Movie Lengths: A Treatise

Sometimes it feels like every feature-length movie should be a short.

I rarely see a movie that couldn't be more effectively conveyed in 10-20 minutes.

But I've been watching a lot of horror lately (thanks, Shudder!) so it could just be that the genre's cinematic tricks and tropes are starting to wear thin.

Hmm... nope. The problem really is that most movies are just feature-length because that's the most marketable motion picture format. People only produce shorts to prove their writing/visual chops.

Same thing with short stories. Box office poison, they are. Everyone just wants novels. There's pretty much no market for short stories. Used to be. (Used to be a market for short films, too. They played before or in-between movies screening in theaters up until the 1960s.)

Prime example: I liked Girl With All the Gifts (despite the WTF-for-WTF's-sake ending). But like every horror movie I see these days, the middle of the film terminally bogged. 45 minutes could have disappeared there and it wouldn't have changed the narrative one bit.

I remember hearing that (long before his other horrific deeds came to light) Harvey Weinstein was notorious for cutting his company's movies down mercilessly (even The Postman, Pulp Fiction, and big hits like that). Directors were mucho upset by that, as was I. 

But I totally get it now. There's a WHOLE LOTTA filler in movies that simply doesn't need to be there. And I've been watching a lot of stuff on Shudder lately that's filler-tastic (Solo, Blind Sun, Can't Take It Back, Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl, It Stains the Sand Red, Last Girl Standing, Sam Was Here,  shows like Jordskott Beyond These Walls, Black Lake, etc.).

That's another reason I really like the horror shorts on Shudder. Like The Puppet Man. Now that thing had no plot, just flashy Argento-ish lighting. But at 10 minutes, it didn't overstay it welcome. I would have hated it if they stretched that non-premise to feature length, but they nailed it in 10 minutes. I never once checked my phone or started multitasking. That's a high compliment.

If only more horror productions held our attention spans in such high esteem!


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here. Probably some other places, too.