{"id":8500,"date":"2020-07-17T16:12:56","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T20:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=8500"},"modified":"2020-07-17T16:12:58","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T20:12:58","slug":"review-skyman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=8500","title":{"rendered":"Review: SKYMAN"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Twenty years ago, possibly influenced by Rob Reiner\u2019s landmark \u201cThis is Spinal Tap,\u201d co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo S\u00e1nchez answered the question: what if we made a mockumentary horror film?

Relying on something dubbed \u201cfound footage,\u201d \u201cBlair Witch\u201d gave birth to a shaky-cam, nauseating sub-genre. The horror film, made for just $60 thousand, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and became a box office phenomenon that pulled in an astounding $248 million worldwide.

Although a significant amount of craftsmanship went into making \u201cBlair Witch,\u201d it spawned a generation of wannabe filmmakers, who were inspired to grab their handi-cam and make their own damned movie. The host of cheap, often thoughtless, and gruesome imitators ushered in two decades of low or no budget cinema.

Few of these shaky efforts broke through as quality work, but studios minted money. The early highpoint was 2007\u2019s \u201cParanormal Activity.\u201d That film managed to do something unique with the genre by constraining location and utilizing a stationary prosumer video camera with creepy \u201cauthentic\u201d night vision images.

Director M. Night Shyamalan breathed new life into the decaying concept and his career with the cheapie (by his standards) \u201cThe Visit\u201d in 2015. Just as other well-known directors like George A. Romero (see 2007\u2019s \u201cDiary of the Dead\u201d) had done, Shyamalan built on the elements popularized by Myrick and S\u00e1nchez\u2014found footage filmmaking was now mainstream.

So, it\u2019s against that backdrop that writer\/director Myrick returns to the sub-genre to further explore its limits. And with \u201cSkyman,\u201d he gives us a little of what worked in \u201cBlair Witch\u201d but, thankfully, with a bit steadier hand on the camera.

Read the rest of Jonathan’s review online and in print in the Times-Herald: https:\/\/times-herald.com\/news\/2020\/07\/skyman-found-footage-filmmaking-revisited

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Found-footage filmmaking revisited<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1978,105,1246,104],"class_list":["post-8500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-found-footage","tag-horror","tag-mockumentary","tag-science-fiction","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8500"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8503,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8500\/revisions\/8503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}