MovieChat Forums > Shadows and Fog (1992) Discussion > actually spooky

actually spooky

posted 17 years ago by rtcnz
3 replies | jump to latest

I actually found it a bit chilling, spooky, haunting. The empty town, the black and white, the "shadows and fog", the emptiness, occasionally stumbling across someone through the fog, that someone being a social outcast: whores, the strangler, that crying woman with the baby, the spooky doctor, a circus freak.

I'm really impressed with how Woody Allen made this film but most of all, it had me feeling quite uneasy. Even with the vintage Allen humour.

Anyone else have this reaction, or am I just a sissy

[–] moviebuff34 16 years ago

Clealry we are in the minority.

[–] midwifekathynew 16 years ago

I thought Hacker's strangling was particularly unsettling, myself

I guess the incredible acting had a lot to do with that.

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Fight the "everyday atrocities"!

[–] dwarol 16 years ago

It's probably just me, but the whole setting and style of the picture reminded me of the vigilante scenes in "Frankenstein" or even "Young Frankenstein" where the mob in the town is in search of the monster. It's kind of like Allen is showing us the backstories of the people who made up the mob in those pictures. In this view, the murderer himself is irrelevant. In fact, Allen's character ultimately takes on shades of Frankenstein's monster, which no character except Mia Farrow's ever bothers to understand or sympathize with.

I'm sure Allen had other things to say in this picture. But for me, the whole "Frankenstein" tone completely overwhelmed whatever else Allen had to say. And as I said in other posts, the picture as a whole just did not work for me, even though I greatly enjoyed the "spooky" style in which it was made.