10 Genius Movie Tricks You Totally Take For Granted
4. The Nightmarish Reversed Binbag - Brick
Unlike every other movie on this list, Rian Johnson's Brick wasn't blessed with a sizable budget to execute the full extent of its ambitions, and so armed with a mere $450,000, Johnson devised a brilliantly cheap way to create a surreal nightmare sequence.
The scene in question has protagonist Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) dream of his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) walking through a tunnel, before the shot is enveloped by a strange black mass, waking him up.
Johnson ultimately got super DIY with the shot, but unless you pause the scene and examine it with a fine tooth comb, it's easily missed. Johnson executed the scene by simply taping a binbag to the camera and trailing it into the tunnel.
He then had a crew member pull the binbag off and drag it into the tunnel, before reversing the footage in post to make it look like the binbag leaps up over the camera lens.
This also required Emilie de Ravin to walk backwards into the tunnel so that she'd appear to be walking forwards in reverse.
The only real giveaway of Johnson's method is that the water on the ground can be seen flowing in the wrong direction, but honestly, doesn't that just add to the unsettling quality of it all?
It's this sort of outside-the-box thinking which should've immediately confirmed that Johnson was destined for big things.