Talk:Something Evil

Summary section

Here is a line-by-line critique explaining why this section had to go---

"The movie was made to capitalize on the success of the novel The Exorcist, which had yet to be released as a movie."

No citation, no dice. Come up with a reliable source for it and it can go back in.

"Despite its common storyline, Bill Butler's unusual camera angles and Allan Jacobs' quick cuts give Something Evil its distinctive and disturbing results."

I just watched this film and the camera angles aren't so unusual. The editing exploits quick cuts in dramatic scenes no more successfully than thousands of other films. The contributor has had since march 2012 to provide a source. WP needs a rule on how long unsourced statements can be in an article without being substantiated. Two years is long enough. This crap gets parroted blindly all over the world and becomes defacto "fact", ie: unfounded, spurious urban myth.

"By never fully showing the "monster," a technique editor Verna Fields would employ to good effect in Spielberg's Jaws (and previously used by Spielberg in 1971's Duel and Ernest Walter in 1963's The Haunting), Jacobs' editing transformed what would otherwise have been an average made-for-TV movie script into a successfully chilling film."

What monster? There is not one image in the entire film depicting any kind of monster or devil. It's all implied evil by way of moving objects, artificial wind, acting, and music. So the film never fully shows the monster that is not in the film at all. What crap. And as I touched on in my edit summary, that technique is so fundamental to horror films anyway it became stock standard horror movie grammar from the beginning, back in the silent era, and for the next forty years monsters were almost never shown in any horror films. So citing examples such as The Haunting (1963) sounds like the contributor who wrote that doesn't know much about the subject of cinema.

". . .transformed what would otherwise have been an average made-for-TV movie script into a successfully chilling film."

That is pure, unfounded speculative opinion. Since we don't know what the film would have "otherwise" consisted of, how can anybody know the techniques employed made it a success?

The contention that Something Evil turned out to be "a successfully chilling film" is a matter of opinion. Citation request for a reliable, peer-reviewed source was added in March 2012. You've had your two years. That's enough guileless opinionated fluff for the time being. Now it's gone.

Please help make Wikipedia a repository of knowledge and help prevent it from being a crap-filled privy.---17:53, 10 February 2014 (UTC)