Good and Evil on Holiday introduction

Good and Evil on Holiday

In 2013 I borrowed $4,500 from my life insurance and began shooting a feature-length video. The project was an intellectual inquiry, as opposed to the usual emotional journey highlighted in the abduction genre. The result was Holiday, a deconstruction of the abduction genre with a score by world famous percussionist, Bobbye Hall.  In 2017, Holiday won Best Feature awards at the Hollywood Film Competition, Los Angeles CineFest, and the Los Angeles Mindfield Film Festival, as well as Best Score at the Culver City Film Festival.  In 2018, the project was offered representation and released.¹

Holiday was an aesthetic experiment at three levels: form, content, and expression.  Formally, Holiday mimics and re-imagines the abduction thriller structure.   For example, instead of seducing the audience into complacency, Holiday pulls the audience into the story’s world, then repels them back to awareness of being an audience.  Also, the tension builds in long, eight to twelve minute sections, instead of the genre’s shorter two-minute dramatic blocks.  At the content level, the story gives equal time to both the abductor, as he imagines himself stalked by Death, and the abducted woman, concerned primarily with “how do I escape?”  Finally, on the level of expression, unlike most abduction thrillers, Holiday does not attempt to be a victim narrative.  These directorial choices will be disturbing for lovers of abduction narratives who will certainly find Holiday frustrating.  That’s fine.  The project was meant to be confrontational, not entertaining.

What follows are some of my thoughts on the project at the levels of form, content, and expression.  First, I consider the implications of the project’s material conditions and mode of production within a particular moment of cinematic history, then I discuss the story’s deconstructive turn of the abduction genre at the content level, and finally, at the level of expression, I elaborate on Holiday’s replacement of the genre’s standard Good versus Evil conflict engine with a multiplicity of conflicts.