Haunted Castle, a Bad Film that Suggests New Modes for IMAX

As big-screen spectacles go, it's hard to beat IMAX. The medium's super-high-definition images, projected on giant screens, often in 3-D, are so physically awesome that they leave you no choice but to become involved?maybe not emotionally, but viscerally, the way you can't help responding to a hair-raising amusement park ride. But while the format has been around for a couple of decades now, it hasn't made the evolutionary leap that other movie formats have made. There are a lot of reasons why it's stalled; many of them are encapsulated in Haunted Castle, an IMAX movie that is improbably being sold as both a teenager-baiting horror spectacle and a First Amendment test case.

If you follow movie news, you might already know that Haunted Castle, a 40-minute 3-D horror flick from Belgian director Ben Stassen, just opened in IMAX theaters nationwide. It ostensibly has both a hero and a story: a rising young rock musician (Jasper Steverlinck) inherits a spooky castle from his dead rock-star mother (Kyoko Baertsoen) and discovers that the place is a gateway to hell where Faustian bargains between rock stars and Satan are hideously consummated. But despite an atmospheric, involving opening shot of the titular building, looming cliffside against a stormy stretch of shore, Haunted Castle disappoints. It plays out like a cross between a gothic horror comic book and one of those high-end, first-person, 3-D video games. You walk through the castle and things lunge at you: possessed suits of armor, weird spectral lights, demonic henchmen?even Old Nick himself, a toothy reptilian head with arachnid legs that hangs in a fireplace and chortles. Lest the comparison of IMAX movies to roller coasters be overlooked, Stassen actually puts you in a mine car and rolls you down into hell, where rockers who sold their soul to Satan are eternally tortured.

It sounds hardcore, but the violence is no worse than what you see while playing the apocalyptic sci-fi video game Quake for 10 minutes. The animation is slick, but the absence of real characters or dramatic situations makes the whole thing resemble a special-effects demo reel. So why did this glossy dreck become a minor cause celebre? Because the IMAX Corporation is trying to undermine its release. Some background: Though IMAX manufactures filmmaking devices and leases projection equipment to theaters that show IMAX movies, only 10 percent of IMAX theaters nationwide are owned outright by the company. The remaining 90 percent are theoretically free to show any IMAX-format movie they want?including independently funded horror flicks like Haunted Castle. In a classic case of playing right into an adversary's hands, IMAX has declared Haunted Castle's hellish imagery to be incompatible with the company's family entertainment mission. A fax sent last December to IMAX theater managers by IMAX president Mary Pat Ryan declared that Haunted Castle "could be degrading to our brand." It went on to suggest that managers either avoid booking the film or slap it with heavy-duty content warnings and show it only at night.

Director Stassen, who's also the cofounder of nWave Pictures, Haunted Castle's distributor, included the fax in the movie's press kit, along with a list of rhetorical questions: "Should a hardware manufacturer dictate what content is exhibited on their projection equipment? Is there room in the giant screen industry for films outside the standard nature and science documentaries? How is the audience's right to choose content affected when new content may be thwarted before the audience is allowed to cast its vote at the box office?" The short answers are "No," "Yes" and "Adversely." But Haunted Castle, by virtue of its unique position in IMAX history, raises another, potentially more important question. Namely, "Can the format be used to produce art?or at least a real movie?"

In the abstract, I'm in favor of more IMAX features like Haunted Castle. Most IMAX movies are travelogues, nature films or G-rated thrill rides. Occasionally you'll come across a title that doesn't exactly fit the profile, like the Rolling Stones IMAX concert film, or Across the Sea of Time, the bland New York time-travel fantasy that nevertheless made stunning use of black-and-white stereopticon images of New York at the dawn of the 20th century. But those films are exceptions that prove the rule. For the most part, IMAX seems to be stuck in the same stage of esthetic development that afflicts all new creative technologies. IMAX common wisdom suggests that filmmakers follow certain rules when making an IMAX movie. Because the image is so huge, you can't move the camera often, and when you do, it must be moved slowly, otherwise viewers get whiplash. You can't cut too much because viewers will feel assaulted. Because the IMAX phenomenon is built around families making day trips to multiplexes and museums, it's best to stick with safe subject matter, and tackle it in a way that's unlikely to confuse or upset the audience.

If these rules sound familiar, it may be because other filmmaking technologies embraced similar rules?until adventurous artists violated them. In the earliest days of cinema, the medium was built around the concept of attraction?offer the folks pictures of faraway places and impossible scenarios, and they'll flock from miles around. It took a good 20 years for filmmakers to figure out that it was okay to move the camera, feature actors in tight closeup and alter space, time and meaning via editing. When Cinemascope and other widescreen processes arrived in the 50s to combat the popularity of tv, directors were saddled with a similar set of Nervous Nellie rules: Don't move the camera too much. Don't get too close to the actors. Don't cut a lot. And for God's sake, don't do anything to provoke, challenge or confuse, because the viewers want to see spectacle, not art. Widescreen filmmakers, like the pioneering filmmakers 10 years before them, ended up breaking all those rules and then some, transforming a technical process?an attraction?into another artist's tool, and deepening cinema in the bargain. Other innovative technical formats?early 3-D, three-panel Cinerama?were denied similar evolutionary leaps because the industry wouldn't let them be thought of as anything but gimmicks.

To prevent IMAX from meeting a similar fate, its parent company must do more than get behind Haunted Castle (which, despite its fantasy violence, is conservative in every other way). IMAX will have to fund?or at the very least, encourage?films that break with the format's style-and-subject playbook. I'd love to see Brian De Palma or Oliver Stone make an IMAX movie, or the South Park guys, or John Carpenter, or Lars von Trier. Imagine The Limey in 3-D IMAX, or The Matrix, or Three Kings, or Breaking the Waves. Hell, imagine any movie that could be described as (a) stylistically interesting and (b) adult. For that matter, imagine IMAX porn. Whatever it is, let it run feature-length, let the editors go wild, let the writers devise real stories that let real directors direct and real actors act. Let the format become a medium. The response from audiences could be indifferent, or it could be so enthusiastic that it expands the audience for IMAX tenfold.

Longer, more challenging movies couldn't be shown as many times each day, and would necessarily have to exclude children, but I suspect the inevitable short-term revenue dip would be overshadowed by a boom in IMAX theater construction. The new theaters would serve a previously neglected sector of the moviegoing public: people who like real movies and want to see them on the biggest screen ever invented.