Fight Club, David Fincher’s film adap­ta­tion of the Chuck Palah­niuk nov­el, which over the past twen­ty years to the day since its wide release has out­last­ed all the seri­ous, intel­li­gent, and indeed enlight­ened cri­tiques mount­ed against it. Fight Club has long been a byword, if not since its finan­cial­ly dis­ap­point­ing run in the the­aters, then at least since its deluxe DVD release. But what does that byword sig­ni­fy?

For many, it sig­ni­fies the tastes and atti­tudes of a cer­tain kind of twen­tysome­thing male — and giv­en the unabat­ed preva­lence of Fight Club posters in fresh­man dorm rooms and fra­ter­ni­ty hous­es, hard­ly with­out cause. At first glance, its sub­ject mat­ter also looks geared straight toward angry young men, telling as it does of a white-col­lar cor­po­rate drone who breaks out of his office dystopia by get­ting togeth­er with sim­i­lar­ly alien­at­ed late-20th-cen­tu­ry men and beat­ing one anoth­er sense­less. Before long, these “fight clubs” cohere into a nation­wide ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion bent on destroy­ing con­sumer soci­ety. For some view­ers, the movie would seem to have it all: vio­lence, of course, but also sex, spe­cial effects, and satire aplen­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly at the icons of so-called “late cap­i­tal­ism.” (Leg­end has it that Finch­er worked a Star­bucks cup into near­ly every scene.)

Oth­er view­ers argue — mak­ing what Orwell, writ­ing on Kipling, calls a “shal­low and famil­iar charge” — that Fight Club is “fas­cist.” They see it as glo­ri­fy­ing the act of rais­ing a shaven-head­ed, black-clad, repet­i­tive­ly chant­i­ng army under a charis­mat­ic leader, in this case a Niet­zschean Über­men­sch by the name of Tyler Dur­den. Por­trayed by Brad Pitt in per­haps the most mem­o­rable role of his career, Dur­den emerges from the mind of Fight Club’s name­less nar­ra­tor (an increas­ing­ly pale and wast­ed Edward Nor­ton) in order to set him on his jour­ney. “He’s tried to do every­thing he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becom­ing the thing he isn’t,” Finch­er has said of that nar­ra­tor’s jour­ney. “He can­not find hap­pi­ness, so he trav­els on a path to enlight­en­ment in which he must ‘kill’ his par­ents, god, and teacher.”

The nar­ra­tor cre­ates Tyler, his teacher, and “kills his god by doing things they are not sup­posed to do. To com­plete the process of matur­ing, the nar­ra­tor has to kill his teacher.” Writ­ing at philo­soph­i­cal sub­red­dit The Motte, Red­di­tor Dormn111 sums up Tyler’s world­view as fol­lows: “Men are suf­fer­ing today because they are inher­ent­ly unsuit­ed for the social demands of moder­ni­ty.” Evolved to be “vio­lent, aggres­sive, and dri­ven by their very real bio­log­i­cal urges,” men are now “told that these aspects of them­selves are bar­bar­ic, evil, and wor­thy of con­dem­na­tion.” There is no place in Fran­cis Fukuya­ma’s post-strug­gle “end of his­to­ry” for “the gut-lev­el desires that men feel in their bones. There is no vic­to­ry, no pow­er, no dom­i­nance. Every­thing the man is sup­posed to do builds towards some sort of high­er sta­tus, but the gains are illu­so­ry.”

Par­tic­i­pa­tion in a fight club is “an act of self-destruc­tion to counter the soci­etal obses­sion with self-improve­ment,” since it “makes men ugly, injured, tired, late for work, and shifts their pri­or­i­ties from the fem­i­nine social hier­ar­chy tread­mill to a nar­cot­ic-like rush of mas­cu­line grat­i­fi­ca­tion.” It gives them “a real sense of stakes in their lives, like the sort that mor­tal com­bat would have giv­en them in the past.” In the words of the Wise­crack video on the phi­los­o­phy of Fight Club at the top of the post, which draws on thinkers like Jacques Der­ri­da, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, these men rebel against a sys­tem that “favors effi­cien­cy over tra­di­tion, cus­tom, or indi­vid­ual desires” and pro­duces stul­ti­fy­ing lives in which is every­thing is “designed for a spe­cif­ic pur­pose, mass-pro­duced and unre­lent­ing­ly pre­dictable.”

The same cre­ators break down the act of inter­pre­ta­tion, using the tools of semi­otics and prag­ma­tism, in their video on the mean­ing of Fight Club and why we still can’t agree on it. Fans and detrac­tors alike come to espe­cial­ly dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about the film’s end­ing in which the nar­ra­tor kills his teacher, a scene The Take attempts to explain in its own video essay. And despite being idea-dri­ven, Fight Club also offers one of the more vis­cer­al view­ing expe­ri­ences (and for some, an entire­ly too-vis­cer­al view­ing expe­ri­ence) in all of cin­e­ma, thanks not only to visu­als that strug­gle against con­tain­ment by the very medi­um of film, but also to the work of foley artists revealed in Film Radar’s video on the movie’s sound design — the crafts­men tasked with mak­ing the impact of a punch sound, unlike in most Hol­ly­wood pic­tures, as if it actu­al­ly hurts.

Fight Club con­tin­ues to make an impact of its own, as exam­ined in the Fan­dor video just above. It names among the film’s lovers Quentin Taran­ti­no and among its haters Paul Thomas Ander­son, so whichev­er side you take on it, you’ll share an opin­ion with one of the most respect­ed film­mak­ers alive today. But then, Fincher’s own auteur sta­tus should give pause to any­one who dis­miss­es Fight Club out of hand. As the rel­e­vant chap­ter of Cameron Beyl’s Direc­tors Series video essay tells it, mak­ing the movie was itself an act of rebel­lion against “the sys­tem,” specif­i­cal­ly the stu­dio sys­tem, and even more specif­i­cal­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Fox, the stu­dio that ruined his fea­ture debut Alien 3 with its inter­fer­ence. After Finch­er bounced back with hits Sev­en and The Game, Fox want­ed him back to direct an adap­ta­tion of Palah­niuk’s nov­el. Despite describ­ing him­self as a“non-reader,” Finch­er devoured the book, which shared some of his own pet themes, includ­ing nihilism and anti-com­mer­cial­ism.

Fox, see­ing the ben­e­fit in smooth­ing out their rela­tion­ship with a film­mak­er who showed signs of becom­ing a box office-friend­ly Alfred Hitch­cock crossed with Stan­ley Kubrick, allowed Finch­er a near-carte blanche, cre­ative­ly speak­ing. “Once Finch­er knew how to play his med­dle­some exec­u­tives to his ben­e­fit,” Beyl says, “he became tru­ly unstop­pable.” Finch­er and his col­lab­o­ra­tors, most notably screen­writer Jim Uhls, did­n’t make the kind of rad­i­cal changes to Palah­niuk’s nov­el that film adap­ta­tions usu­al­ly do to their source mate­r­i­al. The Cine­Fix video below goes point-by-point through all the dif­fer­ences between book and film, many of which have to to with the char­ac­ter of Tyler Dur­den: the book presents him as more of a psy­chot­ic killer, while the film presents him as a kind of an ide­al­ist: down-and-dirty yet high-mind­ed.

But does it also make him too hand­some, too cool, too quotable? No exam­i­na­tion of Fight Club, no mat­ter how close, con­clu­sive­ly deter­mines the film’s own posi­tion on Tyler or any oth­er char­ac­ter, let alone its judg­ment of broad eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, and ide­o­log­i­cal con­cepts like cap­i­tal­ism and fas­cism (put on screen, in one of the film’s many ironies, by a for­mer com­mer­cial direc­tor and a Hol­ly­wood heart­throb). “I love this idea that you can have fas­cism with­out offer­ing any direc­tion or solu­tion,” Finch­er once said. Fas­cism insists on going in one par­tic­u­lar direc­tion, “but this movie could­n’t be fur­ther from offer­ing any kind of solu­tion.” Fight Club endures because it resists straight­for­ward inter­pre­ta­tion, ensur­ing that dis­agree­ments about it will nev­er be set­tled. And indeed, now that its themes hap­pen to dove­tail with so many of today’s vogue terms — “patri­archy,” “bro cul­ture,” “tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty” — the argu­ments have grown more heat­ed than ever. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New, 3.5 Hour Series of Video Essays Explains

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopi­an Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, Amer­i­can Beau­ty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Com­mon

Watch Author Chuck Palah­niuk Read Fight Club 4 Kids

The Truth Behind Jane Austen’s Fight Club: Female Prize Fights Were a Thing Dur­ing the 18th Cen­tu­ry

How Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Illu­mi­nates the Cen­tral Prob­lem of Moder­ni­ty

Wes Anderson’s Break­through Film, Rush­more, Revis­it­ed in Five Video Essays: It Came Out 20 Years Ago Today

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Could there be a greater act of cin­e­mat­ic sac­ri­lege than col­oriz­ing Cit­i­zen Kane? For most of the past 78 years since its pre­miere, Orson Welles’ debut fea­ture has been wide­ly con­sid­ered the great­est motion pic­ture ever made: wit­ness, for instance, its dom­i­na­tion of Sight & Sound mag­a­zine’s crit­ics poll from 1962 until its slip to sec­ond place under Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go in 2012. Artis­ti­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive in ways that still influ­ence movies today, it would seem that Cit­i­zen Kane requires no help from sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions. But that did­n’t stop Ted Turn­er, the media mogul whose pre­vi­ous col­oriza­tions of Casablan­ca, King Kong, and The Philadel­phia Sto­ry had already dis­heart­ened not just lovers of clas­sic Hol­ly­wood films but those films’ sur­viv­ing mak­ers as well.

“Turn­er Enter­tain­ment Com­pa­ny, which had obtained the home video rights to Cit­i­zen Kane in 1986, announced with much fan­fare on Jan­u­ary 29, 1989 its plans to col­orize Welles’ first Hol­ly­wood movie,” writes Ray Kel­ly at Wellesnet. “There was an imme­di­ate back­lash with the Welles estate and Direc­tors Guild of Amer­i­ca threat­en­ing legal action.”

Welles him­self had died in 1985, but the film­mak­er Hen­ry Jaglom quot­ed the direc­tor of Cit­i­zen Kane as impor­tun­ing him not to “let Ted Turn­er deface my movie with his crayons.” Ulti­mate­ly Turn­er’s crayons were indeed stayed, but for legal rea­sons: a review of Welles’ ini­tial con­tract with RKO “revealed he had been giv­en absolute artis­tic con­trol over his first Hol­ly­wood film, which it spec­i­fied would be a black-and-white pic­ture” — an odd spec­i­fi­ca­tion to declare back in 1940, but declared nonethe­less.

Before that dis­cov­ery, “a team at Col­or Sys­tems Tech­nol­o­gy Inc. in Mari­na del Rey, Cal­i­for­nia” had already “secret­ly col­orized a por­tion of Orson Welles’ land­mark black and white film”: its final ten min­utes, Rose­bud and all. The only known sur­viv­ing footage of this project — which took Cit­i­zen Kane and not just col­orized it but also, of course, reduced it to the res­o­lu­tion and aspect ratio of 1980s tele­vi­sion — is includ­ed in the BBC Are­na doc­u­men­tary The Com­plete Cit­i­zen Kane, the rel­e­vant clip of which appears at the top of the post. Kel­ly quotes William Scha­ef­fer, assis­tant art direc­tor at CST at the time, as remem­ber­ing the results fond­ly: “I thought it looked fine.” Then again, Scha­ef­fer had nev­er actu­al­ly seen the real Cit­i­zen Kane — and as for the rest of us, we per­haps breathe a lit­tle eas­i­er know­ing that Ver­ti­go is already in col­or.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Jorge Luis Borges Reviews Cit­i­zen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles

Don­ald Decon­structs Cit­i­zen Kane

Watch the New Trail­er for Orson Welles’ Lost Film, The Oth­er Side of the Wind: A Glimpse of Footage from the Final­ly Com­plet­ed Film

Metrop­o­lis Remixed: Fritz Lang’s Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Sci-Fi Clas­sic Gets Ful­ly Col­orized and Dubbed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When Quentin Taran­ti­no debuted in 1992 with Reser­voir Dogs, and even more so when he fol­lowed it up with the cin­e­mat­ic phe­nom­e­non that was Pulp Fic­tion, the view­ers most dubi­ous about the young auteur’s cul­tur­al stay­ing pow­er dis­missed his movies as ele­va­tions of style over sub­stance. Whether or not Taran­ti­no has con­vert­ed all his ear­ly crit­ics over the past 27 years, he’s cer­tain­ly demon­strat­ed that style can con­sti­tute a sub­stance of its own.

Even many who did­n’t care for his lat­est pic­ture, this year’s Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, nev­er­the­less expressed grat­i­tude at the release of a lav­ish, large-scale film packed full of ideas, ref­er­ences, set pieces, and jokes — an increas­ing­ly rare achieve­ment, or even aspi­ra­tion, among non-Taran­ti­no film­mak­ers. How does he do it? The Direc­tor’s Chair pro­file video above, and the accom­pa­ny­ing Stu­dio Binder essay by Matt Vasil­i­auskas, iden­ti­fies the essen­tial ele­ments that con­sti­tute the Taran­tin­ian style and Taran­tin­ian sub­stance.

In the video Taran­ti­no dis­cuss­es his process: “I was put on Earth to face the blank page,” to bring forth ideas from with­in and place them in new genre con­texts, to write one line of dia­logue after anoth­er and feel the sur­prise as the script takes turns unex­pect­ed even to him. Every­thing, from con­ver­sa­tions to action scenes to expan­sive wide shots, plays out in his head before he shoots the first frame: “Before I make the movie, I watch the movie.” And like all auteurs, he makes the movie he wants to see: “I don’t think the audi­ence is this dumb per­son low­er than me,” he has said. “I am the audi­ence.”

A film­mak­er look­ing to fol­low Taran­ti­no’s exam­ple must do the fol­low­ing: “Keep it per­son­al,” using expe­ri­ences they’ve actu­al­ly had or emo­tions they’ve actu­al­ly felt, even if they present them fil­tered through “crazy genre world.” “Struc­ture like a nov­el,” with the will­ing­ness to break free of chrono­log­i­cal order. “Think like an actor,” since you’ll have to work long and hard with them. Shoot “Hong Kong action sequences,” two or three moves at a time, so that you can organ­i­cal­ly change and incor­po­rate what hap­pens along the way. “Keep music in mind,” whether that means exist­ing songs that evoke cer­tain times, places, and moods, or orig­i­nal scores like that which Taran­ti­no com­mis­sioned for The Hate­ful Eight from Ennio Mor­ri­cone.

Mor­ri­cone is best known for his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Taran­ti­no’s hero Ser­gio Leone, and like Leone and “all direc­tors work­ing at the top of their game,” writes Vasil­i­auskas, Taran­ti­no “uses the cam­era as his most pow­er­ful sto­ry­telling imple­ment,” espe­cial­ly when shoot­ing wide. “Whether it’s the Bride bat­tling the Crazy 88 gang in Kill Bill or Djan­go sur­vey­ing a burned-out home, Taran­ti­no under­stands the pow­er of the wide-shot to not only cre­ate ten­sion, but to uti­lize the envi­ron­ment in reveal­ing the desires of his char­ac­ters.” But he also gets seri­ous aes­thet­ic and emo­tion­al mileage out of extreme close-ups, crash zooms, and point-of-view shots from inside the trunk of a car (or peri­od equiv­a­lents there­of).

Above all, this for­mer Man­hat­tan Beach video-store clerk “absorbs movies,” and has by his own admis­sion stolen from more films than most of us will watch in our lives. But none of this makes pre­dictable what Taran­ti­no will draw from his real-life and film­go­ing expe­ri­ences and put on the screen next: “I should throw them for a loop,” he says in an inter­view clip includ­ed in the video. He means his audi­ence, of course, but before he can throw us for a loop, he has to do it to him­self. And what­ev­er thrills and sur­pris­es Taran­ti­no will, as we’ve seen over the course of ten fea­ture films so far, thrill and sur­prise us even more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Steals from Oth­er Movies: A Video Essay

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Cre­ates Sus­pense in His Favorite Scene, the Ten­sion-Filled Open­ing Moments of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds

The Films of Quentin Taran­ti­no: Watch Video Essays on Pulp Fic­tion, Reser­voir Dogs, Kill Bill & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.