We’re coming in on a bit of a milestone here – in a couple of weeks, this blog will be 5 years old. I mean, that’s not so mature – it can’t buy cigarettes or vote or anything, but regardless, I’m proud to still be at it, five years in (and if it were a cheddar, it would be extra sharp with a bold, sharp bite). Who knows what it will grow up to be, but I feel we can at least breathe a sigh of relief that at this point, crib death is unlikely. And in that spirit of solace and joy, I thought it a good time to reflect back on some of what I consider to be my best work.
In these last five years, I think the character of the blog has stayed fairly constant, even if the publication schedule slowed considerably after the first year (to be fair, I started with a big folder of texts I’d already written, so it was easy to post twice a week – you might even call it cheating), and I have covered a wide range of films, books, and themes. I recently added a new page in the main menu – Themes, including groups of posts on the same topic or director (I just can’t stop writing about Lesbian Vampires or Fulci). If you’re new here, have a look. It could be a good starting point (besides this post, of course).
So, today, to celebrate this anniversary, I’m going to highlight a few of the texts of which I’m most proud (aiming for 10, might be 11 – Sophie only had to choose between two kids). Some of these have found a readership over the years (according to Google Analytics). Some haven’t really, but all have something that I love – an occasional turn of phrase that I take pride in, perhaps an observation I feel is significant, or in some cases, a vague feeling I managed to satisfyingly put a finger on. So, without further ado…
Edgar Allen Poe was one of my earliest entry points to the genre. Long before I ever considered myself a horror fan, I had my “Collected Works” and loved, primarily, his prose (though a couple of poems stuck – like many, my introduction in primary school was certainly “The Raven”). As long as I can remember, I’ve loved his story, “The Imp of the Perverse.” In it Poe evocatively describes a significant human psychological tendency that often goes unnoted. Here, I discuss Poe’s tale, but also get into this idea of the drive to “do wrong for wrong’s sake” and its implications for the horror genre. This is a topic that had been on my mind for years since first reading the story in high school and it felt freeing to put it down on the page.
I was totally into The Craft when it came out in 1996 and it still has a nostalgic place in my heart, but I also always felt somehow uncomfortable with it, like there was some messaging that left a bad taste in my mouth. In this post, I do praise what I think is lovable about the film, but also, I think I manage to offer a reading of its class politics that kinda turned me off. It was satisfying to think that out and put it into words. And I must say, it’s a reading I haven’t seen elsewhere of the film.
Bob Clark’s Black Christmas is just one of my absolute all-time favorites. Full of character, and characters, it is gorgeous, funny, dramatically rich, and at the end of the day, it is simply damn scary. I will always remember how the first time I saw it, when it was over, I had to go around my apartment, making sure all the lights were turned on and the doors and windows were locked. It really got under my skin. This is simply a celebratory post, trying to detail just what it is about this Christmas proto-slasher that works so well. I think occasionally, I’m successful.
Another beloved film, and in my opinion, so ahead of its time. It isn’t quite “meta” on the order of Scream, but coming at the tail end of the golden era of slashers, it really exists in dialogue with what had come before it. All while being so funny and playful and ironic, as well as occasionally actually disturbing and unsettling. It’s a perfect balance of cleverly and critically commenting on its own genre tropes, while at the same time, successfully enacting those tropes. It isn’t textual like Scream is – no one is talking about horror movies, but its perspective reads so strongly in the camera and the characters and the writing. It’s a surprisingly great movie and I rather like my description of it.
I’ve always had a deep affection both for King’s novel and Kubrick’s film, but they are so, so, so different. This isn’t about judging which is better (I know a certain Maine author has strong opinions on that point), but rather, I look at each on their own terms to see how, if anything, they complement each other. A few years back, I had the pleasure of catching Kubrick’s Shining at a midnight screening, and I came away from it with a new read on how the film works. For me, so much of their difference is rooted in the chosen main character. For King, it is clearly Jack, and it is a tragic story of an alcoholic father, who loves his family, giving in to his worst impulses, and becoming one who would do them grave harm. For Kubrick, I think the main character is really Danny, a young boy who loves his father, but is scared of him, who can’t really understand him, or what sometimes makes him and the rest of the horrifying world he inhabits so threatening. And that difference of perspective really changes everything – one is a terrifying tragedy and the other is cosmic horror. I go into it in much more detail in the post.
This one is a little different – rather than writing specifically about one film, or even five films, in this case, I dug into a sub-genre (and one that many would not term “horror”). One week, I watched perhaps 12 “youth runs wild” pictures, all about juvenile delinquents and ne’er do wells, generally from the 50s. They may not feature werewolves or vampires (though, actually, a couple do), but they still express a deep fear society was dealing with at that time of the young, of the still new concept of “the teenager.” These untamed beasts were seen as a threat to society, to the country, to themselves, and the fear of them was surfacing in popular culture in much the same way that aliens and giant insects were representing a terror of the “red threat,” This post was in preparation for writing a script for an homage/sendup of these flicks for my cabaret group, La Folie Retro Cabaret Show.
I really enjoyed putting this one together. The Bela Lugosi Dracula is of course iconic, but many have never seen the Spanish language version that was filmed on the same sets concurrently. Tod Browning shot his film during the day and George Melford got access to the sets at night. They are of course similar in many ways – essentially the same script (though there are points of divergence), many of the same shots even, but they are ultimately very different films, each with its own significant strengths (which are interestingly often weak points for the other film). I dig through both in some detail, often with comparative screenshots. (Also, I briefly touch on the Frank Langella 1977 Dracula, but the meat and potatoes of the post are the 1931 films.) I feel the comparison yields insight and feel good about the work done here.
Sleepaway Camp is one of those “guilty pleasures” for a lot of people. Campy and trashy and sleazy and fun. But I have no guilt – I think it’s actually quite a good movie, and in spite of falling into a trope which is often quite harmful (I won’t name it here because it is a big spoiler), I feel it is effectively very progressive and positive. Was it meant to be? Doubtful. I can only assume it was trying to be shocking and transgressive, but even if accidentally, I feel like this mean little slasher that features children being murdered at summer camp rather has its heart in a good place. And the fact that it isn’t “trying” to promote something “good” means that it is ironically better able to do so than something that is and which therefore, only comes across as strident and hectoring. And it is just truly a blast. I’m glad I was able to dig into these ideas.
I am quite the fan of Grady Hendrix and was really struck by his most recent novel – seriously, I remember staying up way too late, reading perhaps the last hundred pages – the whole time trying to stop the bed from shaking cause I couldn’t stop weeping, but I didn’t want to wake up my wife who was sleeping beside me. Great book – dealing with both a very real, historical harm that was done to groups of young women, and also supernatural horrors and things that cannot be fully understood. But reading it also put me in mind of a strong current in at least contemporary horror – what can be termed “good for her” flicks and I wanted to explore that theme more broadly. I think there are many interesting discussions to be had around the topic, and I really enjoyed getting into it a little bit – some writing about books and movies, some theorizing, some personal response. This is one of my favorite posts.
I came out of seeing Sinners in the cinema just all abuzz with excitement. I’d found it thrilling and moving and cool, rich with feeling and history. But the more I thought about it, I also found the movie challenging on a personal level. There were ideas being communicated that I clashed with emotionally, if not intellectually – issues of culture and cultural appropriation and cultural siloing. It really stayed with me on both levels – for the next week I found myself listening to the soundtrack and vibing with it, but I also found myself really thinking about its argument. Writing about the film was an interesting process, trying to engage honestly and emotionally with the perspective of the film, one that I didn’t share, but which I could appreciate.
The most recent inclusion on this list – one could argue that William Friedkin’s Cruising isn’t even a horror movie, but in my humble opinion, one would be wrong. Honestly, on first viewing, it simply blew me away – so rich and weird and hard to get a clean read on. I had a great time dwelling on this picture and trying to put my thoughts into some kind of order. And I think that I did. Ambiguous and sleazy and exploitative and artful – it really does hit my sweet spots.
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And there we are – five years down. Now, let’s see what the future holds. Will I keep writing about Lesbian Vampires? Probably, but I’ve covered all the classics and contemporaries don’t quite scratch the same itch. Will I keep digging into Fulci? I’ll always love him, but I may have exhausted most of his canon that I’m likely to write about. Will I carry on down the rabbit hole of Italian genre work? Indubitably. Shakespeare wrote that “past is prologue,” so I imagine in many ways my pet themes will continue to occupy me. But I think there may be some new paths ahead as well – I feel way too uneducated on a lot of international horror. Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, Japan – I’ve barely scratched the surface and I know there is so much great stuff out there. There’s still a lot of exploitation fare that I find fascinating, but I haven’t seen enough of – like I’ve only seen one Herschell Gordon Lewis flick. I’ve covered a lot of Italian stuff, but that road goes on forever, and I think I’ve only written about three Bavas, and he deserves so much more. I think in the process of thinking and writing about this stuff for the last five years, one thing I’ve identified is that I really appreciate when value is found in the underappreciated. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed in thinking about horror, but finding the art, the meaning, the beauty, the passion in something discounted as merely prurient trash is deeply satisfying. And I’m sure there is no end to the amount of works out there worthy of consideration. Miles to go before I sleep and all.
Thank you for being here with me. Whatever brought you to my page, I’m happy to have you and I hope you have a look around. Check out the menu above to see different categories of posts on offer. And if something catches your interest, I’d love to hear from you – please feel free to comment on anything. I love writing here, but blogging can be lonely work, and it would be so nice to know how you found me and try to take the conversation forward.
Until then, I wish you well out there in the digital darkness…
(A quick aside – I just re-read my previous posts on Fulci films, of which there have been four or five, and at least three of them begin with something like, “You know, I’ve been covering a lot of artsy stuff lately, but nothing really HORRIFIC, so let’s talk Fulci!” I guess old Lucio has made a very specific impression on me.)
Lucio Fulci is easily one of my favorite horror directors, though he did work across many genres. It’s hard to square this with his later reputation as the godfather of gore, but in his early career, he produced no small share of sex comedies and westerns. But when it comes to horror, he delivered pure nightmares. Often lacking in what some might call “logic.” Rarely budgeted above the B-level. Occasionally working contentiously with his cast, but creating works of resonant atmosphere and image and dread that operate on the brain just like you want, eliciting that delicious shudder of an encounter with that which cannot be understood/endured/overcome/defined. And so, I’ve written about his movies a bunch here (10 of them to date, plus one documentary about him), but it’s been a while since I saw something new of his.
I do enjoy how Fulci gave himself cameos in most of his movies. Here he is as a friendly souvenir seller in The Devil’s Honey.
So that’s the goal today – three Fulci’s that I haven’t seen yet. These will all be from his late period towards the end of his life when he was experiencing severely declining health, which clearly took a toll on his artistic output. I don’t think these will be his best films. There may be real weaknesses on display, but given my deep respect for his catalogue, I am sure that they will be rewarding to explore. Also (and here comes the hypocrisy following my first paragraph in this post), they may not all be strictly horror, but I believe they will all help to illuminate the themes and tendencies of the truly significant work he did produce in the genre.
I hope I like them, but that’s not entirely the point, so much as to see what there is to find and seek to understand how they shed light on his output as a whole. So even if I don’t love one, I still plan to at least write something about it.
And so, without further ado, let’s get into The Devil’s Honey (1986), Demonia (1990), and Door to Silence (1991). And then as a bonus, I’ll touch on the written by Fulci, produced after Fulci’s death by Argento, and directed by neither of them, The Wax Mask (1996) as a fun coda. There will be spoilers for all.
Demonia (1990)
So I’d like to start out of order, basically to get this one out of the way. This is, sadly, the weakest Fulci film I’ve seen to date, and is probably a really good illustration of where his later career went and how tragically he suffered, spending his final years in what must have felt like artistic exile. Honestly, it is sad to engage with this artifact of his decline, but it is what happened. In short, as I’m sure I touched on when discussing a documentary about his life and work, as well as another film from the same year, the superior, darkly comic meta-exercise, Cat in the Brain (1990), Fulci’s final period of creative output had two long shadows looming over it: ill health and lack of money. In 1984, he first got sick, though he did recover and have another couple more good years, but by the end of the decade, he was fighting chronic Cirrhosis, Diabetes, and Hepatitis. He was constantly fatigued and it was inordinately difficult for him to complete a movie (though he still worked fairly prolifically). Furthermore, he was having great trouble securing financing. Partly, this was because producers didn’t trust that he was still a safe investment in his weakened state, but largely this was to do with unfortunate trends in the Italian film industry.
Since the 50s, Italy had been a powerhouse of genre cinema, flooding the market with affordably produced flicks that made up for low to mid-range budgets with a surfeit of style and panache: westerns, cop thrillers, gialli, and of course, horror. As I have read, homegrown viewers really subsidized these movies as there were only 2 TV stations and people would go to the cinema a couple times a week for entertainment. Then, with the introduction of commercial TV stations in the 80s, the bottom dropped out of the domestic genre market. There was still money for prestige pieces with higher budgets. But a lot of the money was being siphoned into cheaper TV production, which demanded safer content than a director like Fulci was known for. Low cost direct to video work could still get made, but budgets were greatly reduced. Adjusted for inflation, Fulci was sometimes working with budgets 1/20th the size of what he’d had ten years earlier (and, you know, he hadn’t exactly been making Ben Hur back then), moving from mid-range projects that could expect to be shown in cinemas domestically and internationally, to truly micro-budget features (produced by companies that were in the active process of going bankrupt) which might be lucky to show up on video in Japan.
This meant a drop in money to pay for materials, film, special effects and actors, of course, but I think what took the biggest hit on Fulci was that he could no longer afford some of his closest collaborators, whom he had worked with for years, who got his sensibilities, and who could deliver on his vision. Thus, his later work just doesn’t look/sound/feel right.
Which brings us to Demonia. It is not exactly a bad movie, like some fun trashy Z-grade “so bad it’s good” curio. Rather, it is simply flat. The beats of the story are there, but it feels empty, without depth, without surprises, listless, without joy (not a word you would generally associate with his movies, but still). Maybe in a different era, Fulci could have made something of it. But it just doesn’t do very much and doesn’t feel like it’s his. I think even when I’ve watched some of his stuff that was made on the low end of the budget scale, there has always been a sense of intentionality, and that is lacking here.
In short, a group of Canadian archeologists in a small town in Sicily set up camp near an old convent that the locals shun. One archeologist, Liza, feels particularly drawn to it though and she discovers, hidden in the basement, a secret chamber where long ago a group of nuns had been crucified. Apparently, they were “Satanic,” carrying out all manner of wicked rituals, like their so-called “orgies” (which in the one scene we’re shown consisted of two couples having sex on either side of a large room – you know your film is in trouble when you can’t scrounge any more for the orgy budget), and the good townspeople had stormed the convent to put a stop to their shenanigans (which, to be fair, beyond lame, underattended orgies, also included baby sacrifice).
Anyway, spectral nuns start picking people off (I enjoyed one scene where a headless ghost nun shoots a guy with a harpoon gun – just your typical medieval Satanist), and there’s a bit of a procedural as the cops try to get a handle on what’s going on. By the end, Liza’s been possessed by the evil sisters and wanders around burbling yellow goo out of her mouth for some reason before the current townspeople show up and burn everything, including poor Liza, down.
Again, it’s fine. It isn’t a disaster, but it has no verve, no seeming reason to be. That quality only surfaces once or twice in brief, wild moments of typically Fulci-esque gore. Notably, there’s a scene were an exposition dumping old cat lady is devoured by her cats (her only crime being sharing the exposition she’s in the movie to share – sometimes you just can’t win), some of them pulling out her eyes for an early snack (even at his lowest, Fulci could still enjoy delivering grotty eye trauma – and there is a satisfying pop as at least one of the wet orbs slips free of its socket), and also a pretty fun moment where a guy is, for some reason (it’s pretty sudden and random), stuck in a trap that goes on to tear him in half like a chicken wishbone (it isn’t particularly realistic, but is still pretty gross and pretty cool). As is so often the case, what Fulci’s film lacks in sense or verisimilitude, it makes up for with audacity.
But it is not a good movie, and I think it doesn’t really reflect much on the strengths of Fulci’s career, so much as it gives us a taste of how far he had fallen by this point. It is honestly quite sad to look at from that perspective.
The Door to Silence (1991)
It is easy to read into the timing of a final work, suggesting that the creator had been particularly focused on his mortality at the time. I think of Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker or Tony Todd’s recent turn in the most recent Final Destination flick. We look back at a piece, knowing that the artist was essentially dying at the time of production, and can’t help but interpret a meditation on their upcoming passing. That is surely the case with Fulci’s last completed work, Le Porte del Silenzio. And I am happy to report that while this hardly stands among his very best films, there is something here – some real feeling, an atmosphere, an inescapable dread worthy of his artistry. Fulci didn’t die until about 5 years later, but he never managed to work again after this, and it really feels like the filmmaker knew that his time was limited, felt that he was already living his own death.
And you really don’t have to dig deep to find that reading (in fact, it’s pretty explicitly what the movie is about). The story here follows a man, Melvin (John Savage) trying to drive home, a journey consistently frustrated, sidelined, and delayed. He has one kind or another of car trouble. His wheels spin hopelessly in deep mud. His engine breaks down. He gets stuck behind a hearse carrying a casket for someone also named Melvin, and just can’t overtake it. At one point, he almost has a tryst in a motel room with a mysterious attractive woman who’s been following him, but she explains that it isn’t yet the right time for them to be together and that she will meet him at his destination. He finds himself in a funeral home where every casket contains a Melvin and one is indeed his match. He gets arrested for breaking into the back of the hearse to rip open the casket, later explaining to the judge that he’s not crazy – he was just scared that the casket was carrying his own corpse (nope, not crazy at all, pay a fine and back on the road with you). A tarot card reader tells him he’s been dead for hours, and he keeps driving and driving and driving and driving. Each detour seems to loop him back on his route. He can’t progress – the clock in his car is frozen and he doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. The road seems inescapable and inevitable. Finally, one more time trying to overtake the portentous hearse, he crashes headfirst into an oncoming truck and that’s the end of him. The loop is closed, the cycle finished. The mysterious woman is on the scene and her license plate reads “DEATH” (da da duuuuun!).
I will say it opens very engagingly – the atmosphere of New Orleans, infused with jaunty funeral jazz sets us off on a good start to our journey. And the sense of mystery and doom is heavy and effective. Sadly, as time goes on, it does get to feeling repetitive and like it’s running long, even though it’s a pretty short movie. I guess it’s just so obvious from a pretty early point that he is dead and this is his road to oblivion, and the lack of suspense took a toll on my attention, but I do think the film works. It is a sad piece, a frustrated piece, and it is clearly being made by an artist with a strong feeling to express. The protagonist is already dead – though he doesn’t feel it yet, to the world he is. To his family, his career, his ability to have any effect outside of himself. And all that remains is a loop that feels never ending, but is clearly going in only one direction, and while there are many detours en route, he cannot turn back.
I could imagine that if he’d had a bit of money (which he absolutely did not), Fulci could have done more with this to make more of the experience – the episodes could have been stranger, more varied, in more locations, exploring Melvin’s coming death in other fashions. But even still, especially read in the light of what his life was at the time, I did find it a moving endeavor. It is not a “scary” movie. It features no gore or goo. But I think it is surely horror – the artist staring his own death in the mirror, and sharing with us the indignation, the depressing inevitability, the injustice of it all.
I mean, of course, considering the subject manner of Fulci’s catalogue, death is all over the place, but this is entirely about it. And however it might feel weak technically or underdeveloped narratively, it surely feels personal. To return to a criticism of the previous film, this one is wholly ‘intentional.’ There is a reason for it to be. It was a work the artist was driven to make.
And it barely even got to exist. I believe it was initially only released on VHS in Italy, where producer Joe D’Amato said it “didn’t even sell a single brochure.” It wasn’t until much more recently that is came to dvd and bluray.
Is it a forgotten classic? No. It is a spin on a tried and true formula. If you’ve read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” or have seen Carnival of Souls, you know where we’re going. But the degree to which it feels important to its creator, an artist who really did significant work in his lifetime and died in poverty and despair, makes it feel important, something worth seeing if you’ve taken an interest in his oeuvre. I watched it on Youtube.
The Devil’s Honey (1986)
So, now that we’ve delved into the ignominious end of the artist’s otherwise noteworthy career, let’s rewind a few years to before everything fell apart, to a work that many consider Fulci’s last good movie (and that others belittle for its saxophone aided cunnilingus scene). Let’s dig into a weird, weird, weird softcore erotic drama with some solid horror mood and ideas, The Devil’s Honey. As I understand, though it wasn’t released until 1986, it had been filmed back in 1984, right around the time that Fulci got sick the first time. I don’t know if he completed shooting before falling ill, but if not, he clearly recovered after that first bout enough to operate at full strength when making this picture – it’s kinda great.
Kinda great and really weird – to a fascinating degree. This is in no way explicitly a horror movie (though erotic thriller could surely be argued), but I’d bet that it has just as many over the top, reason defying “what the hell am I looking at” moments as anything in City of the Living Dead or House by the Cemetery. There are sequences that just begin as absurd to the point of laughability, but which progress through that apparent zaniness to reach compelling extremities of both sexuality and psychological torment. All of this contributes to a horror vibe that makes the film feel at home in Fulci’s catalogue.
And it must be said, I think this is Fulci at the top of his craft. This film just looks and sounds so damn good – vibes on top of vibes – and it is so clearly controlled – we see what he wants us to see, whatever his intention behind that showing may be. We’ll get into it soon (and in some depth – so if you haven’t seen it, I really recommend seeking it out – it’s available out there, but you may need to do a free trial to see it – although if you’re sensitive to sexual violence, perhaps you should take a pass), but I find it striking the extent to which I feel this was made to be an uncomfortable watch – all of the relationships are at least toxic if not downright abusive and the notion of consent doesn’t even pop in for a quick coffee – and yet, the film is exceedingly watchable, magnetic even. So many character actions are honestly ugly and everyone is at least kind of terrible, but I was just totally enamored with it from start to finish, and then went back and watched it again. It is seductively captivating, even as it disturbs.
Like Gaetano.
One final note – I watched it in Italian with English subtitles. As I understand, the text of the English dubbing is totally different and, from what I read, much worse, flattening the emotion and the rich ambivalence of much of the film. I haven’t watched the English dub to compare, but I will be referring to the Italian version (including using the character names from that version – they’re different in English).
Cecilia discovering the presence of a third participant in their public sex.
Essentially, we follow two characters whose paths will eventually intertwine – Cecilia and Dr. Simpson. Cecilia is in a passionate, tumultuous, often abusive and toxic, but always intoxicating and deeply, deeply sexual relationship with the perpetually sweaty saxophonist, Gaetano (on rewatch, he’s not actually always sweating – but it feels that way). We’ll come back to them soon as their dynamic is really the heart of the story – the film belongs to Cecilia. On the other side, Dr. Simpson is a seemingly world class surgeon in a cold, loveless marriage – but don’t feel sorry for him. The impression is that his wife yearns for his affection, she’s desperate for it, but he can’t summon the slightest iota of desire for her, though he expends no shortage of lust on the prostitutes he regularly employs, with whom he can let his freak flag fly, such as in the one scene where we see him drooling like a maniac over the application of nail polish to the crotch of some pantyhose. Years of this emotional and physical neglect has made his wife understandably cold.
However, Cecilia and Gaetano are anything but cold. They burn constantly. And simmer. And melt. Everything hot. The opening scene, the most iconic in the film, finds them in the recording studio along with Gaetano’s producer, Nicky, and a few hangers on, as he’s laying down a sultry jazz track. For the entirety of the recording, their eyes are locked (Fulci and his eyes), and the whole sequence plays out as pure sex – lustful, teasing, desperate, hungry. Finally, it’s time for a break and though none of the staff have yet left for coffee, Cecilia is already licking Gaetano’s face and her breast is in his hand, so overwhelmingly do their bodies crave each other. Then, the moment the others are out the door, Gaetano rips aside her panties and shoves his saxophone between her legs, playing low rumbly tones as he makes cheeky bedroom eyes at her, leaving her crying and shaking as everyone else comes back from their break to record some more. In the beginning, it just feels ridiculous – hilarious – it is the infamous sax-sex scene that the movie is best known for, and it is funny, but damned if it isn’t also sexy as all get out, their desire being so palpable, the sex being so “true,” no matter how silly.
It should also be noted that she says ‘no’ to this multiple times and he ignores her. The film is full of similar scenes – she gets off each time and she does want him, even loves him, but he never respects a boundary, she is never allowed any agency (as long as he’s alive), and many scenes that on one level are hot and mutually satisfying, from another perspective, are easily read as assault or rape.
Simpson smearing nail polish on a sex worker’s face. That’s gonna be a pain to clean up.
The film progresses for a bit, alternating between the hot and cold of the two relationships until Gaetano falls off his motorcycle because he’s riding in circles around Cecilia being a dick, hits his head, and a few hours later ends up under the knife of Dr. Simpson. The problem is that earlier that evening, Simpson’s wife had finally had enough of the jerk and declared that she wanted a divorce. Thus distracted, he botches the job, and fails to save Gaetano, who dies on his table.
Cecilia does not take this news well.
Honestly, on first viewing, I was shocked. Thus far, the Gaetano-Cecilia story had felt so primary, and I didn’t even understand why we were following the doctor at all. I was really startled when a third of the way into the flick, this main character died. It is as sudden and jarring in anything in a horror offering, but perhaps more so because this had not yet felt like a horror movie per se. When a mysterious hand appears behind someone in House by the Cemetery and rips their skull open, it startles and grosses out, but it doesn’t feel as shocking as this sudden loss of character.
Anyway, Cecilia completely flips out and starts stalking Dr. Simpson, demanding to know “Why did you let him die?” And finally, her grief is so powerful that it drives her across town in the rain, into the back of his car where she kidnaps him at gunpoint, makes him drive her to the house she and Gaetano had shared by the seaside, ties him up, and proceeds to torture him for days. But as this torment goes on, he starts to get off on it, becoming obsessed with this mysterious, often naked woman, who walks him on a leash through the waves until he almost drowns, feeds him leftover dogfood, and whacks him in the face with an axe before unzipping her jeans for him to smear his blood all over her belly as he kisses her in sexual fervor. Have I mentioned that it’s a weird movie?
Like you do.
But it really is all about her feelings towards Gaetano. Throughout the final act, we slip in and out of the present with the now subservient doctor and memories of the dominant, cruel, passionate Gaetano. Cecilia seems to promise every day that this is the day she’ll kill the doctor, but she never does. She wants to. She wants to ride that anger, that vengeance, to be satisfied by the violence, but it feels like she knows she wouldn’t be, as she processes her grief, her loss, and what must be her mixed feelings about Gaetano. The one time she does drown him, she immediately fights to bring him back.
Drowning the doctor.
And “resuscitating” him.
Again, every scene between Cecilia and Gaetano is in equal measure hot as hell and deeply ugly and disturbing. How many times does she say “no” to his advances, to his demands, to his absurd bullshit? But also, how much does she crave him and get off on these interactions, though they hurt her or scare her or humiliate her? Even after his death, she watches old home movies where a teasing love scene becomes a rape, and she sobs not at the memory of his violence, but for his loss, rubbing his old sweater between her legs to retain something of his scent. She had and has every reason to hate this guy – he was awful – but she didn’t hate him. Beyond all reason, she loved him. And that is what the movie is about – this overwhelming, uncontrollable, utterly self-destructive desire, “love,” the “devil’s honey,” at once luring you to it and laying waste to you in every way. We see the same thing in how Simpson becomes obsessed and enamored of his torturer in the second half. It is honestly really, really dark.
And at the same time, so watchable, so alluring as a film. It does that thing I love in horror of making cinematic pleasure out of the most unpleasant experiences. There’s the weird pinch that only horror can give. But, while I really responded to it, this all leads to questions of what this film is – what it does. Is it misogynistic in its lascivious portrayal of the suffering woman addicted to a bad guy, or at least the way that bad guy gets her off? Is it an apologia for abusive relationships where a “man is a man,” taking control and satisfying the woman against her own will? Maybe. I honestly don’t know.
But my impression is that even if the film could be read in that way, Fulci was not really interested in psychology (he sure seemed to abhor the very notion of logos), and he didn’t make films with a “message.” Rather, he made films that dove into the deep end of unfathomable horrors. And I feel that even though this is not a work of supernatural horror or a slasher or anything like that, it is a strikingly similar work. It subsumes itself in an unhealthy obsession, in impulses of the self, of the body, of the mind, in pursuit of a satisfaction which could excuse away the worst behavior. And thus, so much of the material of the film is that obsession, that attraction, that desire. And it is compelling, provocative, erotic. The film arouses, but the darkness is always there, nothing is ever “nice” – there is no tenderness, no warmth, only heat.
Horror often involves an encounter with something not only bad, dangerous, or scary, but unknown and unknowable, and I feel that Fulci’s approach to these base human impulses posits the workings of the mind, the impulses of the flesh as similarly unknowable, similarly cruel in their demands that their hunger be met, regardless of the cost. This is an erotic drama with some thriller elements – it is not “horror,” but it rhymes.
By the end, Cecilia has one more memory of Gaetano which seems to be the final straw, allowing her to finally leave him behind and the film ends with her making love to Simpson as the waves crash behind them. In the memory, she and Gaetano had been in a cinema in Venice along with his producer Nicky. Cecilia is making out with Gaetano when she is aghast to see Nicky going down on him. We never see what happens next – it’s the end of the memory, but I don’t imagine it was friendly and I think that explains why there was such tension between her and Nicky in the opening scene. I don’t know if we’re meant to be shocked by the bisexuality, but I’d felt we’d seen glimpses of attraction and jealousy in that first recording session, so this didn’t seem out of left field. Anyway, I suppose the memory of it on some level undermined her idealization of Gaetano’s desire – it was never exclusive to her. He never needed her like she did him. He just needed. He was just perpetually horny and she was there and into him. Finally, she can accept the adoration of her captive, her victim, whom she has no particular love for. An odd intimacy has grown between her and Simpson – notably, at some point, they both stopped wearing clothes, and it doesn’t feel like it was done to tease him, but they have just passed a level of formality with each other. Perhaps we see Simpson developing love/obsession for his torturer as a stand in for what had developed between Cecilia and Gaetano. A viscous cycle continues.
In the end, this is quite a film, and quite a peculiar one. It is sufficiently sexually explicit as to be sold as softcore porn, but though it frequently titillates, I don’t feel its primary intention is to get the viewer off. Rather, it really is trying to unsettle. And it does. It is dark and bleak and horny and feverish. The performances are top notch, and it is gorgeous in every technical aspect. Probably not for everyone, but I think a good example of Fulci’s artistry right before everything went south for him. I’m glad to have finally seen it.
Wax Mask (1997)
So this last feature today is not actually a Fulci film, but it bears mentioning, has an interesting history, a strong connection to Fulci, and is actually a heck of a lot more fun than I had remotely expected it to be. Also, given that the impetus for this current Fulci-thon was to get into something indubitably “horror” and then the most significant work was an “erotic drama,” I am happy to say that this is nothing but a horror movie.
As we’ve gone over in this post, the final period of Fulci’s life was sadly not a fertile time creatively, and he reportedly felt cast aside, abandoned, a great maestro who had made some of the best horror ever (among many other films) dying alone, disrespected, forgotten. Now, hopping back in time a bit, as they had both been big names in Italian horror, in the early 80s there had been a kind of rivalry between Fulci and Dario Argento. But as Fulci, once so prolific, had not managed any work since The Door to Silence in 1991, in 1994, Argento approached him with the idea of collaborating on a film together. Argento had been one of the few survivors (if not the only survivor) of the previously discussed death of Italian genre cinema, benefitting from his significant international fame which made it possible for him to go on funding his films with foreign money. I can imagine him looking at his once rival and feeling a pang of ‘coulda been me,’ and really wanting to help Fulci with this project. I don’t think they’d previously been close, but I believe the offer came from an emotional place.
They settled on a remake of “House of Wax,” taking elements from both the 1933 film and the 1953 Vincent Price vehicle. Fulci wrote a script and then … in March of 1996, alone in the Rome apartment he’d had to move into, having lost his house, Lucio Fulci died in a hyperglycemic diabetic coma.
Argento paid for his funeral and then proceeded to carry on producing the film they’d set out to make together. He hired one of Fulci’s daughters as an assistant art director, and ended up giving a first time feature directing gig to Sergio Stivaletti, who had previously worked primarily as a special effects artist, creating some of Argento’s most iconic effects in recent years (I’ve read that the needles under the eyes in Opera was his invention). The result is a film that honestly, doesn’t feel a whole hell of a lot like either Argento or Fulci, but if you squint, you can see Argento’s influence, and if you close your eyes and dream, you can imagine what it might have been if carried to fruition by Fulci at the height of his powers. But that sounds like I’m down on the picture, and I was really happily surprised how much I really liked it. It is colorful and creative and sleazy in a glossy 90s fashion, with no shortage of gleefully excessive gore and nudity. It suffers somewhat from 90s era visual effects (some pretty rough computer aided material there), but Stivaletti sure knew his practical effects, and there’s no shortage of impressive and really novel stuff on offer.
In a decently scary cold open, we witness the aftermath of a family being brutally murdered in 1900 Paris by a killer with what looks to be a robotic hand – all but one little girl who the inspector finds hiding under the bed. Some years later, having relocated to Rome, Sonia, the little girl, now a young woman, finds herself a job as a costumer at a soon to open, so good it’s scary Wax Museum, run by the enigmatic Boris Volkoff. Volkoff’s fearsome tableaus have a disturbing degree of verisimilitude, and I don’t think it should count as a spoiler that (given what this is a remake of) people are of course being hunted down and transformed into gruesome living dead statues of torture and torment. One adjustment here is that unlike previous incarnations, these are not preserved corpses, encased in wax, but rather artificially sustained living bodies, trapped in a deathlike state, suffused with a blue gooey waxy substance. Once disconnected from the solution being pumped through their veins, they seem aware of their horrific circumstances before they finally die. Solid. Things take a dark turn when Sonia sees a new scene unveiled, that of the death of her parents, featuring details never released to the press. Hmmm. Interesting, no?
I won’t get into the permutations of the plot too much. I mean, one could generally guess where it’s going, but still, there are some twists and reveals and this is actually one that I think most horror fans would enjoy seeking out, so why not go in without too much information? It’s available out there. I watched it on Tubi.
This is not the most amazing horror movie you’re ever going to see, but it is crisp and cleanly directed, with strong energy and an evident delight in its own bloody mayhem. It is a very colorful movie (and unlike many an Argento imitator, I’d say it works and looks pretty cool) and that is one of the places where people may cite Argento’s influence (although, I think the color thing is thrown around far too often when describing Argento’s style – I mean, it works if you’ve only seen Suspiria). However, I think that you can see a bit of Argento in some of the camerawork, and some tracking shots particularly. Stivaletti had worked on many films with him and had seen how he set up shots, and I can imagine him learning a great deal under that kind of tutelage.
It is, let’s say, surprising, when it briefly becomes The Terminator though.
But this post is all about Fulci, so where is he in all this? Hard to be found honestly. Whereas Fulci’s horror output was dreamlike, doom laden, advancing, sometimes quite slowly with the weight of creeping death, carrying images and moments that could shock the mind into submission with their extremity, and sometimes their absurdity, this is a quickly paced, very modern feeling, slick 90s flick, though it is set at the turn of the century. I understand Fulci’s script was much revised before shooting began, so even that doesn’t really communicate much of his proclivities.
However, I think you could imagine the potential of this scenario in his hands. In many ways it is unlike the films he’s best known for, but I think there are thematic elements he could have sunk his teeth into. Simply the image of the death in life of the wax figures – there is something really gross and disturbing in that. The aesthetization of death, in this museum where victims become art, is fertile ground. And there is a kind of detective procedural element here, which he had often dealt with before, so I think he would have known how to pay lip service to the business of “solving the crime” without that significantly impinging on the atmosphere of shudder inducing dread. I don’t imagine it would have been his best film, but I can imagine that it could have at least felt like “his” work. What could have been.
But again, this one is fun, worth checking out just as a cool 90s horror movie (an era that is often discounted for its dearth of good horror), and for Fulci completionists, an intriguing exercise in watching one film and imagining how it might have been completely different in other hands.
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And so that is a bit of Fulci for now, bringing the films of his that I’ve written about to perhaps fourteen, certainly more than any other director. And the great thing is, I’ll probably never run out. I mean, I don’t think any of his remaining horror flicks (that I haven’t seen) are reported to be “good” and the many “good” films of his that I haven’t seen aren’t reported to be horror. But one of these days, I may run down some of the other late-80s low points, or perhaps more interesting, I may get into some of his earlier thrillers in the mid-late 60s. I’ve read that one of them is said to be the root of later erotic thrillers such as Basic Instinct. Also, the westerns are supposed to be noteworthy. Could be worth exploring, but not sure if it should all get written about on a “horror blog” – we’ll see.
But I think that’s the end of the road for now, happily not because I’m driving, full speed, into an oncoming truck (but, I tell you, some days it may feel like it). See you next time.
Well June has come around again, bringing me to another installment of “Cis-Het Horror Guy writes a Pride post.” I don’t know – is it strange? I don’t always hit all the other calendar connections. There’s often something for Christmas, but not always. I occasionally have done some other themed month, like Black History, for example, but I don’t even usually manage to honor Halloween, the high holiday of the horror-blog year. Still, each June, I do tend to mark Pride.
I think beyond the fact that I have enjoyed many examples of “queer horror,” I do feel that there is a strong kinship between horror as I enjoy it and the notion of queerness. Sure, horror in its classic reactionary mode (“monster” disrupts status quo, causing fear, and is either defeated, reifying social norms, or terrifyingly triumphant, resulting in mourning the loss of said norms) can be good fun, but the stuff that always gets its hooks into me, that I most often return to, is more complicated, richer, more seductive, queerer than that. We fear the monster (interpreted as broadly as possible), but we also love the monster. Maybe we are the monster and we have to reckon with our own identity. Maybe the disruption the monster brings is preferable to the tyranny of normie stasis. Maybe we as viewers or readers need to navigate a nuanced relationship to the horror – loving and fearing the same things, identifying with both victims and aggressors, experiencing both earnest sympathetic fear and distanced ironic appreciation of tropes, beloved failings, absurdity, and camp.
So, yeah. I dig scary stuff that’s queer and though I’ve got no letter in the LGBTQ+ alphabet, I do enjoy specifically considering it each year for at least one post in June.
So, this year is no exception and I’ve watched a few things looking for what I’d like to dig into. I think I’ll just touch on three briefly that I very much enjoyed and which are good inclusions for a “Pride” theme, but then I want to really dig into another film which doesn’t suit Pride all that well, but which I do consider outstanding Queer Horror.
So first the Pride Party runners up: I recently watched or re-watched three flicks that have a lot in common: So Vam (2021), Queens of the Dead (2025), and Slay (2024). I’m not going into deep individual detail on them, but I think they are all pretty fun, rather lively and funny, have tons of heart, and while they all deal with some horror creature (vampires, zombies, and vampires respectively), none of them are particularly scary. All are made by queer filmmakers. All three feature drag performance as an emancipatory act. All three have campy qualities. All three are warm celebrations of queerness through a horror monster lens. But again, they all lean more into comedy and there’s not that much horror to them.
So Vam
But not much is not none. It’s just that the horror they feature is less that of their given monsters, and more the fact that even now in the enlightened 2020s it can still be hard as a gay kid in a small town in Australia; drag performers in a rural dive bar may be in danger from the locals; and even a young queer person in a Mecca like NYC can still struggle with fully loving themselves as they are and living life authentically. Plus, there are zombies eating guts and vampires tearing out throats – just enough fictional violence to make the heartwarming character dramedy go down well without feeling too saccharine.
Queens of the Dead
Anyway, they all entertained me, at times touched me, and had good fun with their horror elements. Check ‘em out. Of the three, I think my favorite was Slay – kind of a combination of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and From Dusk Till Dawn, but all have something to recommend them. (As of writing this, So Vam and Queens of the Dead are on Shudder and Slay is on Tubi)
Slay
But while they all center queerness, and they all are clearly horror movies (I do big tent classifications – if you’ve got a zombie eviscerating someone, even if it’s not scary, as far as I’m concerned you can call your flick “horror”), they don’t feel much like horror, so I’d like to dig into a very different work that is arguably not a horror movie, but feels like it. It also isn’t made by anyone who identifies as queer, and was even protested by the gay community at the time of its filming and release, but I think it is really worthy of time and attention – it’s a rich and very effective piece of queer horror, and in my opinion, just one hell of a film. So let’s get into it…
Cruising (1980)
Of the films I watched with this post in mind, this was the only one that pulled me in so fully that the moment it was over, I immediately wanted to rewatch it, consider it, and write about it. William Friedkin is most famous in the world of horror for The Exorcist (1973), and among general audience cinephiles for The French Connection (1971), but this later work of his is far more my speed. Essentially an art house flick featuring hardcore shots of gay sex and fetish activity, ostensibly a serial killer procedural, oneiric as all get out, ambiguous and intentionally frustrating for any viewer who craves narrative certainty, it is almost unfathomable that this was a wide release with a big star (Al Pacino) from a major studio (United Artists) almost 50 years ago. I will get into spoilers, so if you haven’t already seen it, go seek it out first. It’s available for rent on Prime and Apple TV.
In short, this is the story of Steve Burns, an NYPD officer who goes deep undercover in the gay BDSM scene of New York in the late 70s to lure and catch a killer who’s been targeting gay men who are into “heavy leather.” Steve is specifically chosen because he physically fits the profile of the victims (but to be fair, “late 20s, 140-150 lbs, dark hair, dark eyes” must have described a huge number of officers at the time, so maybe Captain Edelson, who recruits Steve (an excellent Paul Sorvino), sees something else in him to suggest him for the assignment).
Once on the case, Steve just seems to dive in with no evident preparation. He simply says goodbye to his girlfriend (Karen Allen), takes on the pseudonym of “John Forbes,” and moves into a flat in the West Village, where he starts hanging around a gay fetish bar and other places that gay men cruise each other, such as the Central Park Rambles. Mostly he lurks and watches, not explicitly engaging with anyone except bartenders that he asks for information (until one night, when he sniffs poppers out of some dude’s hanky and finally cuts loose). The one exception to this is his relationship with his neighbor, Ted, a playwright whom Steve/John befriends (or more?). Ted, however, is very much not a part of that scene, and describes how scary he finds cruising to be. He’s in a long-term relationship, which while not always evidently warmly loving, does appear stable.
Eventually Steve does identify one suspect, but the cops botch the stakeout when he brings his mark to a cheap hotel for a hookup. Because they don’t seem to know how to use their surveillance equipment properly, they burst in before Steve can confirm the suspect has done anything wrong and end up interrogating both of them, abusively in the case of the suspect.
But in the end, Steve does chase down a bit of evidence connected with an early victim, identify a more likely killer, and meet him for a tense tryst in Central Park in which, once the pants come down, knives come out and an arrest is made.
Steve makes detective and moves back in with his girlfriend and a killer is off the street. Hooray.
On its surface, this is such a simple “cop chases a killer” movie with a straightforward story, filmed in ultra-realistic fashion, but I love it because it’s actually none of those things. Really, this is a film of mirrors and doppelgangers that plays out much more like a dream. And the thing is, while filmic dreams often present an over-the-top surreality, in my personal experience, that isn’t really how most dreams work. Generally, dreams feel entirely real while you’re dreaming them, but things can change and don’t always behave as they do in the waking world. So everything here feels solid and “real,” particularly in its sweaty and tactile presentation of a late 70s/early 80s grimy, gritty, excitingly dangerous New York City, but everything is unmoored, uncanny, doubled.
And sometimes absurd. One notable example is the interrogation scene in which Steve and his first suspect are being berated by the cops and out of nowhere, a huge, muscular Black man in a jock strap and a cowboy hat walks into the room and calmly clocks Steve out of his chair before leaving without saying a word (later, he’ll return for the suspect). It’s never explained – even to Steve. It feels so out of left field, so odd, like an incongruous element to make something weirder, surreal. The crazy thing here though is that apparently Friedkin got that bit from interviews with actual officers. It’s the sort of thing they would orchestrate in an interrogation to abuse information out of a suspect – the absurdity is the point – if the suspect told anyone about it, no one would believe them.
So the realistic elements become surreal if you sit with them long enough, but the absurdities are based in facts, in research (also, I’m no expert in 70s police movies, but are they generally so very anti-cop? This is one gritty, masculine 70s cop movie that just screams “ACAB” – if the cops aren’t inept, they are lazy or corrupt or abusers, or worse).
Joe Spinell stands out as a closeted, abusive cop, lashing out at the objects of his lust.
On the uncanny, one neat trick (which David Fincher borrowed for Zodiac (2007)) is that in each kill scene, the killer is played by a different actor (always dubbed with the same voice), though he is always filmed in such a way that it’s difficult to tell if it’s the same person or not. I had to go through on second viewing to take screen shots each time we see him to confirm that the actor does in fact change. That’s disorienting enough for the viewer, but on top of that, the actor that plays the killer in the first scene (which is frightening enough to earn the film inclusion on this horror blog on its merits alone – truly scary and upsetting) then plays the killer’s next victim in the subsequent kill scene. But there’s more.
Just as the second kill scene culminates in its inevitable stabbing, we cut to a shot of Steve walking down the street, dressed exactly the same as we just saw the killer. Steve was apparently chosen for this undercover work because he resembles the victims, but the victims also resemble their killer, and so, therefore, does he. This is a world where everything looks like everything else. The penetrator seems identical to the penetrated. The cop is a killer. The killer is a victim. The straight officer is gay. The Police are fetishists, and the kinksters are authoritarians. Cops cruise trans streetwalkers to pressure them for sex and gay men dress as cops to get off on the sexual frisson of fascism. Everything is a mirror for everything else and nothing can be pinned down. It presents as so “realistic,” but there is no center.
Steve
This ties in thematically when we do learn about the man identified in the end as the killer – clearly he is self-hating, not accepting his own identity, driven to kill in others what he hates in himself, rooted in deeply unhealthy daddy issues. He seems to be murdering his own reflections.
Furthermore, once the “killer” has been put away, Ted, the friendly neighbor, is found murdered in his flat and a final sequence (Steve mysteriously staring into the mirror, his interiority fully off limits to the viewer as his girlfriend has fun playing dress up in his fetish-gear-killer drag) seems to suggest that he may be responsible for Ted’s death. Reportedly, Pacino was really frustrated with the ending, complaining that Friedkin never explained it to him, leaving him unsure if he was simply gay or was in fact a killer. For my part, I think Friedkin knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn’t need Pacino to know the answer because there is no answer. We don’t and can’t know. And somehow, answering that simply isn’t the point. Looking in the mirror was all Pacino needed to do – and maybe it was even better that he didn’t understand. Neither do we.
The whole film is the not knowing – looking at reflections that seem familiar, but hide unknown depths – the mirror always being an object of the uncanny. I don’t think the film is interesting because Steve might actually be gay (though he might) or a killer (that too), but because of how unknown he is, to us, but also himself. He is submerged in an unfamiliar world where he could fairly expect to feel out of place, but clearly something resonates inside him.
And that resonation, those vibes are so much of what makes the film spark. The whole movie, the whole leather scene, the whole undercover assignment feels so very dangerous and sexy. I say this as a pretty vanilla cis-het guy, but the sequences of Steve hanging around the fetish club are just hot – the whole space so suffused with lust and flesh and sex in a way that is really alluring, but also threatening – and we see Steve react to it – however he may or may not identify, the thrilling sexuality works on him, at once turning him on and making him uncomfortable, unsure in his own skin, as that skin reacts to its surroundings. In one striking scene, Steve comes home briefly to visit his girlfriend and they have what seems to be far more intense than usual sex. Clearly, he is worked up by his assignment and bringing it home with him.
Steve’s neighbor, Ted, speaks of how he’s terrified of cruising and I get it – I can’t imagine the vulnerability that goes with picking up and being picked up like that – it has not been my experience, to be sure. In many ways, this would correctly be classified as a detective thriller, but its intersection of compelling desire, genuine fear, and the needs and pains of the body just feel so much like horror to me – the kind of horror that really gets under your skin and works its way into your mind.
Which does bring me to something I want to touch on: the controversy at the time of filming and release, and my decision to include this as a Pride/Queer Horror post.
Released ten years after the first Pride march, Cruising came out as the gay rights movement was fighting (for people’s lives) to convince the general population that gay men and women were “normal people,” deserving of the same rights and respect as everyone else, and not some kind of sexual deviants, too weird to be trusted in the house next door, or teaching your kids, or working for the government or whatever. Along comes this movie, set in this somewhat extreme fetish scene (whips and chains, public sex acts, fisting, golden showers, etc), and my sense is that the gay community at large felt that the film was exploitatively shocking, and thus, counterproductive, serving to plant a “freaky” image in the minds of the public, in addition to drawing a line between homosexuality and mental illness that would lead one to victimize or offer himself up for victimization. I get how this material could have been viewed as harmful to the cause.
But watched from a 2026 perspective, I feel that the scenes in the club or in the Rambles don’t really come across as all that outré (I’m only shocked that they were included in such a mainstream release). Maybe over time, the world has just become more kink-positive, but while the aspect of opening yourself to a stranger still feels frightening (as in the terrifying first kill scene where the victim invites a man home for a tryst and then discovers the danger he’s let into his space), the behavior modeled in the club all seems entirely positive and consensual, and fully above board. I particularly like a couple of moments when Steve runs afoul of the rules, eliciting anger from other patrons, and one time, getting kicked out because he wasn’t properly dressed (ironically, it was “precinct night” and if he’d been dressed as a cop, he would have fit in). If you didn’t know that the specter of an as yet unheard of HIV (people would start to learn about it about one year later) was lurking over it all, it rather comes across as a sexy, but utterly respectful good time for all involved. Notably, I feel that there is a greater degree of explicit consent on display here than in any “straight” meat market disco where men would go to pick up women. Also, in the film’s defense, all of the extras in the fetish club were patrons of a popular leather club at that time – they were willing to make the movie and I’ve read that they were happy with their own portrayal, even if the wider gay community was not.
But there is a real horror here, and it is clichéd and believable and sad. As at least superficially presented (again, the film is more slippery and ambiguous than that), the killer is motivated by self-hate, instilled in him by a stern, homophobic father. He hunts down others who resemble himself, to kill in them what he can’t eradicate within. This is as much of a cliché as the “straight” killer obsessed with “mommy,” slaughtering the “bad girls” that turn him on. The thing is, though, I generally buy both motivations as distressingly common in life and I can’t really fault the film for leaning on one of them (a cliché simply means we’ve repeated an idea so often that it doesn’t feel true – it doesn’t mean it actually isn’t true). The world is full of self-recrimination and shame. This is one of the reason “Pride” events and materials are important – not merely to demand acceptance and equal rights from the rest of society, but to help people accept and love themselves for who they are, not letting internalized hatred poison their souls. It is easy to dismiss it as a cliché, but how many virulently anti-gay politicians devote decades to harming the LGBT+ community before getting caught cruising an airport men’s room with their wide stance (ok, maybe in that case, exactly one, but you get the picture – a common tendency)? Perhaps it’s only a difference of degree between that and the kind of serial killers who people thrillers such as this.
Returning to criticisms of the film, as with many other similar issues (misogyny, racism, etc.), I don’t think the presence of homophobia (externalized or internalized) makes a work homophobic. I understand why people objected to this on release, and I make no claim that Friedkin’s heart was in the right place – he may have only sought evocative, thrilling, “shocking” subject matter around which to build a good, artsy thriller. But I really feel like the film treats its characters respectfully – as people, not as stereotypes, and certainly not as objects of ridicule or disgust. I’ve read a number of negative reviews from the time of release that bemoan the fact that there’s no one to identify with or that all of the characters are so ugly and unlikable or that the setting is just too hellish and vulgar, but I think that may point to the prejudices of the reviewers rather than the content of the film itself, as that sure wasn’t my viewing experience.
And so yeah, rooted in such self-destructive internalized homophobia, this is not much of a “Pride” flick (for that kind of celebratory vibe, watch any of the three movies I mentioned at the top), but it is Queer horror. The killer’s horror is his own queerness and that individualized horror makes him a danger to others (as with everything else in this picture, everything is a series of reflections, a vicious circle – his fear of his own queerness threatens the wider queer community). He is caught in the end. But was he really the killer – of all the victims? Was there ever really just one killer? The worm of his self-hate is not so easily eradicated – it can pass from one to another; destruction and self-destruction eternally surfacing, internalized violence exploding at the world without, maybe even infecting anyone who stares close enough to see that reflection in themselves; Steve, we’re looking at you.
But also, that is just one reading, and maybe it’s a stretch. Friedkin has built a Rorschach test of a film here – the viewer’s perspective defines the image seen. And I love it for its ambiguities. So, yeah – this is a strong recommend – rich and evocative and intriguing, but also always engaging – not merely an abstract mood piece.
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So, that’s one more June in the books (and of course, this is getting published in July, but I spent the last couple of weeks thinking about it, so it counts). I guess before I’m done, I just have one more thought I’ve been chewing on about the label “Queer Horror.”
It’s been a number of years now that I’ve regularly engaged with this as a lens through which to view horror content, and there is so much that I’ve really enjoyed, but I have to say, all of my favorites are older works. This one, sure, but also, especially, really old pieces, like Cat People (1942), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), or anything from James Whale. I enjoy the degree to which it was sometimes daring to include even the suggestion of queerness in an older work, but I also just really enjoy the viewing strategy of “reading” the queerness in a film (or anything else, for that matter). With contemporary work, while I think it is great, and truly good for people that there is now actual representation in the genre that doesn’t need to be hidden in code (signaling much needed social progress), I don’t always enjoy the engagement in the same way as in something older where it isn’t obvious and you have to know what you’re looking for.
And so I have wondered what the future is for films thus identified. It is one thing to have LGBT+ creators making something – does that exactly make it “queer?” I don’t think it always feels like that. And it is another thing to have explicit representation of LGBT+ characters, but if the story isn’t about their queerness, it also doesn’t feel particularly “queer.” As society moves forward, will this cease to feel like a kind of sub-genre?
I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s happened yet. For example, the three films I discussed briefly at the beginning, So Vam (2021), Queens of the Dead (2025), and Slay (2024), all fully celebrate their queerness, not only featuring representation in front of and/or behind the camera, but making it a central aspect of the film itself. And I think that is something people still need and will still need for a while.
On Saturday, there was a Pride march in the town where I’m spending the summer, Ocean City, MD. It was only the third year that the event had taken place and I’m glad I was there. It was really good and needed in what is essentially a small town like this. During the summer, this place is packed, but the population in the off season is teeny and it can be pretty conservative – I can only imagine how hard it might be, even in 2026, to be gay or bi or trans or what have you in OC. But the march, though small, was joyous and overwhelmingly positive – and the excitement I could see in it was really moving. I think as long as kids in small towns still need to have such an event to celebrate their existence and refuse to cease existing, in the realm of horror, there will still be a place, and need for work that centers queerness as a theme, as a site of exploration, growth, and even fear – it’s all part of that full spectrum of human experience.
I’ve got to stop beginning every post by apologizing for the length of time since the last. And yet, here I find myself. Honestly, without going into too much detail, since publishing at the beginning of February, it has been a difficult time – family crisis, and ultimately, a terrible loss – an experience and a grief unlike anything I’ve known before, and honestly, I just couldn’t point my brain in this direction for a while. Recent months have featured too much real horror and sadness and death and I just wasn’t in the mood.
But this exercise is valuable to me; what I’ve built on this site thus far is important to me and I really want to come back to it. So that’s what we’re trying today…
So, what to talk about? As always, it’s hard to engage with the new. And I don’t feel like indulging in some manner of oft-watched comfort food. But just the other day, someone had asked me what my favorite horror movies were and as I expounded on the poetry and intelligence of Candyman (1992), I was left thinking about how all of my favorite horror works maintain a tension between some good and some bad: dream and nightmare, love and obsession, brutality and beauty, and if I’m going to be able to focus on something to write about right now, it should offer something stirring; I want it to be beautiful.
So, I hope this will satisfy – I saw that streaming on Max, at least here in the States (where I am temporarily), I could catch Onibaba, a Japanese piece from 1964 about which I’ve heard wonderful things. So let’s check it out, take care of some horror homework, and hopefully take in something darkly gorgeous. And as I really want to get back on that horse and publish sooner rather than later, thus avoiding a rabbit hole of trying to choose content, I’m going to write something whether I love it or not, so here’s hoping…
Onibaba (1964)
Wow, that was quite a movie. I’m not sure if under normal circumstances, I would have exactly termed it “horror” such that I would discuss it here, but I set myself homework so I should do it. And it was an impressive piece of work: haunting, intense, unsettling, and rich in feeling and thought; and while I didn’t find it “scary,” it is to do with fear and folklore and there is a definite horror to it, though more existential than supernatural. In recent years, there has been no small amount of discussion of “liminal horror” (which often seems to just mean lots of empty hallways), and this surely qualifies, existing in a perpetual state of inbetween-ness.
It is historically set (taking place during a period of civil war in Japan in what I believe to be the 14th century). But it also feels ahistorical, more of a fable or folk tale. It seems like a psychological parable, but also a work of myth or philosophy. It is a morality tale, but one which is essentially amoral.
And then there is its setting: an endless marshland of tall reeds (empty hallways, eat your hearts out). We are only ever among the reeds and we never see the world beyond them. They are like a sea, in a constant flow, blown about by the wind, their lashing an omnipresent white noise (startlingly punctuated by the jazz score). It feels like a no-place. A space that must be passed through if one wants to go from someplace important to someplace else, not a destination in and of itself. But now, with the war, which we only catch peripheral glimpses of, having destroyed so much, having totally upended society, humanity, the world, it feels as if all the stable places outside of the reeds have fallen. This inbetween, this purgatorial landscape is all that remains.
In this space, we meet a very small cast of main characters. At the core are two women, one young and one middle aged. They are unnamed, but we understand them to be mother and daughter-in-law and the husband/son has been away at the war. In a place of waiting, with all farming and other life giving work disrupted, they survive by waiting for samurai after a battle to get lost in the reeds, and then they murder them and sell all their goods for grain.
At the beginning of the film, in a stunning, wordless ten minutes, we see them living an animal existence: killing, stealing, drinking water, shoving gruel into their faces, and falling down dead tired. They do this day in and day out, and though they live together and kill together, they seem to have very little relationship. They don’t speak – what is there left to say? In this empty space, there is nothing of the humanity that sustains – they are reduced to pure, material survival.
Then their dynamic is disrupted when Hachi, a friend of the missing husband/son, returns with news of the husband/son’s death. Hachi shows an interest in the younger woman, sparking on one hand fear on the part of the older woman that she will be left alone and, without her partner, unable to kill and steal, and therefore, unable to survive.
On the other hand, the older woman is simply jealous of the attention, of the physical pleasure, of her daughter-in-law having something that could make life better, if only fleetingly, something that makes life more than simply eating in order to continue breathing. Though she has scoffed a previous offer of giving her body in exchange for grain, there is a striking scene where she has spied on the young lovers and is so overwhelmed with madness and lust that she throws herself on a gnarled tree, grinding into it in desperation, in hunger.
And I think that hunger, that sense of need is what’s at the heart of the whole picture. The very first thing we see in the film is a shot of a deep pit, the place that the women have been hiding the bodies of all their victims. It is accompanied by three lines of text:
The Hole
Deep and Dark
Its darkness has lasted since ancient times
And then, with a jarring jazz stinger, we get the title card: Onibaba (Devil woman).
In this hopeless, lost place, that is no place, the only real feature is the pit, the hole. It seems without bottom, eternally swallowing all that falls into its gaping maw. And the whole film is concerned with that same endless need, the never-ending needs of the body – food, water, air, rest; the needs of the flesh and spirit – lust, companionship, novelty; and the needs of pride that have fueled this seemingly endless civil war (according to Wikipedia, it lasted 50 years – which could feel eternal to a poor peasant whose whole life has only known that war).
With the world so disrupted, there is no love, no joy, no poetry. The older woman says at one point that she has never seen something beautiful, something that could take her breath away. She clearly holds such anger for the proud nobles who have caused this state of war and it’s hard to fault her for killing them and taking what she can when the opportunity comes her way.
The samurai is such a figure of honor and nobility, but those qualities come across as nothing but empty posturing, justification for feeding a generation of peasants into the mill of battle, and it is striking to see so many of them fall to the blades of these two simple, underestimated women.
But for all that her contempt for the ruling class feels earned, even righteous, no claim can be made that she is. Specifically, she is a terrible mother-in-law, trying to trap the young woman with her, scaring her about “sins of the flesh,” and the hell and demons that await those that give into it beyond the bounds of marriage, seeking to manipulate her into unending, mute servitude.
In the final act, which does approach horror, though it is more folkloric than made-as-genre, the older woman takes a devil mask from a samurai lord she has doomed to the pit. Thus adorned, she torments the young woman, trying to terrify her away from her dalliance with Hachi. I won’t go into detail here, but it does not go well for her, and after all her moralizing talk of punishment, she seems punished herself for her greed and cruelty.
The mask refuses to come off – sometimes taking on the role of a devil is indistinguishable from truly being evil. But though everything she does is monstrous and petty and self-centered, I have trouble really judging her, and I didn’t feel the film was judging her either.
If anything, I felt the film was portraying how when all is stripped away, people can be reduced not only to animals, but in fact to monsters. The hole is always open, always wants and needs, and if it is not placated, that endless need will drive people to do terrible things. And it never can really be satisfied, so that is the world; it is a terrible, unforgiving, cruel place, and I don’t feel any negative judgement towards those that suffer in it, even as they, in turn, exacerbate the suffering of others.
There are some horror notes later on, once the mask is introduced, but more than anything, I felt the real horror of the piece to be the bleakness of the worldview, to be the hell these figures inhabit, to know that on some level, it is the common hell of life and humanity in extremis.
It is a harsh film, gorgeous to look at, striking in its soundscape and wonderfully performed. An impressive piece of work, and though it seems like the reeds never stop waving in the wind, the setting and vibe and sentiment all conspiring to trap the viewer in the most hopeless of hells, it is engaging from start to finish. But a cheerful little popcorn flick, it is not.
Hey, but this here blog is about horror, not rom-coms, so being a downer loses it no points and this was a significant piece of cinema, really worth checking out. But go in expecting a “great film with flavors of horror” more than a “horror film.”
—
And that is Onibaba.
Now, having stated at the outset that I was going to write about what I was watching come rain or shine, I must admit that I’d actually set myself two pieces of homework: Onibaba and also from 1964, Kwaidan. But while the more I think about Onibaba, the more I love it in all its desolate glory, regardless of the fact that I don’t think it was particularly made with this target genre in mind, sadly, I just don’t feel compelled to write much about Kwaidan.
This anthology piece, featuring four chilling tales of the supernatural taken from Japanese folklore, is beautiful and poetic and virtuosic and artful, and highly respected – it was nominated for best foreign film at the Academy Awards and won the special jury prize at Cannes. It is ambitious in scope, striking in execution, and takes its issues and characters seriously, all a meditation on humanity and spirituality and nature and justice.
But I just couldn’t get into it. I respect it. I have absolutely nothing negative to say about it – this is not a bad review. I just, for whatever reason, couldn’t connect. Onibaba had felt so small and scrappy and exceptional in how much significance its visual poetry could carry, how much it could make me feel with a handful of actors and one big set, and in contrast, Kwaidan just felt big and expensive and “culturally important” and, I don’t know, it just felt more like homework.
But I often have trouble getting into anthologies. So maybe this is about my current mood. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not up for short works (not so short though, telling all four tales takes upwards of three hours). Maybe in a few years I’ll try it again and absolutely love it, but for now, I guess that’s all I have to say about this worthy, artful film. Sorry.
—
But before I sign off and cross my fingers that it doesn’t take me another 3 months to get back here, I do want to give an honorable mention to one other film, really the first “horror” movie that I was able to pull the trigger on after my long, emotional dry spell. I’d heard good things about Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, but I was wholly unprepared for how much I was going to love it.
Its predecessor, 28 Years Later was fine, but for me, relatively un-notable, following the beats I’d pretty much expected, but this was different. It was a bit shambolic I suppose, following a number of different threads, but I was so completely into each of them, I loved the performances, and Ralph Fiennes’s big Iron Maiden spectacular just gave me so much joy. It is full of infected monstrous killers, chilling human murderers, rough body horror, and post-apocalyptic doom, but more than anything else, I felt it had such a big heart and it just warmed mine. Easily the most fun I’ve had with a flick in a good long while.
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