Thechatter The horror of the unseen

No review of the horror film Friend Request appeared in the National Post. No review of the new remake of the ’90s horror film Flatliners could be found either – just as, earlier in the year, no reviews of The Bye-Bye Man, Wish Upon or Phoenix Forgotten were written.

It isn’t that our assigning editors have anything against horror movies. Nor have our critics come to anticipate efforts in the genre with such dread that they can’t even be bothered to take a look. The fact is I would have been happy to write about any of the pictures mentioned above, if for no other reason than that horror tends to be a lot of fun to write about. But I was denied the opportunity. These and many other films simply didn’t screen.

It is well-known that studios and distributors, as a courtesy to the critics who offer them notice, will orchestrate screenings of their upcoming movies some time in advance of their scheduled release, or else furnish critics with watermarked DVDs or private links to stream these movies online. And it is equally understood that when studios and distributors refuse to extend critics this courtesy – when an email is sent out apologizing that such-and-such a film “will not be screened in advance” – the culprit is usually fear. You’ll only keep critics away from your movie if you can safely presume they’ll crucify it. That a movie isn’t screening for critics, therefore, is never a promising sign.

How bad could Friend Request be, really? Compared to Annabelle Creation or Rings, I mean – to take a pair of undistinguished horror mediocrities I was privileged to review this year. Moreover, what effect could a deluge of vociferous broadsheet censure possibly have on Friend Request’s weekend grosses? Of course all critics like to suppose their judgement holds influence over a film’s prospective audience, and I would be pleased if an eloquent stream of vituperation in Friday’s print publication actually kept my readers away from a lemon in droves. But somehow I doubt whether anyone inclined to see Friend Request in cinemas could be persuaded by my opinion to do anything else. Perhaps refusing to screen a bad movie for critics will briefly delay the appearance of a perilously low Rotten Tomatoes score. Or perhaps it will hasten a film’s disappearance from the popular imagination: the studio knows it’s made an error and would like it in and out of theatres as quietly as possible, with no volumes of excoriation on record to haunt them. They may be onto something. Anyone resolved to enjoy Friend Request will do so either way, and once it earns its modest sum it will promptly vanish and be forgotten. And meanwhile, these pages, in common with the pages of every paper in the world, will carry no trace of it ever having been here – which means no record of how bad it was.

Within days of the release of Rihanna’s new makeup line, Fenty Beauty, countless retailers sold out of the darkest shades available. With over 90 products released in 17 countries at 1,600 stores, including 40 shades for just about every skin tone and a single gloss designed to work for all, Fenty Beauty (in partnership with beauty developer Kendo) quickly established itself as one of the few beauty brands not geared toward an exclusive audience.

Speaking to Refinery29 at the launch, Rihanna said, “I wanted things that I love. Then I also wanted things that girls of all skin tones could fall in love with. That was really important for me. In every product I was like: ‘There needs to be something for a dark-skinned girl; there needs to be something for a really pale girl; there needs to be something in-between.’ There’s red undertones, green undertones, blue undertones, pink undertones, yellow undertones – you never know, so you want people to appreciate the product and not feel like: ‘Oh, that’s cute, but it only looks good on her.’”

While celebrities often say all the right things when it comes to their endorsements and involvement in commercial products, what’s so impressive about Rihanna and Fenty Beauty is that the talk has led to action. The marketing campaign for the beauty line prominently features women of colour, including Duckie Thot, Paloma Elsesser, Halima Aden and Nneoma Anosike.

In a moment of refreshing harmony, a week colour would be necessary. This way of thinking is perhaps best exemplified by something called the “Shirley cards.”

In the 1960s, a Kodak employee named Shirley (who might have been considered the “Becky” of the early days) posed for a set of colour reference cards, which became the standard for film and photography productions looking to set a colour for calibrating lighting and shadows. As a result, Shirley’s skin colour became the default skin tone. In 1977, Jean Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film while shooting in Mozambique because he felt it was a “racist” product. He explained that the film itself trained photographers to use lighter skin tones because setting a scene with darker tones often led to technological obstacles, like exposure issues or a lack of detail in facial features. Sadly, it wasn’t black or brown actors who paved the way to a new standard. It took wooden furniture and chocolate for a spectrum of skin tone to be introduced in film. By the 1970s, furniture retailers and chocolate makers felt Kodak wasn’t accurately capturing the nuance in the colour of their products, making it difficult for customers to differentiate oak from mahogany, or milk chocolate from dark chocolate. It wasn’t until 1995 that Kodak introduced a multi-racial skin colour reference card that included a white woman, an Asian woman and an African woman. Of course, it takes more than just a colour reference card to understand