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Our Trippiest Issue Yet...
It goes like that sometimes. Another birthday crawls around. Wife gifts a killer 1970 Vagabond Printing black light poster. Next thing you know, I’m contemplating the use of black lights in cinema. Then I wondered why Daily Grindhouse hadn’t covered the topic before. This remedies that. Or tries to.
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Weird & Glowing: Blacklight In Cinema
Where does one start with such a broad topic? You narrow it down to the most substantial examples. My criteria: The black light pops the colors into a surreal, psychedelic scene. I’m not looking for small visual accents. I want full-flood color saturation. Like Wham! Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go level color pop.
SPRING BREAKERS - d. HARMONY KORINE
SPRING BREAKERS pops the colors. With the girls on the boat, walking the dock, sporting pink ski masks that look like they were made specifically to be lit by black light. Incredibly, Harmony Korine turns a natural location on the water (actually Shark Tank “Shark” Kevin Harrington’s Florida home) into a supernatural otherworld. continued…
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ENTER THE VOID – d. GASPAR NOE
Gaspar Noe’s ENTER THE VOID makes liberal use of black light in its pulsating club scene. It adds a layer of intensity and hallucination to the film’s benefit.
THE NEON DEMON – d. Nicolas Winding Refn
This movie is colormaxx deluxe. A feast for the eyes, worthy of its SUSPIRIA ’77 comparisons. Some of it is black light. Some neon and color LCD lighting. It’s an absolute buffet of color.
BELLY – d. Hype Williams
In one of the more visually memorable opening sequences of the late 1990s, “Buns” (played by DMX) and “Sin” (played by Nas) wipe out five enemies during a robbery at a nightclub. Murder was the case, but blacklight was the medium.
BATMAN FOREVER – d. Joel Schumacher
Oh yeahhhh. Not the best of the Batman movie bunch. But one of the best black light scenes mentioned here. Joel Schumacher goes full ‘90s Schumacher, art-directing this into an over-the-top day-glo gang fight between Robin and (g)low-life street thugs, the leader of whom is played by Don “The Dragon” Wilson.
Frankly, I thought there’d be a lot more movies with memorable black light scenes. Turns out I was wrong. There aren’t a ton. Although, I’m certain I missed several.
GPT pulled up a bunch of movies it thought had black light in it. But digging deeper, it became clear that dumb robot had no idea what it was talking about. No surprise.
Oh, well. What can you do?
An enterprising filmmaker has a huge opportunity to remedy this lack of black light in cinema.
Until next time, I’m gonna space out and look at the bitchin’ black light poster that sent us down this rabbit hole and marvel at Batman Forever flopping back onto my radar…
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