Tiago's brain dump

Filmmaking is a collective enterprise, and it has been so almost since its inception. As every new storytelling tool demands additional crew members to oversee it, and since the cinematic grammar never stops evolving, movie production has unfolded into an endeavor that nowadays comprises  thousands  of people. Even though, as a consequence, the responsibilities delegated to each role in such massive crews can become considerably fuzzy, it is still  widely accepted  that a movie as a whole is (and has always been) the result of the creative vision of its director above everyone else: swap the producer, replace the editor or have the script altered during filming, and the ensuing movie will arguably still be the same overall; change its director, however, and you risk having an artistically fragmented mess of an outcome. That is, unless the true auteur behind that film is not its director, but in fact its  producer , something that was quite com...

In this day and age, in a society so numb to violence, it is hard to imagine a time when people used to be scared by  Vincent Price  movies. Back then, it was commonplace for horror films to revolve around either the classic monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula and so on), or the fears of the  Atomic Era  (such as aliens, giant mutations resulting from radioactivity, and failed scientific experiments with catastrophic results). Although the  Hammer  films, with their graphic violence, were pushing the boundaries of what could be shown onscreen, the horror element itself was still quite detached from reality, be it in some Gothic castle in the past or in the laboratory of a crazy scientist in the near future. It was not until 1960, with  Michael Powell 's  Peeping Tom  and  Alfred Hitchcock 's  Psycho , that horror was brought to the real world, to the present-day society: far away from the literal monsters from before, embodying pure ...