For years of being a horror fan, I’d been loosely aware of Jean Rollin and his whole vibe, but I had never ventured in to check it out. Happily, with this blog compelling me to follow my completionist urge to better know my genre of choice, a few years back, I finally took in my first of his films, The Shiver of the Vampires (1971), and I was immediately struck. Weird, artsy, bold, idiosyncratic, surreal, and clearly deeply personal and deeply felt, he was an auteur with a very specific individual imprint. Since that time, I’ve gone on to watch quite a few of his other works, at least from the first half of his career (later films, not having the budget, were shot on video, and I fear it didn’t well serve his aesthetic), many of which I’ve written about here (such as Grapes of Death, Living Dead Girl, and Requiem for a Vampire), and I must say, I’m a fan. I may not always be in the mood for what he has to offer (slow, dreamy, artful), but when I am, it can be a warm, hypnotic pleasure. That said, I think many of his films feel less like horror movies than avant-garde forays into the fantastique (this is certainly true for the film under consideration today), but there are sufficient horror markers (vampires, crumbling castles, blood and death and flesh) and well as rich, haunting atmosphere and an exploration of themes invested in the stuff of horror (need, loss, death, sex, decay, persistence, obsession, madness) to earn his oeuvre a place of honor on this here blog.
Sometimes I want the comforting glee of horny teenagers getting creatively picked off at a summer camp and sometimes I want a wistful exploration of doubted memories at the nexus of Eros-Thanatos life-death drives.
And that’s just what we’ve got today! As always, spoilers abound, but while there is actually, believe it or not, a coherent story here, this film, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is not focused primarily on narrative, so it really doesn’t matter. Read on, and then maybe go seek out the singular, beautiful, iconic work that is:
Lips of Blood (1975)
To write about this, I watched the film twice, separated by about two weeks, and I find it interesting that I had quite a different read the second time through. After my first viewing, in my notes, I jotted down, “Dreamy, gorgeous, barely narrative, evocative.” I’d loved it, but I’d also needed a couple of strong cups of coffee to stay focused throughout. But on second viewing, while it was no less dreamy, gorgeous, or evocative, I realized that the story was actually surprisingly clear and straightforward – but the oneiric qualities had simply dominated to such a degree that the narrative felt more dreamlike, situation sliding into situation, context and character in a constant state of flux. It’s kinda striking to watch it again and feel that wasn’t actually entirely true.
In short, the film follows Frédéric, who sees a photograph of a ruined castle in the poster of a perfume advertisement at a party (“scents are like memories – the person evaporates, but the memory remains”) and it unlocks a forgotten memory of his childhood in which he’d met a ghostlike girl at that castle and slept the night within its walls before returning to his mother. Once remembered, the memory haunts him – he doesn’t recall his early years at all, and he feels that something is being kept from him. His mother councils him to let it go – that she gave him the best life she could after they lost his father – he should stop asking about this castle, this girl, and live his life.
But he can’t. A vision of the girl keeps appearing to him, and he is pulled into the night to find her and the ruined chateau of his youth. He finds the photographer of the poster and she promises to tell him the location he seeks, but she’s assassinated before she has a chance. The assassin chases Frédéric to eliminate any witnesses, but he is saved by the bevy of half-naked vampire girls he’d inadvertently freed from their tomb earlier in the night. He’s approached by some woman who claims to be the girl of his memories (all grown up, with a pet frog), but she’s clearly lying – then the vampires eat her. He confronts his mother who has him locked up in an asylum, but it turns out that the nurses are the same vampire girls and they set him free. Finally, the vision of the forgotten girl leads him to a blind postcard seller, from whom he learns the name of the castle and he immediately boards a train.
At the castle, Frédéric’s mother reveals that they used to house a teen girl who was actually a vampire terrorizing the countryside, turning other local girls into bloodsuckers – and she also killed his father. The mother begs him to finish what she couldn’t, behead the vampire, and be done with this all. But the sweet longing is too strong – he lies about killing the girl, sends his mother away, gets bitten, and in the end, Frédéric and the girl climb naked into a casket on the beach and are pulled away by the roaring tide. Like you do.
But like I said, this isn’t about story. It’s much more quiet, more tender than that. While the narrative tracks (clearly the mother has paid people to cover up the past to protect her son from being pulled back into it), this is not a movie where we wait in suspense to find out what is going to happen next. And yet, there is a compelling, if slow, forward momentum. As in a dream, both we and Frédéric feel the urge to move ever steadily forward, to scratch the itch, to satisfy a curiosity (about what, we don’t even know).
Hanging over everything is a mood of the erotic and the romantic, but specifically defined. “Erotic” here, for all that there is plenty of naked flesh, rarely feels particularly “sexual” (that would imply “heat” and everything here is more of a lingering, alluring, magnetic “coolness”), and there is a lot of nudity without feeling very titillating. But there is a quiet, almost private pleasure in the body, and in being-in-an-environment (empty Parisian streets at night, a crumbling chateau, an aquarium after hours). This is typified by an early scene with the photographer. She’s introduced taking pictures of a nude model. The model poses in one way and another, perhaps having trouble settling on a natural state to relax into.
And then, slowly, she begins to touch herself. The photographer doesn’t react at all. The model smiles and relaxes – seemingly having a kind of private moment. Still, the photographer continues to snap photos, neither asking for more of this or guiding the girl back to less explicit material. Finally, the doorbell rings (it’s Frédéric, here to inquire about the picture of the castle), the photographer lets the girl know that they’ve finished, and she gets dressed and leaves. This intimacy was given space to exist, and nothing was pushed. The moment was explicit, and yet so gentle and light. The photographer is warm with Frédéric and before long, she’s disrobed and is embracing him – but that embrace is just that – it doesn’t feel like sex, per se – but it is intimate and warm and longing – as is the whole film.
The other illustrative scene in this vein (ah, vampire movies and unavoidable puns…) is the final one with Frédéric and the girl (who does have a name – I should start using it: Jennifer) – and this brings me to the term “Romantic,” but I use it not in the sense of Valentine’s day, but rather the 19th century artistic movement. There is a transcendent presentation of nature into which the self is subsumed. At the end, after so much silence in the film, when Frédéric has freed Jennifer and there is no concern that any will return to again entomb her, there is a moment when she is on the cliffs by the sea in silence and she shouts out, “Music!” Suddenly the sound of the sea and the wind and the gulls fills the soundtrack in an exuberant burst of chaos. Frédéric and Jennifer embrace, naked as the noise washes everything else out and there is an erasure of ego, a surrender to the natural. In this new nudity, again the sexual is lacking – it feels rather innocent, a kind of undead garden of Eden.
They speak of the idyllic days and years to come – they will be carried in their shared coffin (it matters not how long it takes to get there – they have infinite time) to a small island where they will, together, lure sailors to their doom.
They climb into the casket together, with warm care, Frédéric guides on the lid, and the waves pull it out to sea. For a time we see it crashing in the surf and then the water is peaceful and we see them no longer. Have they been dragged below? Will they reach their destination? These questions don’t seem to matter – reunited, together they have given themselves over to the white noise of the waves, to the immensity of the ocean, to time and water and salt and flesh and decay and the tender static of oblivion.
It’s not a happy ending – but it’s not sad either. There is a sense of completion, gently spiced with a pang of what? Loss? Wistfulness?
For years Jennifer had been lying in her tomb, waiting to be remembered. The perfume ad triggered a sense memory, teasing something long forgotten back into the edge of Frédéric’s mind. Half remembered – misremembered – invented – an uncanny fantastique that cannot be fixed as real or unreal, it fascinates, there is a steady obsession that can’t be turned away from. Something he is compelled to pursue – something without which he could not feel complete, could never be satisfied.
He finds satisfaction, but that also brings a kind of death, a warm oblivion, a loving sadness. I am no expert – I’ve seen like seven of his films, but this bundle of themes just feels so very Jean Rollin. Gorgeous and artful and cheap and shabby (for an auteur filmmaker that returned to the well of vampires time and time again, it feels like the fangs could be bought for 2 dollars in a joke shop and he was never interested in scares or gore), it feels like both an exploitation flick and high art.
And along the way, there are so many other surreal elements and images that feel like symbols – but ones that need not impose a hard meaning. Much of the film takes place in Paris, and it is so often entirely, impossibly empty and monumental – in haunting fashion – a looming dream labyrinth. The other vampires (particularly the twins, Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castle, who are in a number of Rollin’s films), their characteristically diaphanous gowns fluttering in the night wind, feel less like characters than alluring personifications of seductively available femininity and hauntingly attractive death in life – offering an invitation to disappear into something beautiful – dangerous and self-destructive, but nonetheless attractive, soft, yielding, accepting.
Which does bring me to one element of note – this identification of ‘nature’ / ‘death’ / ‘fascination’ with the “feminine” does feel, let’s say thematically dated. It’s hardly a “feminist” project, this male protagonist, an obvious stand-in for the filmmaker, chasing these girlish symbols of the ineffable into the night, giving himself over to them, having them thrust upon him, those figures more symbols than three dimensional characters. And yet, I still find it all rather lovely.
This feels like it comes strongly from one individual artist, who, even if he’s leaning on the kinds of tropes at which one could roll their eyes, in this case, it is so heartfelt, carried out with an earnestness that feels anything but artistically cheap. I could imagine one deriding it as naiveté (which I’m sure occurred in his native France – I understand French critics had little love for Rollin’s obsessions with genre, just as American critics could deride his art-house inclinations), but I can’t imagine being that hard-hearted myself.
Also, on the gender politics of it all, it is interesting to me that this seems to be just about the only work in Rollin’s early filmography with a male protagonist – he almost always focused on women (though that didn’t necessarily make them more characters and less symbols). This is probably a facile reading, but I somehow have the impression that, in doing this, he was rather centering himself for a change.
Apparently, it crushed him that this was such a financial failure – losing so much money that to recoup expenses, the producer forced him to film additional inserts and recut it as a hardcore porn film, Suce-moi vampire (“Suck me, vampire”), with an entirely different story. Fortunately, over time, the film found its audience who have given it no small measure of artistic respect – in that sweet spot between sexploitation, B-movie grindhouse and haute-culture, niche viewership arthouse.
It really is something special, though it won’t be for everyone. Maybe it’s for you though – if you can find it, check it out (as of today, in the States, it’s on Kanopy). Some will be put to sleep. Some will sigh in exasperation. But some will fall in love.
I am a Grady Hendrix Fan. Since picking up his 2016 novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism(which I read all in one sitting on a transatlantic flight, trying to hide my embarrassingly ugly crying from the stranger in the seat next to me as I hit the climactic, eponymous, and very moving exorcism), I have eagerly awaited each new offering. Some have absolutely floored me, and some I have just appreciated, but I really like him and what he does. Each time, he takes on a new horror element (a haunting, demonic possession, vampires, evil dolls, slashers, a devil’s bargain, etc.) and weaves an effective, exciting terror tale around it, which is always deeply rooted in character and relationships in which I become fully emotionally invested. He’s always got a kind of light, playful authorial voice – while I wouldn’t categorize any of his books as “horror-comedy,” there is always something in the tone that feels “fun” if not “funny” per se. Past that, there are solid scenes of suspense, of disgust, of horrible things happening to perfectly nice people (and not-so-nice people receiving a comeuppance that goes way too far for comfort), of supernatural threat and wrongness – this is horror. But overwhelmingly, his books draw an emotional response from me. Of the seven novels of his that I’ve read, though some have worked for me better than others, there is not one that hasn’t made me cry by the end. Interestingly, he also seems to write exclusively about women, each book having a female protagonist, and past that, a largely female supporting cast.
Grady Hendrix, with skull, cause an image of “Grady Hendrix, WITHOUT skull” just wouldn’t look right.
Which brings me to his newest, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, which I finished about a week ago, staying up until four in the morning, trying not to wake my wife sleeping beside me cause I was making the bed shake from stifled sobs. Yup, I’m a tough horror guy – I can watch the most brutal gore – exsanguinations, disembowelings, flayings – without batting an eye, but show me a damn coffee commercial where someone comes home unexpectedly early and I’ll be blubbering like a baby. I’m an easy mark, is what I’m saying.
But I don’t think my strong response was all on me in this case – the book deals with some legitimately heavy real life horrors, layering onto them a supernatural element that, in addition to adding a folkloric threat, also just makes the realistic awfulness go down a bit more easily. I mentioned above the largely female cast of characters in his books, and that is the most true to date in this entry – about a group of pregnant teen girls in 1970 sent to a “home” in Florida to have their babies, giving them up for adoption (or sometimes even having them taken against their will) before finally going back to their “normal lives” as if nothing had ever happened. The fact that all of this is done under the guise of ‘helping them,’ ‘taking pity on these fallen girls,’ just makes it uglier. This is a true to life nightmare which so many real girls and young women have been subjected to, and the sense of crushing disempowerment in their story can be overwhelming.
Apparently, some years ago, Hendrix learned that two women in his family to whom he’d been very close had been sent to such homes, had been subjected to these cruelties, and that gave him the impetus to learn more about these places and engage with it in fiction. And it is a lot.
And this happened a lot – everywhere.
The girls have everything taken from them, in this case, even their names (on arrival at the home, the headmistress renames them all as one kind of flower or another (Rose, Daisy, Fern, etc.) so that they don’t share anything true of their “real lives” – they should not tell each other where they are from, what their real name is, or any details of how or by whom they came to be pregnant). Their parents have already abandoned them. They are disrespected at every turn, condemned for having already done the worst, most sinful thing imaginable. They have no agency over what they do, when they do it, what they eat, how they dress, or any aspect of their bodies. Medical treatment feels like assault and every adult who purports to be on their side, to be there to help them, is sooner or later uncovered as an agent of a hateful social machine fine-tuned to subjugate, marginalize, weaken, oppress, erase. Finally, four of the girls happen across a book, “How to Be a Groovy Witch” and start down a dark path to take back some power for themselves.
Macbeth’s “weird sisters.”
Hendrix mentioned in an afterward that in the first draft of the book, there were no witches. I don’t know if that means they never found the book, or if they did, but there was no “real” magic. Either way, I’m so glad the witches were added. (Quick, fascinating aside: I had the pleasure of watching a presentation on witches that Hendrix gave as a part of his current book tour, in which he pointed out how the witches in Macbeth, who are never named as such, but only referred to as the ‘weird sisters,’ in the first folio were called the ‘wayward sisters’ – a word that would come to be regularly used for young girls who had “gotten themselves in trouble” – it makes for a clever title.) As it was, it took over a hundred pages before the girls came across the book and started working even the simplest of spells, and by then, I was so hungry for it. This is not to say that the early part of the novel is not effective or well written, but just that the core, realistic nightmare of it all is hard to take and any taste of personal power is pretty sweet. Of course though, this being a work of supernatural horror, the book connects them with a group of “real” witches who do not have the best interests of the girls at heart. No matter who the girls turn to, there is inevitably an adult waiting to use them for their own ends.
But along the way, the power feels good. Even if it comes at terrible cost. Even it is dark, and makes them dark. Even if it is using them, burning them down, and will ultimately rob them of any remnant of selfhood in the end. Even if it is “evil,” whatever that actually means. In the hands of those who have been stripped of any power at all, the darkest, cruelest, most vengeful power feels deserved, feels “good.” Even if you know it isn’t – who cares? The feeling is no less true.
There are unsettling sequences (as well as some cathartic, glorious, magical sections) involving the casting of spells (and the price thereof) and the girls’ ascendance into a different, more than natural, more real, more frightening world, but it all pales in comparison to two scenes of plain, old fashioned, quotidian childbirth. Talk about body horror, and it’s entirely “normal” – it’s how we all got here. The two scenes exist in contrast to each other – the first cold, medicalized, in a hospital setting, and the other more “natural,” earthy, supportive – but both are cringe inducing nightmare fuel through and through. The first reduces the mother to an object to be worked on by a respected doctor and hospital crew who seem to view her as less than human. It is cold and disturbing – how empowered they are to disregard her own will, to work on her body without communicating what is being done or why, to drug her and cut her open and treat her as meat that is simply in the way of the baby being birthed, who will be given to a respectable family waiting in the hall. The second feels much more caring (a midwife guiding the birthing in her own home), but the girl almost dies, as does her child, and what her body goes through along the way, what she must endure, become, in order to see it through, it isn’t pretty.
Much rougher than this looks.
Again and again, even when it seems that the girls have taken back some taste of agency, every single time, it seems to once again be stolen away. Even with magic. Even with witches. Even with teamwork. Even with love. The world is not fair (an obvious statement, but having it repeatedly hammered home thus takes a toll). By the end, the sense of ineffable rage at their unjust treatment just permeates every page. And that wrath eventually grows into something powerful – terrible in that power and yet, still beautiful. You want them to fight back – you want them to lay waste to everything in their path – even the “innocent.” You want that rage to have an outlet, for them to have an effect on their world, even if it is to “do harm, do wrong,” even if it is ultimately bad for them as well – that emotional drive, that need to reverse injustice is just so compelling.
And I think that is the essence of the book, and it brings me to the other thing I wanted to dig into in this post. In recent years, a term has been applied to a number of high profile films (The Witch, Midsommar, Pearl, Ready or Not, Teeth, etc.) – “Good for Her” horror. I think the exact meaning is a bit hard to pin down, but as with so much, you know it when you see it. For me, a “Good for Her” horror is distinct from simply a “Final Girl” who survives a slasher, turning the killer’s tools of destruction back on him, and it is also different from something like a “Rape-Revenge” movie, where a woman directly takes revenge on those who had previously assaulted her. In both of those cases, the protagonist fights back against and heroically kills “the bad guy(s).”
I Spit on Your Grave aka Day of the Woman (1978) an essential Rape-Revenge film, and quite the difficult watch.
Rather, in this model (I hesitate to call it a sub-genre as I think it consists in a kind of viewer/reader response that can span genres), the (female) protagonist, by the end of the story, takes an action or actions that are morally dubious, enacting a kind of revenge on, not necessarily a villain, but instead simply those who have been bad to her (a crummy boyfriend, some kind of bullies, a sexist boss, etc.). If it were simply defeating the “bad guys,” that wouldn’t be morally dubious. It wouldn’t have the delicious bite of doing something “dark,” vengeful in a way that is “not-nice.” And it doesn’t have to be full on “evil,” but it is an action of self-interest, performed by one formerly socialized to do for others before herself, now bitterly empowered. At the end of a slasher, the final girl takes the masked killer’s blade and triumphantly penetrates him with his own phallic implement. In a Good-For-Her movie, the protagonist may survive some ordeal to leave her condescending father-in-law stuck in a trap where he’ll probably get eaten by a hungry crocodile as she walks away, head held high. She doesn’t need to kill him, but she doesn’t need to go out of her way to help him either. She’s done enough. She’s had enough.
In another example which well predates this term, I might look to a “Rape-Revenge” flick that does things a little differently – Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981). Whereas the standard narrative for this kind of movie shows a woman sexually assaulted before hunting down and destroying the man or men who had done so, I think Ms. 45 is more interesting in how broadly the protagonist’s vengeance is applied. After being raped twice in one day, the mute seamstress Thana (Zoë Lund) is pushed over a line, takes the gun of her second assailant (whom she’d managed to kill in self-defense), and starts on a program of hunting and killing terrible men around NYC. And it is a “yes, all men” kind of deal. Initially, it seems she is giving them an opportunity to reveal themselves as “bad” before dispatching them, but by the end, she is relatively indiscriminately shooting anyone with a penis, such that we are even left to worry about the fate of a perfectly nice little dog when we realize he’s a (very good) boy. Applied so broadly, though most of the guys she shoots are clearly dangerous sleazebags, this takes on a different vibe than a direct revenge movie. There is a sense of injustice so expansive, suffusing her whole world, that her only options are either self-erasing acquiescence or full scale, blood in the eyes, losing-oneself-in-the-act androcide. There is a specific horror in that: the character fully justified in feeling her anger, her understandable need for retribution, but taking actions that exceed moral or ethical justification, and are ultimately self-destructive. There is that moral pinch that I really appreciate in a horror flick.
I think just this feeling is what is found in the much more recent spate of films that often get labeled with the “Good For Her” moniker. (Spoilers ahead) In Midsommar, Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, is not a monster. He didn’t kill anyone – he didn’t really do anything especially wrong – but as a couple, they are bad for each other, and she has been suffering, and he hasn’t helped. When she lets him get sewn up inside of a bear skin and burned as a ritual sacrifice as she finally feels at home, accepted and loved by her new community, we can feel happy for her, finally getting what she needs, finally advocating for herself instead of others, turning her back on one who has made her unhappy, but her newfound happiness is given ambivalent spice by Christian’s torturous end. In The VVitch, the witches are unmistakably shown to be “evil” – stealing babies and anointing themselves with their blood, causing all sorts of gory, gruesome, harmful nightmares, and finally bringing about the bloody and sad destruction of Thomasina’s whole family, but when she makes her mark in the Devil’s book, chooses to “live deliciously,” accepting whatever eternal punishments might be the price of rising above her present repressed destitution, and floats, naked, into the flame licked night sky, laughing and free, I think it’s hard not to feel her ecstasy as ultimately a “good,” though the moment is made all the richer, weirder, more complicated, more delicious, by all of the “bad” that has been, and will be, its cost. Still, in spite of it all, I do genuinely feel in that moment, “hey, good for her!”
These are satisfying stories and the nature of that satisfaction is of interest to me. They share some common DNA with other models, but are clearly distinguished. And, I could be wrong in this, but it feels like this is a relatively recent trend – this kind of story told in this exact kind of way. That said, we’ve long celebrated male anti-heroes. Is this really so different? I feel it is. While I think there is a pleasure in vicariously following a “bad” guy who happens to be carrying the “good” of the narrative forward and is willing to do any ugly thing along the way, under no burden of supposed respectability or ethical behavior, I think these stories all start with a woman who is, in terms of her era and cultural context, “normal” – not a hero, not an anti-hero – just a “woman.” And that term (because we all understand certain things about the world in which we live) contains the implications of a kind of disenfranchisement in need of repair – the main character has been brought up not to rock the boat, not to be “bitchy,” not to make others feel bad, and to even feel guilty for having emotional responses towards and expectations of others – and it feels good to see her change, grow, learn to take what she needs, what she wants, and reject what she doesn’t. One can also find something like “good-for-her” moments in tales featuring protagonists from other marginalized communities, but these examples with specifically (and it must be noted, generally white, cis-het) women stand out as notable for grabbing the cultural moment. These are crossover hits while other stories with other kinds of protagonists may be overlooked by the masses and only appreciated by aficionados of specifically “queer horror,” “black horror,” “indigenous horror,” etc.
Just as an aside, one thing I’ve noticed: when I think of the most prominent examples of “Good For Her” Horror, they seem to overwhelmingly be made by male creators. Is this just because films in general tend to be, or is there something else to it? The VVitch comes from Robert Eggers, Midsommar from Ari Aster, Pearl from Ti West, Ready or Not from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Teeth from Mitchell Lichtenstein, and Ms. 45 from Abel Ferrara. I expect the trend goes on and on. There are some possible exceptions, such as Revenge (2017) from now Oscar nominated director, Coralie Fargeat (who has recently had such surprisingly mainstream success with The Substance), but while I think her earlier film is great, formally, I feel like its tropes map more cleanly on a traditional “rape-revenge” model.
So, if it isn’t simply symptomatic of gender inequality in Hollywood leading far fewer women to end up behind the camera, why is it that these stories are being so notably presented by men? Is it a kind of social guilt – leading to an attempt to ‘make right’? Is it a kind of facile universalism wherein the gender of the protagonist is, ironically, merely a screen onto which the director can project his own perception of inequitable treatment, and his own fantasy of empowerment, in turn inviting any audience member to do the same? (Who has never felt that life is unfair? I expect the most privileged experience that no less than the most downtrodden – politically, that certainly seems to be the case.) Is it a way to just make it feel “ok” to root for the “bad” choice – if a man did the same, would he come off as an insufferable, greedy asshole, or in order to have a man so socially put down, would he have to be some kind of miserable incel type, and we’ve all learned how actually monstrous that can be – and therefore, not ‘fun’? Are these all unfair readings, just spiraling on my blog, just looking to “problematize” great work that is doing something good, that people strongly respond to, including myself? I, a cis-het fellow, really love these stories, really vibe with their themes and can have a visceral response to their protagonists getting her bloody groove back. Does it detract from their power, does it call into question their ethos to recognize that few if any are actually being written or directed by women? I honestly don’t know, but it might be a fair question at least. But if the answer is “yes,” I must admit, I don’t think I’ll like them any less. I hope that’s ok.
Which brings me back to Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. A witch story is the perfect vehicle for a “Good For Her” moment, the whole concept being that a woman or a girl makes a compact with some dark force, clearly choosing to “do wrong” in order to have power – a choice she might not make if any inkling of power at all weren’t so very, very, impossibly hard to come by. And in this case, this is, as are so many other “Good For Her” examples, another story written by a man, an author who, for whatever personal reason, only seems to write female protagonists. For me, that doesn’t detract from the power of the story, and I can’t imagine (though it is, admittedly, a current trend) policing who gets to tell which tale – an author has a personal connection to something, does a ton of research and sets out to craft a moving, powerful, disturbing narrative to do it justice – I can’t imagine criticizing that. But as I’ve mentioned, I’m not a woman – I don’t know how female readers receive Hendrix’s characterization. Could, for example, one feel that he oversells the powerlessness and a woman would find small remnants of agency around the marginalia? I don’t know. I can only say that for me, it really landed. Just as all of the above referenced films have as well.
The special edition with bleeding pages. Cool.
So, yeah, if you’ve liked any of Hendrix’s other books, I feel confident saying you should pick this up. If you haven’t read him and this kind of social horror doused with supernatural sauce sounds like your cup of tea (weird mixed metaphor – who puts sauce in tea?), I recommend it. Plenty of scary things happen – suspenseful scenes of supernatural assault in the night, tongues getting chopped off, wombs full of live eels, ancient powers rising in the night, turning their inhuman, unendurable gaze upon you and demanding fealty paid in blood, but hands down, the scariest stuff is all real – either the historical horror of these things really being done to young pregnant girls for years, or the contemporary horror inherent in the sense that, even if these exact homes no longer exist, the same inequity and essential disrespect persists, and possibly always will, the story only putting this awful fact into a starker contrast by means of its entertaining supernatural elements. Also, I’ve just got to say – birth – ooof. Now, that’s horror. Seriously, it’s amazing any of us are here at all.
Ah tradition – the little recurrences that free us from the burden of decision making. What will we eat for this important meal? What we always eat for that important meal! How do we mark the anniversary of someone’s birth? Cake and song, of course! What will I write about on my blog at the beginning of the year? My favorite things from last year – like I always do. As do so many others.
Now, do I keep all traditions holy? Like writing about something for Christmas? Or even just writing on a regular schedule (twice a week, twice a month, once a month, etc.)? Sigh. No, not remotely. 2024 was not a good year for blogular regularity (this blog needs more insoluble fiber). I started off strong, but life intervened, and well, you do what you can. And today, after a long delay, is the long awaited day of said doing.
So, as the year turns, I like to look back at the one previous and take a moment to praise those works I saw for the first time and really loved, but just didn’t get around to writing about on this here blog. Some I really thought I would have written about by now, and maybe I still will someday – I reserve the right to return to these – they wouldn’t be on this list if not for some element contained within that stands out as really special. I’m making no claims that these are the “best” films of the year. Most are older movies and they might not even be “good” (whatever that means), but each had something that really sparked with me and has lingered in my mind as the months came and went.
So, in no particular order (scratch that – this is the order in which I saw them), let’s dig in to my top ten new to me in 2024…
Death Game (1974)
As I understand it, this was a very contentious set with a tremendous amount of conflict between first time director, Peter S. Traynor, and both the actors and other creative staff. But you wouldn’t know it to look at it. I went into this one completely blind, just because the poster on Shudder was intriguing, and it is a gorgeous, rich, confounding, and addictively watchable piece of work (probably thanks largely to the efforts of its outstanding cast and abovementioned creative staff, most notably cinematographer, David Worth – it is beautiful to look at).
George is a middle class, middle age “normal guy” whose wife is called away on an emergency and is thus home alone one rainy night when two young, attractive girls show up on his doorstep, asking to use the phone. He invites them in, and though he initially hesitates (but doesn’t put up much of a fight), ends up having a sexual tryst with both of them in his fancy hot tub. And then they refuse to go away and subsequently lay waste to his entire life. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Eli Roth’s Knock Knock (2015) is a recent remake (I’ve heard good things about it, particularly the performances of Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas, but haven’t checked it out yet). It is a classic tale of a character making one mistake and never being able to climb back from it. It is tense and wild, weird and erotically charged, socio-politically deeply ambivalent and searingly angry. It is full of extremes bouncing off of each other – on one level an effective, engaging feminist diatribe against male privilege and on another, a cautionary tale about how women are crazy and dangerous. It is scary and joyful, and most interestingly, it is the same things that both frighten and delight.
If that sounds confusing, I think it’s probably because the film doesn’t really know what it’s trying to “say,” if it’s actually trying to say anything at all, but that makes it all the more effective – its ideas and feelings can all live freely, in dialogue with each other, and they are more vibrant for their life-like messiness. It’s a film of ideas, but one without a “message” (which I feel is often more effective – if what you really want is to communicate a message, then the best medium is a banner). And as a horror movie, it is genuinely discomforting and exciting, eliciting a wide range of reactions from me throughout. The two girls, who give the names Jackson and Donna (Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, respectively) are downright terrifying agents of grotesque chaos and violent destruction whose truth is utterly impenetrable to both George and the viewer – we are not given tools to understand what their true intentions or actual backstories might be, and it makes them fearful – dangerous and menacing. But they are also awesome, and it is hard not to cheer on their bizarre, playful chaos and devastation, and not just as punishment for George transgressing in terms of his infidelity, but in the sense that his whole life represents a mendacious, iniquitous, privileged power structure – in terms of gender, but also class, education, capital, and politics, that assumes a respect and authority, but is built on lies and deserves to be shattered. Jackson and Donna feel like avatars of some primal trickster energy – impossible to contain or control – here to violate the bullshit of a respectability which only serves to maintain hierarchies of gender and class.
They are the villains, but also the heroes. We support them and we want them and we fear them and we vicariously get off on their often ridiculous, cruel, baffling actions. The film is simultaneously alluring and confusing and weird and wonderful. I really, really dug it! Now, as everyone who worked on it seemingly hated the director and felt he had no idea what he was doing, it seems that the movie’s strength could have been somewhat accidental, but watching it 50 years later, who cares? Good is good, intentional or not.
Red Rooms (2023)
This was a really uncomfortable but captivating watch – an often quiet, tense emotional piece, and one with a real mystery of character at its cold heart. It is chilling and unsettling in all the best ways – Juliette Gariépy is Kelly-Anne, a Montreal model fixated on the high profile trial of a man accused of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering three young girls in a “Red Room,” broadcasting his crimes on the dark web to the highest bidders. She does freelance modelling work, but earns most of her money playing high stakes on-line poker, which funds her expensive, well-curated, and almost entirely solitary lifestyle. Unhampered by other human connections, Kelly-Anne is free to rise before dawn every day so that she can get to the court early, thus earning a public seat for the much publicized trial.
For almost the whole movie, she is a magnetic cypher – a fascinatingly opaque central presence. What is her interest in this case, in this man? Is she a groupie for this soft spoken accused killer the way that many women were for Ted Bundy? Is she a former victim, plotting her revenge? Is she a true crime fanatic, addicted to the most salacious details of this horrific case? Are any of these mutually exclusive? The fact that, though she is probably in every scene of the film, we are locked out from her inner life and will never know what truly lives behind her eyes, pulled me in, the experience of the film becoming an intriguing, sometimes disturbing meditation on our interest in darkness, our fascination with the worst things imaginable.
By all genre classifications, this would be normally be considered a drama or a thriller, but this exploration of that draw to see the worst, to not look away, to possibly even love it, and to have to reckon with how you feel about that, this is absolutely the stuff of horror.
The only clues we really get as to her actual intentions are in the form of contrast with another daily viewer of the trial – Clémentine, a young woman convinced that “he couldn’t have done it,” who has hitchhiked to Montreal and is living in a homeless shelter so that she can come to trial every day and support the man she’s fallen for. Whereas Kelly-Anne is cold, distant, unknowable, Clémentine wears her big heart on her sleeve, coming across as quite sweet but also naively deluded. But there is a kind of kinship there and Kelly-Anne, in her way, befriends her for a time, but as things develop, we come to see how different they truly are, and the friendship cannot survive this.
This is one of the tensest, chilliest, most intense viewings I’ve had in quite a while – if I saw enough new movies to make such a list, it would definitely be in “best of the year” territory. And while the film lives and dies by Gariépy’s performance, it also must be said that as a piece of filmmaking, it is tight as a drum and impeccably filmed (notably, one very long take in the first courtroom scene really wows – by the end of that, I was hooked and really excited about the film I had chosen to watch). This is the third feature of writer-director, Pascal Plante – I’m not at all familiar with his other work, but on the strength of this, I’m certainly keen to check it out.
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)
This is an interesting curio more than I can exactly say that I loved it, but I must admit, it was very, very interesting. Apparently the first Brazilian horror film, director José Mojica Marins’s first entry in the Coffin Joe series (in which he also stars as the titular character – later, he served as a late night horror host in the persona) is a bombastic, atmospheric, idiosyncratic, and taboo breaking exploration of the nexus of egoistic, self-serving evil, heroic individualism, Nietzschean will to power, Byronic romanticism, and exploitation cinema, all within a totally culturally specific, ultra-Catholic Brazilian context. There’s a lot there to dig into.
We follow Joe (or, more precisely, Zé), a black clad little man in a cape and a top hat with long, sharp fingernails who has the town in which he lives fearfully under his thumb. He scoffs at religion, morality, and emotion, caring only about his own status, power, and the continuation of his bloodline through a male heir. He beats (and eventually kills) his wife, he drowns his friend and rapes his wife, he bullies the townspeople, forcing them to do shocking things (like eat meat on Good Friday – I mentioned it was really Catholic), he pokes a guy’s eyes out, he murders and abuses and tortures and humiliates any and everyone who crosses his path. He’s the worst.
He’s also free in a way no one else is. He does what he pleases and takes what he wants. As already mentioned, he is diminutive in stature, but that doesn’t prevent him from terrorizing and dominating the whole town. Besides his claw like fingernails and the tendency of his eyes to go all bloodshot when he’s angry, he has no supernatural abilities, and yet he is stronger than everyone else simply by virtue of his lack of morality; his willingness to do wrong is his power. That power is exciting, and for all that he is a terrible, hateful, cruel, petty person, it’s hard not to vibe on his defiant commitment to his own interests, as in a later scene when he gets a wild monologue like something out of the climax of Marlow’s Faust, as the lightning crashes, the bells chime, and midnight draws nearer – he is initially cowed and fearful, but as his dark fate creeps towards him, he rallies, spitting in the face of god and all that is good, tearing a cross off the wall and throwing it to the ground – how do we not read that as heroic? Admirable? Awesome?
It is an interesting viewing experience start to finish. We have no ‘nicer’ character to lean on – we only have Zé, and he is monstrous – an awful person to spend time with, but he’s also never not the most interesting guy in the room, and there is a point at which his evil crosses the line into allure. As a film, the style is varied, creative, and while sometimes less than “Hollywood-professional,” it is always full of energy and ideas. I really found it engrossing and intriguing, especially as it hails from a culture with which I’ve had particularly little contact. Really glad to have seen it.
Ghostwatch (1992)
I often have a problem as a horror fan and blogger. When someone finds out that I like horror, they frequently want a recommendation for a good horror movie, by which they often mean a “scary” movie. And that is just hard. Different things scare different people, and also as I have watched so many horror movies at this point, it is really rare that one can succeed in freaking me out in that “scary” way. Many are just comfort food repetition of familiar elements. Some might disturb me. Others might unsettle in delicious fashion, or give me a taste of that sweet dramatic tension inherent to horror. But they don’t often keep me up at night.
Well, I’m happy to say that Ghostwatch really got under my skin – it was the scariest first time watch I’ve had in years, and after it was done, I had to go around my apartment turning on all the lights – always a good sign. First aired on BBC1 on Halloween night in 1992, it shares DNA with works such as The WNUF Halloween Special, Orson Wells’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast, and the recent Late Night with the Devil. But for my money, it’s much scarier then all of them.
There are twists, turns, and revelations that I wouldn’t want to spoil, but the essential premise is that a TV crew (all played by known real-life TV journalists and presenters) is investigating a haunted house on Halloween night in a live broadcast. Without going into detail, the deeper they dig, the more disturbing it all becomes, and by the end, it goes big, at the very least, nation-wide – much more so than I might have expected. It is all very well done, and until late in the game, evidence that anything supernatural is really happening is kept to a minimum, contributing to a really effective sense of reality and possibility, which must have been greatly aided by the inclusion of known TV presenters as the investigating crew. As I understand, though it was advertised and aired in a “drama” slot, many people who bumped into it while channel surfing did not realize it was a work of fiction and, ala War of the Worlds, believed this to be a work of documentary reportage. People went crazy.
For good reason – I thought it was properly terrifying – really realistic in its exploration of an uncanny experience, that is probably not supernatural, until it definitely is. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if you believed you were actually watching the news. Wow… Ok – no more details –if you get a chance, go watch it, and try to imagine you know all the characters as real TV news presenters – It’s something else!
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Where had Brian De Palma’s problematic masterpiece been all my life? Sitting on the shelf at the video store I guess, but I finally got around to checking it out back in the spring, and it blew me away. Any criticisms of it are fair. Its ‘homage’ to Psycho could easily be taken as a rip off. It taps into the unfortunate, deeply harmful trope of the ‘trans killer,’ and its representational issues don’t end there – see the discomforting and rather rapey black street gang in the otherwise top shelf subway chase scene (it would be nice if, other than the deeply unhelpful subway cop, they weren’t seemingly the only other black characters in all of NYC). It is sleazy and exploitative and it cheats by having the killer played by a different performer from the one who will later be revealed. But in spite of all that, Dressed to Kill towers above just about any other thriller I’ve ever seen, and it is impossible for me not to love it. Sexy, scary, cinematically playful, with a protagonist I enjoy hanging out with (a charming Nancy Allen as an independent, proactive, stock-exchanging, murder-investigating prostitute), Michael Caine giving an interesting, nuanced performance, and a movie cop leading the murder investigation who’s really, really fun to hate (Dennis Franz, later known from NYPD Blue – golly, what a schmuck – the character – I know nothing about Franz as a real person), this might be one of the most enjoyable movies of any genre I’ve seen.
It is a thriller that genuinely thrills (see the above mentioned gasp-inducing subway scene), with multiple sequences that found me holding my breath, so expertly did they play with ratcheting up and releasing tension. And not only scary ones. An early centerpiece of the film finds Angie Dickinson’s dissatisfied housewife in a wordless sequence of seduction, cat and mouse eroticism, and life affirming sexual satisfaction, all before things go way south for her in a wide variety of ways and the film is off to the races. For about 22 minutes, barely a word is uttered and it is cinematic perfection, as she follows an unknown man around an art museum before going home with him, where an unpleasant penny will drop. It is pure visual storytelling, totally captivating, erotic, funny, scary, stressful, sad, moving, and ultimately shocking. Just a perfect, perfect example of what a movie can be (on the strength of this, I also dove into other De Palma films of the era – there’s a lot there to love, but nothing surpassed this for me), an exhilarating exercise in matching the inner experience of its viewpoint character to cinematic technique.
This is one of those blurry genre flicks – people who like it, who don’t like horror, will call it a “thriller” and people who love horror claim it as our own (we are the genre of blade wielding maniacs, are we not?). But I think this underlines the ultimate pointlessness of genre classification, largely a marketing tool to help producers reach audiences. Does it really matter what it’s called? It has scares and jumps and unsettling qualities a plenty, all tied up in an unselfconsciously pulpy, lurid package. Past that, it offers a variety of cinematic pleasures, stylistic in a way that exceeds base realism, which I feel is often characteristic of the horror genre more than any other – it is one of the very things I come to horror movies for. So I think it’s ours. It is a mood – rich and sensual, even in parts that have little to do with sex. The camera stalks its characters in a lusty way that excites and puts on edge in equal measure. There is a playfulness with the darkest thematic material, resulting in this tale of madness and sex and death and despair being a real hoot. I think that’s a horror thing. But I would.
(Also, I won’t go into them now, but if you like this, do check out Blow Out (1981) (for my money, far more enjoyable than the Antonioni film it references) and Body Double (1984) – which together with Dressed to Kill see De Palma celebrating what can be done with the camera and sound and editing, all in the form of sleazy, fun, highly entertaining thrillers – all art, no pretention.) Other movies in his oeuvre are great too, such as Carrie (1976), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), or Sisters (1972), but Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double all feel of a piece somehow.
Maxxxine (2024)
It was actually the trailer for Maxxxinethat sent me to De Palma back in the spring. When it dropped, I just got so excited for its promise of seedy, 80s, neon-lit murder vibes, that I found myself on an eighties pop kick on Spotify and seeking out classic (and not-so-classic) films of the era that I’d previously missed.
I loooove X (2022), and I rather liked Pearl (2022), so I was eager to take in the third film in Ti West’s Mia Goth led trilogy (one of these days I will finally write about the rich tension in these three films between the beauty of individualism and the ugliness of egoistic greed which feels so specifically “American,” but today is not that day). I can’t say that this was the strongest of the three, and in all actuality, it is probably the weakest, but I still experienced such pleasure watching it, that it stands out as a top film of the year for me.
Now, my appreciation of Maxxxine is doubtlessly flavored by circumstances that had nothing to do with the film itself. It came out last summer when I had been having a tough time of it – there were stresses having to do with family health concerns, I was tremendously busy, and I was just feeling burned down. But finally, after a hard run of fielding heavy responsibilities (which I was happy to be able to do, but it’s a lot), I was able to give myself a day for myself. I went to the beach for a half an hour, I got a coffee milkshake (my favorite), and I drove 45 minutes to a town where I could finally see this movie that I’d really been looking forward to for months, and I just had the best time.
It is, admittedly, not the strongest movie. After a promising opening, the third act suffers, failing to pay off early character promise, and resolving its story in a fairly obvious fashion. Characters make choices that are sometimes hard to follow, and most damningly, Maxine, in my judgment, hasn’t changed in a particularly interesting way by the end of the film (Goth’s journey doesn’t feel as significant as it had in the two previous films). But I generally don’t care – I really dug it anyway.
Having survived the bloodbath of X, Maxine has established herself in LA as a tough, hard working, driven young woman, thriving in the adult film industry and doggedly pursuing crossover success in a horror movie. She is a creature of ambitions that will not be denied. Her straightforward, no-nonsense demeanor makes her a really enjoyable guide through West’s vision of mid-80s Hollywood, which is just as appealingly sordid and enticingly dangerous as the trailer had promised. We’ve got a killer stalking attractive women on the strip. We’ve got Satanic Panic up the wazzoo. We’ve got porno chic and bloody, excessive practical effects and a killer soundtrack. And it is a film of scenes, groovy and dark and sexy and violent and cool. Notably, I loved the run-in with the Buster-Keaton attired wannabee rapist in the dark alley – he never stood a chance, and the film’s evident glee in Maxine’s dealing with him (and boy is he dealt with) is gorily infectious.
And that glee is key to what makes this such a fun watch – it might not be the height of filmmaking, but it is a film that loves filmmaking, that loves style and genre and technical artistry. West et al. are clearly having great fun crafting scenes and set pieces, such that even if the film as a whole is no more than the sum of its parts, it has loads of great parts that, moment to moment, one can really savor. There is homage all over the place, but that’s superficial – I think the real heart of the movie is in its own excitement at building each moment, each look, each vibe. I rather loved it.
Plus, it was a really good milkshake.
P.S. Just to say, I did rewatch Maxxxine under other circumstances about a month ago and while the experience wasn’t as rapturous, I still really enjoyed it, so that seems like a good sign.
Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
Another new film, and another “thriller” that I’m including cause it taps into something of mood and atmosphere and style, elevating it above base realism to earn a place on my “horror” blog list (something to which I know all significant filmmakers aspire). Essentially an erotic-crime thriller, it has standout moments of compelling, visceral violence, and by the end, it takes a surprising turn into a kind of magical realism which I had not seen coming. It was easily one of the most gripping movies I saw last year, and I really hope to watch it again soon.
Lou (Kristen Stewart) is a standoffish gym manager, estranged from her crime boss father (a truly scary Ed Harris), just trying to keep to herself, when she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a homeless runaway passing through town, chasing dreams of success on the female bodybuilding circuit. Lou is immediately smitten and as they strike up a volatile romance, she also starts supplying Jackie with steroids, which Jackie abuses, bulking her up, but also messing with her emotional stability. Eventually, a whole series of things go particularly wrong, they run afoul of Lou’s crime-boss dad, and everything hurtles towards a taught, intense conclusion. Really, this is crime thriller territory more than horror.
But it’s also really, really good. The crime/family drama story is emotionally gripping and I believe the dynamic between Harris and Stewart. The action/thriller stuff is exciting and sometimes brutal in its execution (a horror gorehound would be satisfied with at least one scene that ends poorly for Dave Franco’s head). And most significantly, the erotic element really lands. There is only one sex scene per se, but the feeling of physical attraction between Lou and Jackie is palpable and encompassing and dangerous. There is a need of the body and of the psyche that makes demands and doesn’t care about the fallout. And notably, I really buy it – something that isn’t always exactly a given in romances. Bad decisions, murder, betrayal – life can be completely turned upside down and Eros cares not. Maybe there was something in that that made me feel a kinship with horror. I’ve written before about the similarities of horror and tragedy, and there is something of that tragic pinch here. Lou and Jackie are good for each other, but also bad for each other and they give each other life and are also catalysts for self-destructive behaviors.
Minor spoiler alert – though dramatic tragedy is present, it doesn’t end in the tragic, as the film stretches further and further from reality into something less obvious and more interesting, but that psycho-sexual-emotional-violent tightness is still there, and that feels like my genre of choice – to paraphrase a line which has nothing to do with this, it might not actually be horror at all, but perhaps it rhymes (with apologies to Mark Twain). It’s pretty special.
Lifeforce (1985)
Wow! This one is a hoot and a holler. Right around the time I was writing up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for its 50th anniversary, I went on a bit of a run of Tobe Hooper movies, including both this and also the next on the list (among others that didn’t make the cut – I’m looking at you, Invaders from Mars – oof!). I’d always heard this was a weird flick (naked, body-swapping energy vampires from outer space!), but I had no idea just how much fun it was going to be.
Written by Dan O’Bannon (writer of Alien (1979) and Return of the Living Dead (1985), among many, many others), this was a critically panned box office flop on release. And I can understand why. It is a pretty strange flick with an outlandish story that somehow makes 25 million bucks look cheap. But I think it has rightfully found its audience over the years. The key for me is that it is just pure, unadulterated, non-ironic sci-fi/horror pulp, and it is glorious, crazy, top-shelf pulp at that. Every idea, plus a couple of kitchen sinks, is thrown at the screen, and it tries to do so much that its pretty decent budget is simply stretched too thin. We’ve got sequences in space, as a crew investigates the organic, cavernous ship they find hidden within the coma of Halley’s comet, filled with giant, dead bat creatures and a few naked folks encased in space crystals. We’ve got fun revisionist folk lore, positing that all of humanity’s stories of vampires are rooted in these peculiar alien beings that like hopping from body to body, leaving desiccated husks in their wake, but are apparently allergic to pants. We’ve got every pulpy attraction on offer – sex, violence, lasers, monsters, gratuitous nudity, goopy blood rising out of a barely believable (if you squint) Patrick Stewart mask and forming a floating, bloody, expository naked girl, exploding zombies, mid 80s visual effects zapping all over the screen, a spot of sci-fi gothic, and oodles of pop-psychology mythic resonance. And while the movie is clearly having a blast with every incongruous element that it packs in, I also think it actually takes itself seriously and is really trying to spin a great adventure yarn, full of wild stuff.
While the story could be criticized (and it was) as pretty peculiar (true), it also really cooks. This is not a boring movie – we race from one surprising scenario to the next, and I was there for it. Sure, it’s odd, but it’s not formulaic – not something I’ve seen a thousand times before. It is a movie in which, somehow, everythinghappens, and generally, it worked for me. I think we don’t get too many things this big and weird and not even remotely boring, and it’s worth celebrating them when we do.
Salem’s Lot (1979)
So I know some folks grew up with this one and that it’s much beloved, but when I first gave it a try a few years back, it just didn’t do it for me. Something about the pacing or its late 70s aesthetic (there’s a lot of brown and tan) just put me off and I didn’t finish. But a couple months back, I was working my way through the Hooper filmography and this showed up on Shudder, and now I am sold. It’s great.
A 2-part CBS miniseries, Hooper’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about vampirism spreading plague-like through a small New England town takes on some of the vibes of an old EC horror comic (Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, etc.), something also true of Hooper’s earlier, weirder Eaten Alive(1976), with creeping blue lit fog and monsters lurching through the muck and dramatic lighting and framing and color. If that style doesn’t do anything for you, neither will this, but I love it. And I’ve gotta say, for something shown on primetime TV, this gets really spooky and scary – it’s perfect Halloween season viewing – mixing comfort food atmospherics, enjoyably era-specific (now charmingly kitschy) fashion and personas, and legitimate old-fashioned, skin-crawling creep-outs.
As with so much of Stephen King’s work, this is a work of character over plot. A who’s who of late seventies talent populates the town with nuance, emotion, and specificity. I was only one year old when this came out, so I can’t claim to know them all, but I was constantly going, “hey, that guy!” This is of course a tale of vampirism, but it is also one of base human venality – bullies, drunks, philanderers, abusive spouses, cheats, and cowards – all humanely rendered (and well-drawn) as real people with their own foibles, haunted by their sizable failings.
But on top of that, there is a rousing story of one of the creepiest cinematic vampires (clearly indebted to Nosferatu), Kurt Barlow, coming to a small town and utterly laying waste to it, of course resulting in all underlying tensions exploding to the surface. It is a kind of story that King has told many times, and while there are significant departures from the source material, I feel it does very well by the spirit of his work. And it gets scary. No one is safe (the first victim is an innocent child, and he’s not the last). It has some top notch horror set pieces, such as poor, dead Ralphie Glick scratching at his older brother’s second story window, asking to be let in, and if you can settle in for its unhurried 2-part TV movie pacing, I think it builds tension really well and delivers some successful terrors.
But I would be remiss if I didn’t go into one performance. I’d long known the name James Mason, but I hadn’t really been familiar with his work. Ye gods, he is so freaking good in this movie! He plays Richard Straker, the vampire Kurt Barlow’s “partner” (technically business partner – they travel from town to town, opening antique shops, Straker always arriving first and laying the ground for Barlow to arrive and feed – but as is often the case in these kinds of stories, the gay coding is strong in this one – two elderly men who live together, running their New England antique shop – and Mason is just so villainously silky smooth – which also feels like classic coding). Mason’s Straker is just the best kind of delicious bad guy in the tradition of a mustache twirling Vincent Price (who may have never actually twirled a mustache, but you get what I mean). There is a wonderful scene in which the local sheriff is questioning him about recent unexplained deaths and, all in subtext, Straker, with a sinister, mischievous twinkle in his eye, communicates, “yes, you know I’m bad, but you have no idea how I’m bad, or how bad I am, and also, you have nothing on me and I’m going to walk out of here and continue to be worse than you could possibly imagine – and on top of it all, you will do my dry cleaning!” He is an absolute wicked delight. Just gleefully evil and dominating, but so polite and civil. Perfection.
So, yeah, I’m a convert – this was spooky-ooky, old fashioned horror gold – I might have to watch it again next October. For a certain kind of old-school, big-vibes horror, I’d put this up there with something like John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), high praise indeed.
The Majorettes (1986)
As I near the end of this annual round up, I notice how heavily horror-adjacent “thrillers” have featured on the list this time, and my last entry is no exception. To some extent, that is a result of the Maxxxine trailer leading me on an 80s sleazy thriller kick, which deposited me down a De Palma rabbit hole where Tubi noticed what I’d been watching and offered more of the same. And to some extent, I think it’s just a coincidence. I watched plenty of other stuff that I loved last year, but some of it already got its own post, or at least a passing mention (e.g., The Substance, Immaculate, Infinity Pool, or the Spanish language Dracula). The borders of genre are permeable and inconsistent. There is such little significant formal difference between a “slasher” about a masked-stalker picking off teens, a “giallo” about a black-gloved madman dispatching stylish, beautiful Europeans, or a grimy NYC or LA set “thriller” about police hunting a psycho who’s murdering, for example, workers at a phone sex line (it didn’t make the cut, but I rather enjoyed Out of the Dark (1988) in which a clown-masked maniac does exactly this). Sure, there are identifying markers – masks, gloves, police, but any of those could easily (and often do) surface in any of the other genres. Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975), clearly a giallo, features a murderer in a motorcycle helmet which feels like a slasher mask; Killer Workout (1987), an enjoyably absurd slasher, rather turns on the police investigation (which feels like a thriller thing); and the above-praised Dressed to Kill, a thriller, has a killer with black giallo gloves. In all cases, there is a confluence of generally human killers, psycho-sexual death drive, a sense of iterative tropes/procedure, multiple stalk/chase/kill set pieces, and a lurid, sensationalistic mood.
Which, finally, brings be to The Majorettes. This was a random watch on Tubi while stranded on a recent layover – I knew nothing about it going in, and this genre busting film really delivered. This could easily be taken as a low quality effort, a cheap hack job of a flick that can’t figure out what genre it’s in and has little new to offer, but boy oh boy, did I enjoy it (I’d thought I might devote a post all to it, but then decided that I was already late with this year-in-review post – I mean, it’s almost the end of January already, geez – and that I should therefore just include it here). Is it cheesy? Yep. Are there jaw dropping moments of what-the-hell-am-I-watching? Oh yeah! Do many of the performances strain credulity? You better believe it! But this was also one of the most consistently enjoyable movies I watched all year, fun both as a gloriously campy curiosity and surprisingly effective as a twisting, turning mystery that made choices I had not seen coming. Given how some aspects feel, let’s say, “less than professional,” I’m shocked at what a tight little flick it is, with an ending that packs a chilling, icky punch.
If, by the end of its opening credit sequence of twangy-zappy- synth groove overlaying old-school video toaster graphics of a florescent, animated twirling baton, ending in a bewigged, skeletal majorette behind the title card, you’re not already in love, turn back now – this movie is not for you. If, past that, the way too long sequence of high school majorettes lamely dancing in the gym for a photo session while a creepy janitor ogles them, setting him up as a possible suspect in the killings to come, doesn’t tickle your fancy as an lovably inessential ingredient of a kind of 80s slasher, you should really know better than to go on. But if this is, instead, comfort food for you like Thanksgiving leftovers, you are in for a treat.
The movie continues for a little less than an hour as a relatively normal slasher flick – mostly teen girls (some boys, but they’re not really the targets) being murdered by a masked man – necking in a car in the woods with a boy, in the school shower, in the pool, with a very ‘regional’ charm. This does not feel like a product of Hollywood, but something smaller, more personal, with some shaky performances to be sure, but like a piece where the filmmaker has some perspective on themes of religion, sex, youth, and violence, and is making his movie his way. The fact that nothing in that perspective is new doesn’t detract from the amiability of its expression in some editing and camera choices, not to mention a startlingly unpredictable script. It was directed by William Hinzman, who appeared in many George Romero films (he was the first zombie in the graveyard in Night of the Living Dead), and he brings something unique to what could have been a very routine outing (I guess he only directed one other film, Flesheater (1988), which now I have to check out).
Notably, less than an hour in, the movie sloughs off the skin of its genre trappings and reveals itself as something completely different. As we’ve been watching kids get killed, many possible red herrings have been set up as likely murderers, but then, out of the blue, one villainous character (who is not the killer) unmasks the slasher-killer shockingly early in the runtime and ropes him into her schemes to rip off and murder an old lady for her fortune. This twist felt kind of giallo to me – backstabbing backstabbers backstabbing each other with the narrative thrown into a kind of engaging instability.
But then, just when you think you know what kind of movie it has suddenly become, it flips again, and that whole giallo subplot is disrupted by the absurdly, laughably eeeeevil motorcycle gang (oh my, seriously) killing the wrong person – totally randomly. Once again, we have no idea what movie we’re watching – what is it even about now? And with the little time left, how will we ever resolve the plot about the masked killer, the kids targeted by him, and the police on his trail? Well, we sort of will, but first we need to go on a wild detour into revenge-action territory as a previously unremarkable kid Rambos it up, shirtlessly taking his assault rifle (yup) into the local woods to hunt down the abovementioned, hilariously bad-guy-ish gang of local drug dealing toughs. At least four different vehicles blow up, cause it was 1986, and (kind of a big spoiler coming here – so if you might want to check this out, skip the rest of this review – at the time of writing, it’s free to stream on both Tubi and Youtube) with the previous murders incorrectly attributed to the newly dead leader of the gang, the slasher-killer gets away with it all, the movie ending in honestly disturbing fashion with him watching a new, much younger group of girls having what seems like their first majorette training, not yet mature enough for their adolescent sexuality to trigger his repressive religious murder drive, but knowing that one day it will, and patient enough to wait for it. Damn.
This movie, sometimes so silly and weird and totally free with genre “rules,” slams shut so very, very hard. All the sub-plots are tied up in a neat little bow and just as it began with horror in its approximation of a pretty typical slasher, before going off on a wild journey through cop procedural thriller, giallo murder mystery, teen-gang drug drama, and finally, explosive action-revenge flick, in the final moments, it leaves a revolting, horrific taste in the mouth. The killer is free, unpunished, unsuspected, and will do it all again, to these innocent children in right front of him (and us) now. And no one will stop him – this will go on forever – this is the world. Ugh. Seriously, it hits hard – that is horror.
So yeah – I loved it – I watched it twice in a week, and while the twists and turns could no longer surprise on second viewing, its weird mix of exuberant camp, surprising narrative strength, personal thematic expression, and independent, regional boldness still shone brightly. If you can vibe with its early genre tropes (and they don’t turn you off), I really recommend it. Thanks Tubi!
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And that is that. Happy New Year everybody! The last week of January, and I’m finally wrapping up 2024. I hope this new year treats you well, and I hope to be back sooner rather than later with more…
I mentioned last year when doing my annual “Top 10 New To Me” post that I had absolutely fallen in love with the Chucky TV series – I hadn’t had access to it yet and when it showed up on Shudder, I was so happy to find myself getting more into a new show than I had for just about anything since I’d first discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer way back when. It’s playfulness, its audacity, its twisted little heart, the way I care about the characters – both the ‘good ones’ and the ‘bad ones’, and the ways that it commits to actual puppetry and practical effects and can actually elicit a squirm from me in its glorious moments of extremity, I really love it. I love its vast storylines with characters that reach back to the very first films, and I love how willing it is to make big changes – just about anyone (any lovable character, any innocent child, any polar bear) can die at just about any time, and yet, I don’t lose interest (always a danger if you feel like it isn’t worth investing emotionally in characters who might not make it). And so, especially since I just got to watch the third (and due to cancellation, sadly, final) season, I’ve really had a hankering to revisit the films that preceded it, and now that 6 out of 7 have landed on Shudder, I think this is the time.
It’s been a while since watching most and I remember enjoying them all, but to varying degrees and in different ways – an interesting feature of the series being its wild stylistic shifts while maintaining unbroken continuity of narrative and character. Each has left a certain impression in my mind and I’m curious to return to them as a whole and look at it all as one piece. For now, I’m just going to do the films – for all that I love the show, watching three seasons of TV is just too much for one post (as if watching 7 films weren’t already pushing it). I’d originally thought I might also check out the recently released Doc of Chucky(2024), but again 7 films is already a lot… So I look forward to watching it when this is all over, but I don’t have a plan to write it up.
I’m renting the first one today and then I expect I may only have until the end of the month before the rest leave Shudder, so here’s hoping I can burn through this all with great alacrity. Wish me luck. And obviously, I think it should go without saying when digging into so many films, but spoilers will abound…
Child’s Play (1988)
So, this movie made a big impression on me well before I ever watched it. I was ten when it was released, and really not into horror yet, and I remember that the trailer wormed its way into my brain and really freaked me out. I had this talking ALF doll at the time that unfairly took on the brunt of my fears – I ended up tying it up and taping it up and putting it in a box, which I taped up again, and hid it in the closet, the terrible idea having been planted in my impressionable young mind that a beloved toy could come to life and try to kill you. Freaked. Me. Out. Finally, years later, I did watch the movie and I remember being impressed with how well it all worked. Let’s see how it holds up now.
This is the very doll – doesn’t look scary at all. I guess that’s the point.
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Ok, it holds up great! Wow – what a tight, fun, scary, even emotionally grounded little movie. I love when a horror flick taps into a simple, unsettling idea – the monster who can kill you in your dreams and from whom you can never be safe, the urban legend waiting to appear behind you in the bathroom mirror, the unseen and unknowable killer who is never explained and never caught who is calling you from inside your own house, and in this case, as frightened me so as a child, the idea that a marker of childhood, such as a toy, could simply be evil – and target you, a child. To be fair, all dolls can be at least a bit uncanny – with a human form, but not human, dead, glassy eyes, always wide open, clearly inanimate, but what was that movement out of the corner of my eye? Probably nothing – just my mind playing tricks on myself… It is creepy, it feels wrong, all presumed safety and innocence merely a mask for cruel intent. It’s just an object, easy to overlook, easy to discount, but it’s watching and waiting and when you least expect, it can try to kill you and everyone you love.
In short, a mother gets her little boy the wrong doll for his birthday – it’s possessed by a voodoo practicing serial killer – and it murders everyone around him, ultimately trying to insert its soul into his young body before being permanently trapped in that of the doll. When weird and deadly things start happening, Andy, the boy, keeps telling everyone “It was Chucky,” but for some reason, no one believes him (go figure), making him appear at best disassociated, and at worst, possibly psychopathic – could he be the one who hit his babysitter in the head with a tiny hammer and made her fall out a window to her death? Could he have killed the boy’s psychiatrist and a former associate of a notorious serial killer? I mean, that would be pretty weird, but he was there…
Writer Don Mancini, director Tom Holland, and the whole crew take this simple, scary idea and just execute it so well on every level. I love how we don’t really see Chucky move or speak (as himself, not with the pre-programmed phrases of the doll) until halfway through the movie. Until then, there is so much effective tension in POV shots of the unseen murderer, mixed with still shots of the doll, perhaps in a new location and simple reaction shots of those being stalked – fearful, but also laughing at themselves as there is seemingly no real danger, until there is. It’s a bit like holding off on showing the shark in Jaws.
The fact that we don’t show him move until so late also opens up that little seed of doubt that none of this is happening, and that Andy, the little boy, is in fact crazy and maybe even murderous – a notion at least somewhat entertained by more than a few characters in the movie, and a particularly horrific thought for his mother, Karen. I don’t think it ever fully takes hold for her, but you can see her resisting the terrible idea. And for the audience, I don’t know – I mean everyone who bought a ticket back in 1988 knew they were going to the ‘killer doll’ movie, so no one could seriously doubt what was happening, but the fact that there is a kind of plausible deniability for so long did something for my viewing experience as well, if nothing else, on the level of the mother’s horror in having to even entertain the possibility that her son could be crazy and even possibly dangerous.
I really believe in her love for him – how hard she’s trying – a single mother doing her best, struggling to get by and give Andy every little thing she can to make his young life a happy one after the death of his father, even going so far as buying the yearned for ‘toy of the season’ for him from a peddler in an alleyway with a 70% discount on account of being possessed by the soul of a serial killer (like you do). Also, I believe in Andy’s sweetness and vulnerability – I think the director, Tom Holland, really hit the jackpot when he cast young, Alex Vincent as Andy, only 6 years old at the time. There’s a moment early on when he lays waste to the kitchen making his mom breakfast in bed and proceeds to wake her up at 6:30 in the morning – something anyone could be expected to be at least irritated by, but when she tries to roll over and go back to sleep and he counters, “but it’s such a beautiful day!” yanking open the curtains and letting the sun shine in, you can see her heart warm, and it is lovely. You go to a movie like this for the killer doll, but I think it wouldn’t work half as well without this sense of love, their relationship grounding this big, explosive, successfully scary movie.
And then, after 45 minutes, when he is finally fully shown to be animate on screen, crudely swearing a blue streak and trying to tear Karen’s face to shreds, it is startling and disturbing, and also funny – the incongruity of something so obscene and violent exploding so suddenly into the film (all voiced by undersung national treasure, Brad Dourif – I mean Exorcist III alone…). And from then on, there is such excellent puppetry on display, mixed with a variety of filming methods that make Chucky feel truly alive and threatening – shots where I expect a little person was used so that the walking can look totally natural, but where we only see his shadow, close ups on a hand with a knife, eliding the full image of the killer doll: an eye here, a reaction there, and occasionally top-notch puppetry that brings it all to life. The film makers don’t’ overplay their hand, saving the shots of Chucky fully moving for maximum effect. And he is effective – whether as a menacingly saccharine toy with eyes that seem to follow you, as a knife wielding murderer, or as a resurrected killer looking to implant his soul in the body of a 6 year old boy. It all works.
There’s not an ounce of fat on this 87 minute, horrific, playful, suspenseful flick, and it frequently goes big – showing its roots as a 1988 film by virtue of the fact that things so regularly blow up. But seriously, it is really highly produced, and in the end, when they just can’t kill this little monster and he gets burned and shot to pieces and just keeps coming, he is effectively grotesque and scary in his burnt, melted state, internal metal structures left sticking out of his formerly plump little fingers like claws.
Finally, in singing the film’s praises, why doesn’t Chris Sarandon have a higher profile? His dry sardonic charm is such a treat, and between this, Fright Night, The Sentinel, and the Resurrected, not to mention voicing Jack Skellington in the Nightmare Before Christmas (and, not horror, but come on, The Princess Bride), it seems like he should be a huge star. I mean, I see that he has been working consistently for the last 50 years, but I don’t necessarily hear about him that often. Also, how has his character never shown up on the Chucky TV show – which managed to bring back just about any significant character who ever showed up in one of the films? Now that it’s been cancelled, that’s forever off the table, but who knows, maybe a future film? But I digress.
Seriously, this was a great movie – I’m so happy to have rewatched it, and you can see how it could spawn a franchise – even one that would eventually come to take such wild stylistic turns. Ok, on to part 2!
Child’s Play 2 (1990)
This was an era of sequels and franchises and I’m so glad that Chucky’s creator, and writer of the whole series (who later became its director and the showrunner of the TV show), Don Mancini didn’t follow the lead of so many other 80s slashes in primarily following the villain as he finds a new set of characters to slaughter, but instead stays focused on Andy (at least for now – later the focus would shift more to Chucky, but that will accompany a major stylistic change). That said, Andy is the only recurring character as I guess Catherine Hicks (who played Karen in the first installment) wasn’t available (I read she was pregnant at the time of filming); her character is institutionalized for telling everyone the truth of what had happened to them and Andy is put into the foster care system, where eventually Chucky (not so dead after all) comes to find him, still intent on stealing Andy’s young body before he’s forever trapped in that of the doll. I think the Chucky films and TV show probably have some of the best continuity in horror, and that begins here.
In many ways, this feels like a standard sequel. It’s not entirely necessary, but it is fun, it has some good suspense sequences, a couple enjoyable characters (such as Kyle – the older foster sister who will return on the TV show, or the mean teacher who gets beaten to death with a ruler), and a top notch ending sequence in the toy factory where the Good Guy dolls are made. I don’t think that final scene is scary per se, but it is tons of fun; it is exciting, and colorful, and just as burned up Chucky at the end of the first movie is gross and creepy looking, melted, deformed, legs ripped off, knife handed Chucky is really grotesquely fun, and then he blows up. Cool.
I also enjoy the not-exactly-satire, but let’s say “bite” of the opening scene with the owner of the company that produces the Good Guy dolls dealing with the fallout of bad publicity from the much publicized case of a little boy saying their doll had tried to kill him. The owner is such a bastard and, by extension, there is clear editorializing about the self-serving greed and cruelty of modern business – it’s really not at all what the movie’s about, but it has fun making the owner of this toy company so very schmucky.
I feel like the second and third films are both a bit typical as sequels go, but at least this one holds up as a fun watch, even if the suspense of the first half of the first film couldn’t possibly be recreated as we’ve already seen the pint sized killer, and in this one, we see much more of him from early on. If I do have a criticism, it might be that we see him too much and whereas the first movie had such a good effect from teasing a hand here, a shadow there, in this case, he’s always running around and it’s hard for the puppetry to really make us all that scared of him.
But also, the more we get to know Chucky, probably the less scary he gets. I mean, he’s always a brutal killer, and he’s not at all a nice guy – he’s rather a total jerk, but at the same time, he is fun – and he has fun. He’s crude and mean and downright evil, but always an enjoyable screen presence, cracking wise and taking joy in his work. I suppose there’s a bit of shared DNA with Freddy Krueger – so many of the 80s slasher killers were some silent stalker in a mask – but Freddy and Chucky are both mouths – they just keep talking, joking, taunting, screaming. And both are really enjoyable murderous assholes. You don’t like either of them in the sense that you’d want to be friends or get a coffee or something – they’d kill you and mock you the whole time, but they are both fun to watch. Honestly, of the two of them, I feel Chucky is the weirder character, and I think one could have some ambivalence about him – but I think that will more come into play in the 4th and 5th films – for now, in the first two movies, he just has a couple elements that I wouldn’t expect to go together:
So, before he was a doll, he was a human killer, Charles Lee Ray, aka, “the lakeside strangler.” When we first meet him in Child’s Play, running from the cops with some kind of criminal partner, he looks kind of like a petty gangster, and his gruff personality and vulgar argot seems to match that. But he’s also a prolific serial killer, suggesting some kind of intelligent lone wolf predator. And also, we eventually hear that his murders all had a ritual voodoo element to them, such that he could magically install his dying soul in a doll and kick off this long running series, implying an altogether different, supernatural, even spiritual, focus. These three angles feel like they could be three different characters, but they come together to make him specific, unique.
I don’t remember how much that develops in the third movie (which I don’t recall being a series highlight – I see a “trivia note” on IMDB saying that it was Mancini’s least favorite as it was rushed into production so quickly that he didn’t have time to come up with new ideas), but it will really explode in the 4th and 5th. So with that, ever onward…
Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking (1991)
Ok, so admittedly another rapid turnaround sequel, capitalizing on the success of the first flick, but I must say I enjoyed this more than I’d expected to. Following the first, it takes better advantage of the tension that comes when we don’t see the doll move – and there is a whole new set of characters who have no reason to suspect this toy might slice their throat open. Following the second, it sets up a really fun, visual stage for the finale, moving the proceedings to a carnival, specifically inside the most impressive ride through haunted house I’ve ever seen – it’s a fun place to put this big final conflict, even if it is a bit of a beat by beat recreation of what’s come before. It’s got some enjoyable casting, such as the great Andrew Robinson (Hellraiser, Dirty Harry) as a creep barber, far too interested in the state of his young charges’ hair, who gets a real close trim. And while much of the story is a bit rote, it does hit a couple notes of, if not exactly satire, then at least viewpoint.
Following the opening of the second film, we start again with the toy company that produces the good guy dolls, deciding once more that no one remembers or cares about Andy Barklay and his killer doll and that they should put these ugly toys back on the market. Clearing the mess of the last film’s climax out of their factory, some blood from the previous Chucky doll drips into the vat of melted plastic and that’s apparently enough for Chucky to find new life on the production line, and the first thing he does is kill the evil CEO of the company. This is an enjoyable start, and perhaps it taps into the new direction the series will take, with a greater focus on Chucky himself – he is still an evil little bastard, but when we’re given such a jerk for him to kill first, we are invited to enjoy Chucky all the more (later, we won’t exactly be rooting for him to kill a bunch of kids – or maybe you will – I don’t judge).
And then we have the new setting of the film – it is years later (though this film was already in production before number 2 was released) and Andy (now recast as an older, teenaged actor), having bounced around the foster care system for close to a decade, is now enrolled at a military academy. The military isn’t exactly demonized, but neither is it shown in a particularly pleasant light, and I feel like that is an element of the abovementioned viewpoint – this institutional environment, fueled by hierarchy and bullying and authoritarian power games is not a healthy place for anyone, and its demand to ‘be tough’ or ‘be a man’ calls for a suppression of feeling that reflects the world’s refusal to believe what Andy experienced as a young kid and is still haunted by.
As Andy is older and not so vulnerable, I think we do see a shift of perspective to Chucky beginning here which will come to greater fruition in future films. He’s not a protagonist or anything, but he’s also not just an attacking killer – we see him get frustrated – try things and be balked by obstacles, make a new plan and target a new victim (a new, younger kid whose body he can try to steal). This also allows him scenes where he doesn’t need to move so much and thus, the puppetry can sustain a greater degree of verisimilitude than some moments in the second film.
But, by the end, the story goes pretty much where one might expect it to, we have a big showdown in a cool setting, and Chucky gets cut to shreds by a giant spinning fan – though having seen him return from much worse, I don’t think anyone would have reason to believe he wouldn’t be back. Honestly, I found it surprising that we didn’t have some final scare stinger to indicate as much, but also I guess it ended up being a longer period before the next film and perhaps its fate wasn’t so certain at the time. So let’s move on as the series really takes a turn, changes its naming convention, and Mancini injects some fresh new life into the franchise.
Bride of Chucky (1998)
So the first three films are all “Child’s Play” movies. With the fourth, they really become “Chucky” movies (or “_______ of Chucky,” to be precise), both in name and focus. But while many of the big 80s slashers seemed to care more about following their famous killers from film to film than their victims, they never took the time to get to know those killers like we do here. This is something different, and really fascinating, not to mention, a hoot. If there wasn’t enough time to come up with something new between the second and third film, in the 7 years between 3 and 4, Mancini was able to innovate. While they were still “Child’s Play” movies, the series mostly wanted to scare the viewer with its creepy, foul-mouthed, doll-inhabiting killer, but with Ronny Yu’s Bride of Chucky, that element of suspense is all but abandoned in favor of the kind of horror inherent in a black comedy, in the delicious fun of perversely getting to know and love the little murderer, plus his newly introduced paramour. I don’t think it really goes for many scares, but it commits to its violence and gore, and I think there is still something of horror in the film encouraging us to hang out with, and to some extent, root for its leading couple.
From the get go, the movie takes on a much more comic tone with a sight gag of the markers of many other famous horror icons being stored in a police evidence locker (a claw glove, a hockey mask, etc) before a garbage bag filled with the shredded remains of the Chucky doll from the third film is identified and purloined. And when the thief (a dirty cop after a quick payday) is bloodily dispatched by the newly introduced Tiffany Valentine (Jennifer Tilly at the height of her powers, right after Bound, and not long after her Oscar nominated turn in Bullets over Broadway), a whole new vibe is ushered in with her breathy, sexy-baby voice and her hyper-femme persona – Tiffany brings an entirely new, campy kind of fun into the world of these films.
She resurrects her long lost lover (she and Chucky had been an item before he ended up in the doll), he in turn almost kills her and traps her in a doll body as well, and they set off on an adventure to retrieve a lost voodoo amulet that will help them secure new bodies and carry on their romance/life of crime. This means hitching a ride with some teenagers running away together, who are leaving a trail of bodies in their path that each suspects the other is responsible for, before finally discovering that they’re being held hostage by Bonne and Clyde in doll form. The teens survive and seemingly defeat their plastic captors, but we know Chucky and Tiffany will return (and furthermore, having physically reconnected earlier in the film, the movie ends with the surprise birth of Tiffany’s bloody, sharp toothed doll baby – so there is still someplace new for the story to go).
The teen couple is fine, and their story of young love, hounded by a controlling stepfather (a very enjoyably dickish John Ritter) and harried by a series of mysterious and disturbing murders, tracks reasonably well, but unlike Andy in the first three movies, it is hard to feel like they are really the main characters. Rather, the film is all about Chucky and Tiffany and their tumultuous love-hate relationship. He’s terrible to her and she imprisons and tortures him (and periodically, over the course of four films and three seasons of TV, tries to, and even periodically does succeed at killing him), but they also love each other (and are turned on by each other – 4 movies in, this R-rated horror franchise has its first sex scene, and it’s between dolls, of course). We are in new territory and watching and enjoying it all in a new way.
Most, though not all, of their victims are somehow shown to be “bad people” (the controlling stepdad, a crooked cop, a lame, wannabee serial killer, a couple stealing from unwitting newlyweds) and ala some other horror franchises, the kills get more creative (a bunch of nails in the face, a champagne bottle shattering the mirror over a waterbed in a honeymoon suite), inviting us to enjoy the bloody mayhem with little reservation. The killer doll couple are rebuilding their relationship the best way they know how, and though they can be awful and petty and cruel, and frequently hate each other, they also bring out the best in each other and always eventually rekindle their love (of course, the “best” they bring out is “the best killer they each can be,” but that’s the wicked fun of a movie like this). The tension and heat of their relationship is where the film lives, and though it’s all explored with a kind of playful, campy distance, it still lands. This is something that will stay with the Chucky material through the remaining films and shows, even when the tone eventually goes back to being a bit more serious and scary.
I am not an expert on this, but I think it must be rare for the screenwriter to be so synonymous with a series. Often it happens with the director of the first film, even if they have little to no involvement in subsequent efforts. If you think Nightmare on Elm Street, of course you think Wes Craven, or you associate Halloween with John Carpenter, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Tobe Hooper, and I think all quite rightly so. Even if they had only peripheral connection to the rest of the films in their respective franchises, they all left a creative stamp on the originals that set the path for all to follow. But in the case of Chucky, though I think Tom Holland did a great job with the first film (as he did with another favorite, Fright Night), it is writer Don Mancini that I primarily connect with this series. He has been shepherding the story and the character along for more than 35 years, and I think it’s in this entry that he made his identity and aesthetic more present. To be fair, Ronny Yu does a really nice job, and there is some real style occasionally on display, but I think in this film, the writer is asserting himself, and will soon come to fully dominate the material.
This movie came along during a time when, following the success of Scream, horror was getting more self-aware and self-parodying. Now, I don’t think Bride rises to the level of self-parody, but there is a change of tone that feels very of this era (and at least one or two meta-jokes, such as when, asked to explain how he came to be like this, Chucky says that if his life were a movie, it would take 3 or 4 sequels to cover it all). Still, I think that the introduction of this relationship at the heart of the story, twisted and dark, and quirky and fun as it is, is a unique element, which will only deepen in the next flick, and for which I’m hard pressed to think of parallel examples (no matter how much it directly cites Bride of Frankenstein). I sure wouldn’t want a relationship like Chucky and Tiffany have (I’m a much more low-drama type), but I really do enjoy watching them in it.
Seed of Chucky (2004)
This film is probably not for everyone, but I rather love it. Mancini continues further in the direction he’s been going, for the first time taking up the mantle of director himself, and creates a weird, fun, very campy, very outré, very over-the-top, gory, meta, absurd, hilarious, queer, and even occasionally touching family drama. I think all notions of scariness are temporarily abandoned in favor of following these relationships down a rabbit hole and reveling in a playful, bold, audacious extremity. It is still a horror film, both in terms of how many eviscerations, acid melts, and decapitations it offers and in terms of the newly introduced Glen/Glenda’s traumatic struggle to come to terms with the violence of their parents, a violence which they have, at least in part, inherited.
In short, the killer baby doll born at the end of the preceding film has grown to adolescence unaware of its patronage, a captor of a prickish British ventriloquist. One day, they see a featurette on TV about a “Chucky” film being made in Hollywood, based on the infamous urban legend of a killer doll linked to a string of unsolved murders, and starring Jennifer Tilly as the doll’s love interest. The doll escapes and makes the trek out west to find their parents (and is able to resurrect them out of animatronic dolls on set as they still have the magical amulet from the last film). Reanimated, Chucky and Tiffany learn they have a child who is struggling with gender identity issues (born, as a doll might be, without sex organs, they don’t know who or what they want to be – it’s somewhere between a trans and non-binary narrative, but let’s say culturally specific to the smooth-crotched-doll community). Chucky wants a boy and Tiffany wants a girl, so they settle on Glen/Glenda and make an attempt to be good role models and kick their murder addiction (unsuccessfully), while making a plan to put Tiffany into the body of Jennifer Tilly (who will be impregnated with Chucky’s seed (we have a title!) so that Glen/Glenda will have a human form) and put Chucky into the body of Rapper-Director, Redman (who may be casting Tilly in his upcoming biblical epic). Little, of course, goes to plan, but along the way, there are genuine character developments, and a fun ‘coming out scene’ by the end.
Don Mancini is an out gay creator, and as far as I know, that wasn’t being hidden before, but following the elements of camp introduced with Jennifer Tilly’s Tiffany in the last film, I’d say that this is the first time the series is really explicitly “queer.” Glen/Glenda’s story is entirely focused on a bundle of identity issues: there is the obvious question of gender (which will only deepen as the series progresses), but also, they really struggle with a question of who and what they are as a child of this killer pair. Are they also a killer? Is that something they were born with and can’t change, and should come to accept and love about themselves, or is it a choice they can turn their back on? Beyond that, though Chucky more or less comes to be as supportive of his gender-non-conforming kid as one can hope for (he’s still a murderous bastard, but after some time, gender is no longer an issue), Glen/Glenda initially has to deal with a father intent on making them accept ‘masculine traits,’ who is determined to make his child a ‘boy’ – we see them close to cracking under the stress of parental expectations and demands, and by the end, when Glen/Glenda cuts off their father’s limbs and head, shouting “are you proud of me now, daddy?” it is easy to see represented, the collected rage of many an effeminate little boy lashing out at a father who couldn’t accept his child.
Of course, the film also just takes on a much more ‘camp’ tone here. It never goes fully in the direction of parody, and it does maintain its own sense of reality, but there is an ‘extra’ quality to both performances and filmmaking that infers a kind of ironic distance (not to mention how Jennifer Tilly, voicing Tiffany, can speak both so deferentially and so bitchilly about ‘Jennifer Tilly,’ the real life actress – such as a moment when the doll has to drag Tilly’s unconscious body across the floor and complains about how fat she’s gotten). This camp quality is underlined by the inclusion of director, John Waters in a small cameo (his face gets melted off with acid as a kind of father-son bonding experience – but it’s ok; he’ll come back in a different role on the TV series).
But ultimately, the most enjoyable queer-adjacent – coming to love yourself and being proud of who and what you are – development belongs to Chucky himself. For four films, spanning 14 years, he has been trying to get out of this doll body and be human again. Finally here, on the cusp of completing the plan (though Redman is now dead and Chucky would be ending up in the body of Tilly’s chauffer), at the last moment, Chucky decides that he likes who he is and there’s no need to change and be a human again. He is a killer doll and he likes being a killer doll – he finally fully embraces his own ‘othered’ identity and proudly ‘comes out.’ It’s not exactly a moving moment (though Glen/Glenda does get some of those), but it is a fun moment, an “ah, I see what you’re doing there” little twist that I certainly appreciated. And seriously, good for him. We all love him as a killer doll – if he were human, he’d just be a murderous jerk (as we will see in the next film).
All of this may sound heavy handed or overly serious, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. For all that the film plays with these issues of gender and identity, it does so in a wild, free way, which I think could come off as too much, or even insensitive to a contemporary Gen-Z crowd – but isn’t that part of the joy of camp? Being able to go so over the top, being able to offend, but all with a playful irony – we can enjoy the “badness” of it, but no one is advocating for any of these things actually being “good.” There is a rich frisson in that paradox which makes it all the more enjoyable (and which also separates this sort of work from the kid of straight-out, ugly edge-lording one might bump into on Twitter). This is the least scary, but probably the goriest film of the series to this point. It has more sex and nudity, by far. It has a puppet masturbating to an issue of Fangoria magazine. It has Brittney Spears being exploded in a car crash. It has a head being garroted off someone’s body as puppet lovers get spattered with his blood and share a genuine romantic moment. It has Oscar nominated actress, Jennifer Tilly being inseminated against her will by a doll with a turkey baster. It has a perspective about social matters, but it expresses that perspective in an absurd, gleefully violent and perverse way, and it is all the more lovable for it.
From time to time, there is a horror movie that wears its socio-political perspective on its sleeve so much that it gets blowback. While I generally find the kind of people who would complain about, for example, the feminist messaging of a movie like the 2019 Black Christmas unpleasant jerks, I can agree that a film can suffer from being too on-the-nose – I can appreciate a message and still feel that themes are better explored in dramatic action than voiced as polemic artificially put into the mouths of characters by a well-meaning author. But I must say that in this case, while the perspective of the creator is obvious, it is also handled with an ironic humor and so covered in eviscerations and beheadings that I think it comes across so much more enjoyably than it otherwise might.
Perhaps not every little thing works perfectly – some jokes may feel obvious, and what exactly was with that “made in Japan” thing, given that we know the Good Guy factory was in or near Chicago in the first two films, but little failings notwithstanding, this one is rather a delight. Sadly, it was the last one released cinematically.
Curse of Chucky (2013)
Following the progressively higher camp of the last two entries, Curse of Chucky (again written and directed by Mancini) takes a hard turn back to straight horror territory (but not too straight – there’s at least one lesbian couple), initially feeling so different as to seem like a bit of a soft reboot (though by the end, all of the story is woven together and this is clearly an expansion and continuation of all that has come before). But stylistically, it feels completely different, and is the first time in decades that a Chucky film has been particularly scary.
Key to that (beyond filmmaking that definitely takes on a darker, more menacing tone than the last few films) is the fact that for the first time in quite a while, we are aligned with new protagonists who are not Chucky et al.; nor are they anyone who knows who Chucky is or has fought him before (as was true for Andy in the first two sequels). Primarily, we have Nica Pierce, and her family which has come together following the seeming suicide of her mother (the night after a Good Guy doll was delivered to her, sent by an unknown person). Of course, we know who Chucky is and that he is clearly behind the deaths that start piling up, but these people don’t, and just as in the first film, Chucky isn’t shown to move or speak of his own accord until approximately halfway through the runtime, which really promotes scariness.
Past that, it is quite a successful, tight little bottle movie – over the course of just more than 24 hours, in this one house, the doll is delivered, the mother dies, the family comes together, and, one by one, just about everyone else is picked off until pretty much only Nica remains, following a pretty classic slasher formula (which hasn’t been the case for earlier films in the series), before revealing a much more personal story at its core. It is dark and suspenseful, well shot and scored, and it plays with the dramatic irony inherent in the audience knowing much more about this doll than the characters. That said, there is still a bit of a dark, comic tone, such that some characters seem simply doomed by virtue of how humorously unpleasant they are. Thus, as with a pretty standard slasher, there is some fun to be had from worrying that a character might be killed, but there’s also fun to be had, waiting for some jerk or another to bite it. Past that, for a loyal viewer, it is quite mysterious – for most of the film, we are left to wonder what Chucky is doing here – what is he after? Why is he targeting these people specifically? After spending so much time with him as a viewpoint character, having his intentions suddenly closed off to us, creates a sense of intrigue, and I think also makes him scarier again, leaving us far more in the position of his potential and eventual victims.
Furthermore, when we finally learn what the connection is between Nica’s family and Chucky, how far back it goes and how each has cause to blame the other for their respective fates (rightly or wrongly – I think Nica stands, so to speak (she’s spent her life in a wheelchair – because of him) on far more solid ground here), Chucky comes off as a more menacing, uglier character than he has in some time. We have flashbacks to the series of events that led up to him being chased by the police at the beginning of the first film when, at the edge of death, he put his soul into the doll. In those flashbacks, Chucky is less a hilariously crude and violent puppet, and more a cruel psychopath who would hold a pregnant woman hostage, creepily pitching woo at her while murdering her husband and threatening her family, before leaving her to die with a knife in her belly, such that the baby she births (Nica) is born paraplegic. He’s not fun – he’s disturbing and frightening. And yet, when we flash back to the present, in doll form, he’s still a good time – that’s how movies work.
There’s also a fun bit of behind the scenes family connection as Nica is played by Fiona Dourif, daughter of Brad Dourif, who’s been voicing Chucky since the very beginning. And she’s great – a very warm screen presence, giving us a character who will go through a great deal before all is said and done (and who will later in the franchise be called on to deliver a solid vocal impersonation of her dad).
And then, after feeling like such a standalone movie for 80 of its 97 minutes, so much so that it could even feel like some kind of reboot, so disconnected from everything else, the penny drops and everything slams into clarity. This is still a series, and the ending of this movie both reaches back and looks forward, setting up a new context for what is next to come. In short, it doesn’t end well for Nica, but she’s still alive, and she and Chucky and Tiffany (as well as at least one key character we haven’t seen in ages) will all be back in the next film, and on three seasons of TV.
This really was a good time, and it is interesting how the series of films really seems to occasionally reinvent itself, all while continuing a larger story, relatively consistent in its history (though maybe not always in its rules of “how possessed dolls work” – why doesn’t Chucky bleed anymore?). Ok, only one more to go…
Cult of Chucky (2017)
An interesting change that applies to both Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky is that unlike earlier entries in the series, Chucky has now been active for years between the installments. At the end of the first 4 films, Chucky was melted or exploded or ripped to shreds or burned and shot – each time, he was at least seemingly dead. Not so at the end of Seed. That time, he survived and went off to do whatever he was going to do for years until resurfacing in Curse, with a plan obscured to us. The same is true for Cult. Obviously, so much must have happened between the two films, and while some of it is inferred, we will never know everything, helping to build both mystery and a sense of a larger life passing beyond our view – this is only one moment in a bigger story, and we won’t ever get to see the whole picture. Thus, this movie feels the most like an entry in a serial, laying the groundwork for the TV show to come, both in terms of characters and important plot developments, as well as in the forward momentum of this kind of continuing narrative. That said, this is also, beat for beat, one of the most engaging movies in the series – I would have been happy if it had felt a bit more complete by the end, but moment to moment, I was totally in, and ate up the unfolding story.
In Cult, we at least touch base with a significant character from each era of the Chucky franchise. Andy (from the first three) returns, played once again by Alex Vincent, all grown up himself, but is also joined by Tiffany (from the next two) and Nica (from the sixth) (plus, the post credits sequence reintroduces a key figure from Child’s Play 2). And in combining all of these significant figures, Cult carries forward something of each era’s tones. We once again have a scary story about someone who knows that a little doll is responsible for all this murder and mayhem, but whom no one believes, this time not because they are a child, but because Nica, following the events of the first film, has been held responsible for the deaths of her family and imprisoned in an insane asylum. But added to that genuinely scary context and style, we still retain something of the camp-adjacent black comedy of Bride and Seed, and I think this might be the funniest Chucky himself has been for the whole series to date (“Ok, let me explain something to you. I am a vintage, mass marketed children’s toy from the ’80s, standing right in front of you, holding a very sharp scalpel”). And then there is the newfound serial hook of it all, which I feel has particularly come to play in the final two films, and which sets up much of the feeling of the TV show. The second and third films, while both fun in their ways, had felt a bit like retreads of the first – the next two went off in a wild, totally different direction – now the story is really moving forward, developing and changing significantly from one feature to the next.
And as a lead to anchor it all, Fiona Dourif shines. I feel for her plight, both in terms of her Cassandra-esque nightmare, and in her survivor’s guilt, which has allowed her terrible, abusive therapist to gaslight her into accepting that she was actually responsible for the deaths in the last film, though she very clearly knows differently. And then, by the end, when Chucky successfully hops into her body, somehow miraculously, at least while he’s in possession of it, healing her of the paraplegia he’d caused her in utero, she makes Charles Lee Ray an enjoyable human villain for the first time, imbuing herself with the play inherent in the doll, which hadn’t fully surfaced in other portrayals of him in his non-evil-doll form. As she plays it, his wicked delight is simply infectious – I mean, he’s always cackled in evil madman fashion (I saw Mancini on Shudder’s Queer for Fear documentary citing the original Invisible Man as a direct inspiration), but this may be the most I’ve vibed with it.
And there are new twists and turns, namely, due to the fact that between films, Chucky leaned a new voodoo spell that now lets him split his soul into multiple vessels, letting him animate many killer dolls at the same time – and letting them hilariously bicker with and praise and/or mock each other. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Andy into the story, as he advances his own plots to get revenge on the doll that stole his childhood, adds a wildcard to the mix. Many elements are in play at all times, and anything can happen.
As with the previous entry, much of the runtime functions as a standalone film, frequently scary and gory in ways that got a couple of gasps or cringes out of me, but also consistently funny, and almost always intriguing, with small touches of gothic mystery layered atop the cold, clinical, creepy setting of the institution, with the main gestures towards larger serialization coming primarily at the end. Also like the last movie, this is a very contained story – almost all taking place in the asylum during a relatively set period of time – and it gives room for some very enjoyable performances from both Dourifs, father and daughter, as well as the other denizens of the hospital, and of course, eventually, Jennifer Tilly. During a post credit sequence, we even meet Kyle again (the older foster sister from the second film), so just about the only significant figures still absent are Glen and Glenda (who will return on TV) and Andy’s mom – who we’ve seen him speak to on the phone, but who never made it back onto screen (also, as written above, I would love to see the return of Chris Sarandon’s Detective Norris from the first film, but I’m not holding my breath).
All in all, the film series, as it stands, goes out on a high point, and leaves things set up for TV to carry the story forward (while also introducing new main characters, all with their own storylines and main preoccupations).
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Well, this was a fun little project – it’s been a blast to revisit these all, and I can’t really express how much I appreciate the narrative and stylistic variety on display. There are a few other, “bigger” horror franchises, but for me, this one holds up the best as a whole, picture to picture. Sure, I may like the first Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street more than many of these, but the level of quality running through this whole series, the sense of larger continuity, and the visible artistic play that’s allowed the series’ creators to take on such wide ranging approaches have all kept the series both fresh and fun, while also being so consistent and rooted in continuing characters, raising this series up above the pack.
Sometime I will watch both the recent doc, which I just don’t have time for right now, and rewatch the show, which has been some of the most fun I’ve had watching TV in years, but for now, I think seven films is enough to hit publish on. Hope you’re all having a good November out there.
