'the horror is in your mind'

You know, for every film like Repulsion or The Tenant (both Polanski) which totally nails that vibe, there's dozens of shitty films that use that as a way to avoid designing a cool monster or showing violence that might make the film genuinely grab the audience. I'm not a fan of gratiuitous violence, except in gun ballet form where it's OTT, but I think that showing is usually better than telling for movies, particularly like this NZ short film that I was just watching. - Right; it's called The Lascar and Fred Pokai was in it. 👋 Very classy; nice design, POW post doing sound so it was a rich soundscape, but there was this scene where one of the Indian men is lashed by the evil whitey, and all we see are some carefully constructed angles, meaning we never see the stick hit the flesh. Ok; one could say this was aimed at a broad audience, and hence that might have been too much, but then in the scene where he's recovering, we don't even see the lash marks on his back, as his back is hidden from the angle that they use. That's lame. My two cents: if they'd shown some gnarly makeup effects that made it look like his back had been lashed, then the believability would have been greatly increased. The whole film often felt like the blocking was too cautious and the music was generic bullcrap -- I think John's course has backfired and created a bunch of generic film scorers rather than anyone as unique as him or John Charles.