What I Learned
. . . from Manos: Hands of Fate
As I once suspected, many of the world's greatest adventures start with a bet or a dare. Making a movie for $19,000 is one such adventure.
In most 1960s horror movies, it's always the black guy who gets it first. But in a pinch, a black poodle will do.
If you don't have a women's costume budget, the sleepwear department at Sears will suffice.
If you need filler material for your movie due to having forgotten to include something superfluous like, say, the opening credits, you can film up to ten whole minutes of just driving around in a car in the Rio Grande valley.
Why bother with sound, when you can simply dub in all the dialogue later? This works particularly well when one woman reads the part of the distressed heroine, the young girl, and eight cult wives, especially when there's no variation in the voice so that you get such lines as "The woman is all we want! The others must die! They ALL must die! We do not even want the woman!"
A great way to build suspense, if the dialogue and plot themselves aren't doing it, is by having the characters simply stand and stare at each other for literally minutes at a time before speaking.
Even if you're using a camera which can only capture 30 seconds of action at a time, if you're sufficiently nonchalant about it, people may instead refer to it as an artistic quick-cut editing style. . . . assuming there's anything else remotely artistic about your movie in the first place.
To give your horror masterpiece that one extra stab of intensity, nothing beats a surprise ending, and especially nothing beats a surprise ending like a post-credits stinger. When you're on a budget, this can even be accomplished with punctuation:
* * *
I: You just . . . did you just spit water all over me?
She: [still laughing] Actually, I think most of it came out my nose.
I: So you just blew water out your nose at me?
She: But it was funny! THE END . . . QUESTION MARK! As if they would even dare make a sequel to that!
THE END
?
* * *
I: You just . . . did you just spit water all over me?
She: [still laughing] Actually, I think most of it came out my nose.
I: So you just blew water out your nose at me?
She: But it was funny! THE END . . . QUESTION MARK! As if they would even dare make a sequel to that!