Sound And Vision: Craig Gillespie
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we take a look at Kid Cudi's No One Believes Me, directed by Craig Gillespie.
The films of Craig Gillespie, whose new film Dumb Money recently released in cinemas, can be best described as pop art confections of class struggle. The idea of the haves and have nots battling it out has been ever present in his work, even if it presents as light and fluffy at first glance. Why did Tonya Harding in I, Tonya do what she did? What makes Cruella DeVille tick, if not for being one of the have nots, trying to make it big? The American Dream (or in the case of Cruella, the British Dream), is at the core of the works of Craig Gillespie, and it is indeed a rotten core. The American Dream ain't all that.
That is also the case for his remake of Tom Holland's Fright Night, in which the setting itself is emblematic of this recurrent theme. It is set in a Las Vegas suburb, that is just far enough removed from the glitzy center of the city, to count as a neighborhood on the way down. People are moving out: this place is only for sleeping and eating. Life is in the big city, a commute away. And in this figuratively sleepy city, a vampire can thrive. People are always suddenly gone, anyway.
The problem is that Gillespie never fulfills on the promise of the theme. The economic subtext is all but abandoned halfway through, and nothing much is done with the setting. There are other missed opportunities: for an ostensibly more adult update of the eighties classic it does pull its punches. The threat of the vampire is very PG-13, as the horror is both relatively bloodless and sexless. Except for one stand-out scene that doubles down on the voyeuristic qualities of the suburb horror, nothing much memorable happens.
Enter Kid Cudi, who is on the soundtrack of Fright Night with No One Believes Me. Craig Gillespie directed the music video too, and it is the stand-out type of tie-in video that outshines its cinematic counterpart. Where most songs made for movies get a music video that is not very memorable, even if it was made by the film director (think Goonies 'R' Good Enough, by Cindy Lauper, directed by Richard Donner himself), this one is great. It brings a peril to the front that is missing from the movie: even kids aren't safe here. They can be both victim and monster in this music video, a terrifying prospect that is missing from a lot of horror films, but especially from the Fright Night remake.
Next to that, all the blood and sex missing from the film proper is reinstated in a clever way in the music video. Especially the scene where Kid Cudi walks past a car where a woman is either having sex or being attacked is an inspired visual. Fright Night, the film, misses a lot of opportunities that the music video really cashes in on. The suburban sprawl is a much more impressive setting in the video, with a sense of style and dread, in beautiful long takes, that is not that present in the film itself. Where Fright Night seems to be directed in a workman-like way, this music video already has some of the pizazz that Gillespie brings to the table in things like I, Tonya and Cruella. That the music video lacks the internal logic of the film, letting a vampire enter a house even though he is uninvited, doesn't really matter: this is a great, haunting music video that outshines the film in every single way.
