Month: December 2022

You Probably Shouldn’t Give Exotic Pets as Gifts – Gremlins

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So, I write this cruising at 23,500 feet on a flight from Poland (where I live) to the US (where I’m from). It’s a couple days before Christmas and thus, one makes the annual pilgrimage to family, wherever that might be. Just one of many holiday traditions, like roasting chestnuts (which smell nice, but always seemed inedible to me), decorating a tree (didn’t get one this year since I’d be travelling, so I decorated a windowsill – it looks a bit like Christmas vomited all over the houseplants), or tiptoeing around any potential triggers of familial conflict – Happy Holidays, All! But regardless of how, or if, you mark the occasion, I think it’s pretty common to indulge in some kind of seasonally appropriate movies.

For some, that means Miracle on 34th Street or Elf. For others, that means Krampus, A Christmas Horror Story, or Better Watch Out. Just as an aside, it’s not my focus this week, but I recently watched Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 and ye gods, what a hoot – Mickey Rooney as an angry, drunk toymaker (he apparently had protested the first film – what is he even doing here?), effects work by Screaming Mad George (who always has zany, surreal, weird ideas), killer toys, an odd yet wonderful mix of hokey and sleazy, and the mystery of who is trying to murder this little kid (who is doing a lot with his face), that actually kept me fully engaged until the reveal. I really recommend it. (I know it’s on Shudder in the States, but is hard to come by in the UK – I don’t know about the rest of the world.)

But for tonight, following my stroll down memory lane a couple months back, trying to reconstruct how I got here, I thought I would brave the sometimes fraught waters of nostalgia and revisit a beloved film of my childhood (which I haven’t seen in ages), one which I didn’t even think of as horror when I was little, but I can’t imagine a reasonable generic definition which could exclude it from the canon now. I write, of course, of Joe Dante’s 1984 Gremlins. Now, I think there’s always a risk when going back to something you loved when younger – that it won’t hold up, that it may even be cringe inducing and you question how you could ever have thought it was anything more than embarrassing. I am so happy to report that this was not at all the case here. What an absolute delight! I expect I appreciate different things as an adult than I did long ago, but this stands as a tremendously fun ride, and somehow, in spite of a wide range of reasons one could expect it wouldn’t, it really does work. So, let’s get into it. (Note – I’m writing this assuming you’ve seen it. If you haven’t, go treat yourself – where I live at least, it’s on HBO max.)

Gremlins (1984)

I think that it’s easy to detect the presence of the three main creative voices behind this movie. From director Joe Dante (whose earlier film, Piranha (1978), Spielberg had called the “best of the Jaws rip-offs”), there is a madcap energy and an evident love of 50s B-movie sci-fi/horror. Individual camera set ups are not often showy, but the camera movement is so playful, often twisting from one slight angle to the next, granting an off-kilter, weird vibe. The old time monster movie of it all is just so much melodramatic fun, such as the scene in which Stripe, the leader of the gremlins jumps into a pool to spawn a horde of scaly, clawed compatriots. Bright green light suffuses the pool as fog spills out and light flashes. The young protagonist, Billy, backs away in fearful knowledge of the nightmare soon to spew forth (Zach Galligan, who would go on to a long career in cheap horror movies and thrillers – my favorite listing of his on IMDB is from Hellraiser III as “Boiler Room Patron Getting Stabbed with a Pool Stick (uncredited)”).

Or in the science classroom when the teacher who’d been experimenting on a mogwai returns to see what has hatched from its slimy cocoon. As he enters the room, the film projector still turns, bathing the room in a faint flicker, while he stands in a slowly turning silhouette of the film reel. At a slight Dutch angle, he goes into the shadows in search of the experiment gone wrong which will soon end his life. It’s just delicious.

From screenwriter, Chris Columbus (who went on to write The Goonies and direct Adventures in Babysitting and the Home Alone movies, among many others), there is a fun “Boy’s Own adventure” to it all, replete with Rube Goldberg machines of threat and mayhem. It is interesting though, given his later “family friendly” oeuvre, to read that his original script had been MUCH darker – Gizmo (the cute, lovable heart of the movie) would have transformed into the lead Gremlin (ala Stripe) and would have then been responsible for killing Billy’s dog and beheading his mom. Wow…

Finally, from producer, Steven Spielberg, there is a commitment to balancing all of the scary monster movie harshness with something soft, loveable, cute, and utterly bankable. I expect the original script in Dante’s hands, without Spielberg’s mainstream influence, would have been a fun, weird, crazy, and much less successful film. And sure, there is fun to be had with a hard R movie featuring grotesquely comic little monsters attacking people (Gremlins kicked off a wave of such movies: Ghoulies (1985), Critters (1986), Munchies (1987), and Hobgoblins (1988), all of which spawned further sequels), but the way Gremlins has its cake and eats it too is unique. Somehow its disparate elements (B-monster movie melodrama, Christmas movie schmaltz, kid movie cuteness, and horror movie threat and brutality), which seemingly should cancel each other out, undercutting each other’s power, instead work together, and each element has that much more of an effect. The cute is cuter and the scary is scarier. Of course, this wasn’t appreciated by everyone – there was a blowback of parents appalled at how violent this “cute” movie was that they’d brought their kindergartner to. Apparently, it was following the reaction to both this and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) that led the MPAA to adopt the PG13 rating just a few weeks later. While I love the movie, I understand how parents could be upset – it swings abruptly from nigh saccharine moments of heart-warming goodness, to shockingly dark fare.

Perhaps the most iconic tonal shift is when, after escaping from the bar where she works (overrun with drunk gremlins), Kate (Phoebe Cates as the love interest) takes shelter in the bank with Billy and, this Christmas Eve already going somewhat poorly (murderous green monsters everywhere), she finally explains why she’s always hated Christmas and how she “learned there was no Santa Claus.” In short, it involves finding her father, dressed up as old St. Nick, dead with a broken neck, rotting in the chimney days after not making it home for Christmas. It is so dark, so tragic and horrifically ugly, especially for a film largely targeted at young kids. But it’s also hilarious in its extremity.

Without losing the weight of the moment, a kind of irony surfaces – here we have a late in the story dramatic monologue wherein this central character reveals deep, hidden emotional truths of her character. It feels like some kind of play with “drama” schtick, and the fact that it goes so hard on the shocking darkness somehow makes it simultaneously awful and much funnier. The next second, we cut to Billy’s dad trying to sell a malfunctioning “smokeless ashtray” to a gas station attendant as he tries to make it home for the holiday, unaware of the chaos going down. The emotion was there – it’s not overplayed or laughed off, but there is no beat to dwell in that feeling. We’re off to the next thing. I’ve read that Spielberg and Warner Brothers demanded that the scene be excised but Dante had final cut on the film and stuck to his guns. I’m glad he did. It’s kind of the whole tone of the film in a nutshell.

In line with this tonal play, I think what stands out most to me is the aforementioned mix of moviemaking tropes and tools, to which Dante regularly tips his hat. It’s telling that we see on TVs in the background excerpts from both Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the gremlins’ pupal stage pods directly borrowing their look from that earlier film, and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), from which Gremlins borrows the Christmas movie trope of the mean old bank owner who is crushing the poor average Joes of Small Town America, and at Christmas, no less! Also, both films end with the main character running down the streets of town shouting at everyone (“Hello you old Savings and Loan!” “They’re here! They’re already here”!).

Following It’s a Wonderful Life, everything here happens in Christmas Movie Land – a loving father, who just can’t catch a break, but is out there chasing that American dream, comes upon a sweet little creature in a shop in Chinatown and brings it home as a Christmas gift for his son (I’m pretty sure in the original script, Billy would have been a young teenager, such that it made sense for 13 year old Corey Feldmen to be his best friend – instead of a 20-something working at a bank).

Of course, though Billy is a good, loving “owner” to Gizmo (does anyone really “own” a pet? But I don’t know what other word to use), everything goes wrong, no one follows The Rules (Keep them out of bright light. Don’t get them wet. And whatever you do, never ever feed them after midnight), and the town is overrun with monsters. Also from Christmas land, the cruel old lady running the bank where Billy works is foreclosing on everyone’s homes and businesses and doesn’t care how many children starve. Plus, she wants to murder Billy’s dog.

Then by the end, the final image of the film is the old Chinese man from whom Billy’s dad had basically stolen Gizmo, having retrieved the gentle creature, walking off into a matte painting of the town that is an absolute Christmas card. The interesting thing is that I feel like this isn’t exactly a horror movie, a Christmas movie, or a horror-Christmas movie, so much as a horror movie that’s set in a Christmas movie, it’s locations and tropes and characters all straight out of Christmas town. Then it adds monsters. Scary, bloodthirsty, mischievous monsters.

And yet, somehow I didn’t find it scary when I was little (at least I think I didn’t – I’d have to ask my parents I guess) – and just two years earlier, my father’d had to carry me, screaming, out of E.T. (government scientists are pretty scary). Having the adorable little, squeaky voiced Gizmo at the center of it all somehow made it ok, made it feel safe. Also, some of the violence and threat gets pretty cartoony, but it’s a fairly severe cartoon. But no matter how gross and goopy the gremlins were, how sharp their claws and teeth, how many people we see them gleefully murder, I never realized I was watching a horror movie because a sweet little furball saved the day in the end, driving around the department store in his tiny pink remote control car before pulling the blind, letting in the sun, and destroying the villain.

But as an adult, Gizmo recedes a bit and I get the horror movie – a cute, sweet, funny one, but a horror movie no less, one which joyfully revels in its horror, just as it also revels in its slapstick, Looney Tunes puppet show and its endless genre and film homages and references. But when it wants to be scary, it is.

Case in point – Billy’s mom hears a sound upstairs and creeps up to her son’s room where that morning they had discovered a set of large, gross looking cocoons. Coming up the ladder, fog drifts down and she can see something’s wrong. The camera follows her and then opens up to reveal that they have all hatched and are now empty. She’s already unnerved but then, in the stillness, ringing through the house comes Bing Crosby, singing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” She freezes. It’s creepy. Next, having come downstairs to turn off the record player, in one non-showboating, totally effective tracking shot, we see her edge across the living room and peer down a hallway as, unbeknownst to her, a shadow of a gremlin appears and disappears in the kitchen doorway before she makes her way into that room.

What follows is probably the horror centerpiece of the whole movie. Turning the corner, she sees a gremlin (and for the first time, we do fully as well) sitting at the table munching on her gingerbread men, their yellow icing disgustingly smeared all over its face. It discovers more cookie dough in the food processor and dives in head first to glut itself before she whips around the corner and turns the machine on, sucking the critter into its blades and shooting green blood all over the cabinets.

Then she’s hit in the back and turns to see one of these little monsters throwing things at her. Whatever these kitchen items are may not be that dangerous, but the sense of life and death threat is real – it is a scary looking beast and it is malicious. Using a tray as a shield, she braves the assault, makes her way to her assailant and stabs it repeatedly with a kitchen knife, shouting, “Get out of my kitchen!” The way her own violence is so rattling for her makes it all the scarier. And then (here it comes – this is the big one) another one attacks, she forces it back by squirting bug spray in its eyes until it stumbles into the microwave, she turns it on, and after a few moments of bubbling and screaming, it pops wetly.

It’s gross and awesome and surprisingly rough for a kids movie starring an adorable, wide eyed ball of fluff. Then she goes into the den, is attacked by one more hiding in the Christmas tree who gets the better of her and almost strangles her before Billy comes home and cuts off its head with a sword that had been decorating the wall, sending that head spinning into the fireplace where they watch it burn. Wow. It is all violent, thrilling, gory, gross, and really funny.

But something I noticed watching it a couple times this week is that while there is a lot of violence, we only see its direct effect on the gremlins. They get stabbed, microwaved, decapitated, electrocuted and melted into puddles of skeletal, burbling goo, they bleed and explode; they suffer.

However, while they do kill a number of people, we never see the exact final moment. When they drive the snowplow into the house of Mr. Futterman (the always lovable B-movie mainstay, Dick Miller – easy to love even when playing grumpy, drunk xenophobes, complaining of foreign-made goods, full of “gremlins”), crushing him and his wife, we cut between the Futtermans’ reaction shots and the gleeful critters in the cab of the plow until finally we see the Futtermans scream, cut to the Gremlins one last time and then see a jolt as if they’ve just made contact, running into or over the couple. We don’t actually see what happens to the people.

Or, in another scene, the bank owner, mean old Mrs. Deagle is distracted by Gremlin Carolers outside, singing the most excellent theme to the film, “The Gremlins Rag,” all bundled up with song books in hand – just lovely. She takes a pitcher of water to throw on what she thinks will be irritating children and finds them instead and runs back inside to go upstairs to safety– in the meantime, Stripe has sabotaged her electric chair. We see her screaming in terror as it malfunctions, shooting her up the staircase way too fast, and we see her thrown out the window and subsequently fly through the air. But we don’t see her hit the ground. That happens just barely out of frame. The fact that we see violence to humans but not exactly humans dying does soften things somewhat. Often I wouldn’t want my horror movie ‘softened,’ but in this case, it works.

And then there are the gremlins themselves, another element the film gets just right. Their design is properly creepy – long spindly, almost insect-like limbs, their slimy, reptilian green skin, their long claws and sharp teeth. They are gross and goopy (at one point, Stripe blows his nose in the curtain, like you do). They are vicious and bloodthirsty. And they are just unabashedly delightful in every way. Seriously – I know when I watched this as a kid, I loved Gizmo – he was there for me. I was five (I had a little Gizmo doll and everything). But now, I unconditionally love the Gremlins. While scary and disgusting, they are still cute in their way. I mean, they are just fun loving rascals who love playing around, dressing up, eating junk food, and watching movies – just kids really. Dangerous, out of control, deadly children, but children who you can still love, who are still cuties when you catch them in the right light.

For example, I love the moment when Billy and Kate realize that all of the gremlins are off the street and must have gone someplace dark, so they check out the cinema.  We see them happily filling the seats, gobbling up popcorn and Junior Mints, and generally just having a pretty wholesome, if raucous, good time. Billy pokes his head in and when Kate asks him what they’re doing, he replies, “They’re watching Snow White. And they LOVE IT!” And they really do.

The main villain, Stripe only survives Billy and Kate burning down the cinema because he had gone across the street for candy as the concessions stand was all out of popcorn. “Yum yum?…Yum yum!” I mean, sure, later he tries to eviscerate Billy with a chainsaw, but how can you not love this guy?

As they are just effectively kids, the real weight of responsibility for all that’s happened truly falls on Billy’s dad, who should never have ignored the old Chinese man’s warnings in the first place (The Chinese shopkeeper is admittedly quite an exoticized stereotype, but that was the era, and he does come across pretty positively at least). If you want to read something into these proceedings, the dad can be taken as a symbol of America – optimistic and good intentioned, blithely chasing his dreams and unthinkingly seizing natural resources that aren’t for sale, trying to do right by his family with no thought of larger consequences – irresponsible and spawning monsters. When the old shopkeeper, known only as “Grandfather,” returns at the end to take Gizmo back to safety, the dad sincerely apologizes. Though “Grandfather” politely accepts this apology (and a malfunctioning smokeless ashtray), and it is heartfelt, it really feels hollow. It doesn’t matter how he feels. People are dead. But, you know, he’s a nice guy – what are you gonna do?

That reading aside, this is just such a deliriously fun movie and I’m glad I took this opportunity to revisit it. It’s also a great addition to the Christmas Horror list – may it brighten your season!

Red Flag Horror: A Wounded Faun, Run Sweetheart Run, Fresh

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For a horror fan and blogger, I must admit I’m not great at keeping up with new releases. Sure, I would like to, but somehow there just isn’t time and while I could check out the new movie getting buzz, I often end up filling some gap in my horror knowledge with an older film I’ve long meant to see, or I just re-watch something I already know I enjoy. I mean, there’s just so much coming out all the time, and since it’s pretty much impossible to see everything, the percentage of horror films released that I’ve seen grows ever smaller.

But this week I actually managed to catch up on three new films that came to streaming services in this last year and I was struck by a recurring theme that runs through all of them. Fresh (on Hulu in the States, but carried on Disney+ in much of the rest of the world), Run, Sweetheart, Run (on Prime), and A Wounded Fawn (on Shudder) all center on a woman going on a date (or something that comes to feel like a date) with some seemingly nice guy, ignoring passing moments of aggression, domineering behavior, or just gut feelings of weirdness that might have warned her away, ending up at his luxurious home, and then, finally, finding herself in the middle of a crazy-stuff-is-going-down horror film. Let’s call it “red flag horror.”

Of course, it’s nothing new for horror to feature women threatened by vicious men. Rape-Revenge movies, from Bergman’s The Virgin Spring in 1960, to 1978’s I Spit on Your Grave, to more recently, the 2017 French movie Revenge, have long done just that. 80s slashers featured so many images of women being stalked by masked male figures that many came (rightly or wrongly – a discussion for another time) to view the sub-genre as quite misogynistic. And more recently, movies like The Invisible Man (2020), Men (2022), Assassination Nation (2018), the Black Christmas remake (2019), or Promising Young Woman (2020) have all foregrounded women navigating a minefield of dangerously entitled, possessive, abusive men. Another big release this year, Barbarian (2022), also turned on whether or not a female character listens to her gut or takes a chance on a guy she doesn’t know not being a psycho or a rapist (in the beginning, she’s so very careful, but when she stops being careful, she really stops being careful and then it’s time to start shouting at the screen). There have been so many of late that it really feels like a trend, but these three that I watched this week, all released close enough together that I can’t imagine anyone copied anyone else, follow key story beats so closely – it just has to mean something, right?

Maybe it’s that, five years after #MeToo first trended, public awareness has simply grown of the exhausting degree to which so many women need to be on guard to protect themselves in everyday situations and therefore, more writers and directors are centering on that experience, tapping into a fear fresh in people’s minds to make successful horror that rings true with people’s lived experience (just as it has long been observed that, e.g., filmmakers in the 50s made alien invasion/giant bug movies that were all about communism).  But it’s not like the menace a woman can feel going to a remote cabin with a man she’s just been seeing for a short time is at all new; it’s only new that it’s so openly and frequently discussed – so is it maybe just that producers see an opportunity in investing in work that is very “now,” ripped from the headlines in a utterly opportunistic money grab?  Both can certainly be true.

Either way, I find it fascinating to note this repetition of not just theme, but specific actions – a nascent trope taking shape. And so, let’s have a quick look at these three quite dissimilar films which all rest on strikingly similar foundations. There will be significant spoilers, so be forewarned.

Fresh (2022)

Written by Lauryn Kahn, Mimi Cave’s feature debut starts with its heroine, Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), enduring the myriad indignities of app-based dating. Between jerks who tell her how much nicer she’d look in a dress and the endless, roiling sea of dick-pics, she’s not having a very nice time. Then she has what seems to be a chance encounter with Steve, a nice, funny guy (and a doctor, no less), in the produce aisle and she feels cautiously optimistic for the first time in ages that she might have actually met somebody she likes. Somebody with no social media profile that she can look up. Somebody who asks about her friends in an offputtingly wary fashion. Somebody who suggests that even though they’ve just started dating, they should throw caution to the wind and go away for the weekend together – to a beautiful but remote area with poor cell phone reception.

But he’s a super warm, goofy, charming guy and, ignoring the many vetoes of her best friend Mollie, Noa agrees. Then, on the way out of town, he explains there’s a problem and they’ll need to leave in the morning, so why don’t they stay at his place (which she’s never seen before and is way out in the middle of nowhere – but a different middle of nowhere than she’d told her friend she’d be in, also with no good reception) for the night? The next thing she knows, her wine drugged, she wakes up chained to the wall in a nicely finished cell in his basement (next to the cells of a few other girls), being kept alive so that he can cut off bits and pieces and sell them to unbelievably rich cannibals who want only the freshest meat.

And yet, there is still a kind of chemistry – he is still noticeably interested in her and while she now knows him to be a sociopathic, woman-eating killer, he is no less charming and funny (Sebastian Stan, who I only knew before as Marvel’s Winter Soldier, really threads a needle here – at once so likeable and so awful). Thus, after a period of despair, and losing one round roast in the name of haute cuisine, Noa continues the date, hoping to placate Steve and stay alive and relatively whole until she finds an opportunity for escape. 

Edgar-Jones delivers a really nuanced performance.  As she dines with him, makes cannibal jokes, flirts, and bides her time, you get the sense that she is full of contradictory emotions. She’s terrified, but he’s also surprisingly easy to spend time with. She hates him and what he’s done to her and the other women being held prisoner, but the food (though morally repugnant) is actually delicious, he makes her laugh, and if you could just forget the whole false imprisonment and involuntary surgery, there is a genuine spark between them. Or she’s just acting the part to a tee. Just playing him until she gets her chance. It’s never clear and it feels as if it might not even be clear to her either – maybe everything she does is calculated and in control and maybe this is an example of how it can be so hard to leave an abusive partner. It can’t be overstated how enjoyable the interchange is between these two performers. It is a delicate dance. 

I will say this is a really fun watch: blackly comic without robbing its subject matter of its weight, and rooted in real world problematics, from gender based violence to late stage capitalism. Noa’s plight is never less than horrifying, but Cave uses a pretty light touch, and while Noa chooses to ignore signs she shouldn’t have, it’s easy to go along with her decisions. Nothing is glaringly amiss before she wakes up in the basement. He never explodes in anger. He doesn’t stare at her fingers, licking his lips and talking about how tasty she looks. But it’s clear that even the gentlest, funniest guy could be a monster, and if your best friend tells you not to go, you probably shouldn’t.

Run Sweetheart Run (2022)

Shana Feste’s film follows Cherie (Ella Balinska) a secretary and single mother who is sent by her boss to entertain Ethan (Pilou Asbæk), an important client, due to a scheduling conflict. She assures her baby sitter that it is not a date, but dresses in such a way that she can choose later to keep things business-like or go for a sexier look. Picking him up at his home, she finds him living in an amazing, temple-like mansion and they head out to dinner. He is rich, handsome, and charming, and one moment notwithstanding when he shouts at someone whose dog gets too close to him, explaining he had been seriously bitten as a child, she has a good time and the evening moves closer and closer to date territory.

Of course that one moment of screaming at a stranger in a restaurant was aggressive and kinda scary. And he seems a touch too smooth to believe. And maybe a bit on the dominant side, but there is an attraction, and when she drops him off back at his place, he invites her in. She almost doesn’t do it, almost listens to that little voice inside and goes home to relieve the babysitter, but it’s been a nice night so far and she wants to go for it, so she does.

At this point, we get our first clear sign that Ethan is more than just a run-of-the-mill creep. Before following her into his house, he holds up his hand, stopping the camera from following him (something like this will happen a couple more times, suggesting a control he maintains over the narrative). The door closes and the camera just watches it. Faintly, we can hear shouting and some kind of crashing until, about a minute later, Cherie bursts through the door and escapes into the night.

Without her phone (everything is in his place), she goes looking for help, but is everywhere met with suspicion, and when she goes to the police, they arrest her for public intoxication (she had a glass or two of wine, but all bloodied, she apparently looks suspicious). Eventually, we learn that Ethan is some thing of great power and that her boss had given her to him as a “tithe” so that he could hunt her, chasing the smell of her blood (and of course, her period’s just started). I will say that when we finally get an explanation of what he is and what he is doing, I was underwhelmed – it was all a bit too on the nose – awkward fantasy world building and political messaging so explicit as to render the remaining run-time strictly allegorical. But until then, it was a really intriguing, exciting, frustrating chase. There is a moment when, backed into a church, he tells Cherie that she ‘will always lose because people believe in me’ before showing her his true form (which we can’t see). In the moment, I wondered if he was Jupiter? If he was God-the-father? If he was the concept of patriarchy made flesh? I kind of wish the question hadn’t been answered because it was much richer not knowing.

But with the exception of this one element, so much of the rest of the film really works. From the moment when she’s leaving the Police Station in the middle of the night and each figure on the street could be Ethan (tension), but isn’t (relief), but is still some man she doesn’t know (tension again), to the discovery that she is but the most recent girl that her boss has sent to Ethan over the years, the film paints a dark picture in which a woman can reasonably trust no man, in which every guy on the street is a potential threat, in which the men of the world conspire together to preserve their own power.

It’s in that last point that I think the film overreaches in a way that serves neither its story nor its mission. I could be wrong, but I doubt patriarchy is perpetuated by men so explicitly, with some powerful leader definitively ensuring that “men keep all the power” (all while twirling his mustache). I feel making a motivation that obvious, that intentional, that comic book supervillain-esque effectively masks real systemic/psycho-social factors at play, whereas a monster could be used to embody them and hence, bring them to light (something horror is uniquely good at).

A Wounded Fawn (2022)

This is Travis Stevens’s third feature and also his third film to highlight women abused, targeted, or undervalued and unfulfilled by men (I particularly enjoyed his second feature, Jakob’s Wife). Here, we meet Meredith (Sarah Lind), who works at a gallery and has recently recovered from a particularly bad breakup. She’s excited to tell her friends that she actually has plans for the weekend as she’s going away with this guy she’s started seeing to his cabin. She’s had a hard time of it and it’s been difficult for her to open up again, but she’s been making the effort and he’s really nice.

Of course, the first time we see him, we know he’s bad news as we already watched him murder a woman in the cold open, an art dealer who beat him at an auction in buying a statue of the three furies harrying some hapless fellow. He seems to have been compelled to carry out his attack by some mysterious, golden, owl headed figure for reasons unknown, but this doesn’t stop him from keeping the coveted statue for himself.

In the car on the way out of town, there are So Many Red Flags. While driving, he puts his hand on her knee in a proprietary fashion. He drifts off into strange silence when she describes her thesis in university (how women artists have been stolen from and erased from history). He gets weird when she asks about his family. And when Meredith asks to stop at a roadside market to use the bathroom, he gets angry at her because ‘they’re almost there – can’t she hang on just a bit longer?’ It should be noted that it’s the afternoon when this happens and when they arrive, it’s full on night time. Also, as a clear visual pun, when they drive past the market without making the requested stop, the camera pans over to a string of red flags, flapping in the wind above the produce.

What follows is a very uncomfortable sequence in which Meredith clearly does not feel safe, but is now out in the middle of nowhere with this guy who has revealed an explosive temper. Still, she tries to relax into the evening and enjoy herself, or at least manage not to set him off. Finally, after a series of odd occurrences (apparently unrelated to him), she puts her foot down and demands that they go back to the city. Of course, that’s when the owl “makes” him try to kill her and the film takes a major turn for the weird.

The rest of the run time is given over to Bruce. Having come to after she’d knocked him out with the statue, he is hounded by the furies himself, their faces and voices provided by his recent or attempted victims (the art dealer from the cold open, Meredith). As he keeps deflecting blame to the force that makes him kill, the thing in his head that’s not him, the owl spirit, the furies attack him mentally, physically, and spiritually (it gets pretty trippy), demanding that he finally take responsibility for his own actions.

Was there really a mythic owl-headed force making him kill, or does he do it cause he wants to and this is how he justifies it to himself? Is he being hounded by Greek Eumenides, or is Meredith somehow doing this and his insane imagination just processes it this way? This final act is interesting and boldly creative, but also difficult and could try one’s patience if not exactly in the mood for it. Regardless, the first act is a powerhouse, layering tension upon tension, Meredith alternating between listening to her gut and telling herself it’s ok and trying to make it work, between desperately wanting to leave and being so careful not to say or do the wrong thing around this man she no longer trusts.

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And so, there we have three recent films, all of which could have been cut short if the woman at their center had just trusted her instincts sooner and not gone along with this rich, handsome, charming, but somehow-something’s-not-quite-right-about-him man. Is it merely a coincidence that they all came out within a few months of each other? Does it rather tell us something about how we as a society are currently viewing the dynamics between men and women? About our current fears? Does it speak of a kind of progress in terms of a growing understanding of social inequalities that need to be remedied? Maybe. It’s possible. That would be good.

But to be fair, those inequalities, those dangers that have traditionally and disproportionally fallen on one half of the population have been around for a long time, at least that half the population has always been all too aware of this fact, and both halves have long been willing to turn blind eyes to keep business running as usual, so I don’t know that some parallel plot points in three direct-to-streaming horror flicks can really be taken as evidence of a real sea change. Of all of the powerful men that got ‘cancelled’ in the heat of the #MeToo moment, many have returned to their former work or positions (though some ended up in jail, so that’s something).

That said, however, one of the things I love about horror, especially lower profile, lower budget work that never really takes the spotlight, is the way that it can reveal things people are thinking about. Maybe these films speak to that – these and the many others previously listed that have come out recently and which carry a more modern awareness of the enduringly persistent violence of power-gender dynamics. And on top of that, they are fun, weird movies. If I haven’t completely spoiled them for you, I suggest checking them out.

Identity, Image, and the Right to Self-Exploitation: Perfect Blue

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After three weeks exploring the work of the Italian “godfather of gore,” Lucio Fulci, I thought it was time for something completely different – time to move away from twistingly plotted, sometimes exploitative gialli thrillers and dreamy, atmospheric gore films, time to dig into the cultural production of a totally different culture. I had long heard that Satoshi Kon’s and Sadayuki Murai’s 1997 anime, Perfect Blue, was a fascinating, impressive piece of work and thought this might be the right time to finally take in this animated, artful, and socially incisive film (also, who knows how long it will stay on Shudder – I should watch it while I can).

First off, wow. It does not disappoint. This is a rich, layered piece of psychological horror, an interesting glimpse into an utterly culturally specific context in which many parallels can be found with today’s (western) internet/fan culture, and an emotionally moving exploration of one woman navigating the choppy waters of gender roles, her own sense of self, and a tension between a kind of liberation and exploitation in terms of her own image/presentation/identity. There’s a lot to dig into, and on top of all that, it is just an engaging, exciting, tightly constructed, funny, sad, and disturbing film, captivating regardless of how you engage with its deeper themes.

Secondly and ironically, given my intentions, the way the story plays out, as well as the line it walks between a stalker-thriller and a gory and psychological work of horror, would fit in just fine with most giallo films, and furthermore, it is shockingly similar to last week’s Fulci film, A Cat in the Brain – I mean, in many ways (though certainly not all) it is almost the same story. Sometimes no matter how you try to shake things up and bring the variety, continuity asserts itself.

That said, this is a story that can be spoiled. I’ll try not to completely reveal the ending, but there will be references to other details throughout, so if you suspect you might want to watch it, go do so now. I think it’s worth your time…

Perfect Blue (1997)

Based on the book by Yoshikzu Takeuchi, Satoshi Kon’s and Sadayuki Murai’s film follows a young woman named Mima as she attempts to transition out of a career as a J-Pop “idol” and be taken seriously as an actress. This is a hard move to make, and just as some of her fans are unwilling to accept this new identity, she herself struggles with leaving her old image behind. Over the course of filming a TV crime thriller in which she takes on an increasingly prominent (victimized and victimizing) role, her sense of self begins to unravel, what is film and what is life comes unmoored, and people around her are targeted in a series of gruesome murders which Mima suspects she may be responsible for. The viewing experience reflects her disassociation, the editing and circular scripting contributing to a surreal, disjointed, mysterious state in which nothing feels certain or solid, other than the emotional tension of her identity, mental stability, and agency being so cast into doubt.

Central to the story is the concept of the Japanese “pop idol,” as while there are parallels, I don’t think there’s anything like it in the American/European context (and I had to read up on it as I’m not fluent in Japanese pop culture). When I think of an American pop star, I think of someone who is already, on some level, famous, “a star” – a person who has made it to some kind of big time. It seems that (especially in the 80s and early 90s, when there was an explosion of “idols” in Japan) this is not true for idols. According to Wikipedia, in Japan today, approximately 10,000 teenage girls work as idols, and there are over 3,000 active idol pop groups. For many, this is a job like many others, offering none of the perks of fame and fortune (for example, Mima lives in a cramped, little apartment, with a poster on the wall of her pop group CHAM! and a few fish).

The way this differs from many “normal jobs” is in the extreme restrictions placed on the girls’ self-presentation. Managed by their respective agencies, the idols are sent on jobs with no real input into what they’re doing, and they at all times, in every interaction, must exude a kind of girly-girl sweetness and innocence. If they actually find success and rise to the top, there can be benefits, and many enjoy the work, but it can be constricting, even suffocating.

At the beginning of the film, Mima consistently speaks and behaves, on or off stage, in public or in private, as the absolute archetype of an “excitable, squeaky, cutesy, young girl” to an extent that borders on irritating. It’s interesting to note how slowly she comes to carry herself differently, to use her voice in a more “naturalistic, mature” way. It takes time, well after she’s declared her “graduation” from CHAM! to leave behind this infantilized affect which she had embodied professionally for years.

Of course, a significant element of how she resets her public identity as a “serious” actress is to take on sexually explicit work (a familiar occurrence in the West where former Disney channel stars occasionally make appearances in Playboy). She does a nude spread for a magazine and, most controversially, films a scene for her TV show in which she’s gang raped in a strip club, her manager explaining that this is what you have to do to establish yourself – “even Jodie whatsername did it” (referencing Jodie Foster in The Accused).  After agreeing to this, her role is enlarged and her career begins to advance.

The scene in question carries a kind of ambivalence. On one level, everything is totally professional and above board. No one treats her in any way roughly or disrespectfully or does anything not previously agreed to, and while one of her managers tries to get her out of it, can’t bear to watch, and leaves the studio in tears, Mima consciously, willfully chooses to do the scene. Going from a close-up in which we see Mima screaming and struggling, only to have the director call “cut!” before we pan out to see the crew standing around, the actor formerly assaulting her apologizing for what his job is and Mima apparently fine, before “action!” is called and she starts screaming and crying again creates a disturbing, intriguing cognitive dissonance. Is this a horrible, scarring experience for her or is it ‘just a job’ and she’s a professional, an adult woman who has made a calculated professional choice?

Either way, it seems that making this choice starts something unravelling in her own psyche. On the train home from her manager’s office, she sees reflected in the window her former idol self, what will come to be known as “the real Mima,” who is appalled at what she’s agreed to do and refuses. Over the course of the days and weeks to follow, this apparition comes to seem more and more real, and is maybe responsible for the bloody murders of one of her managers, the photographer of the nude shoot, and the writer of the TV show who’d proposed the rape scene.

This coincides with her discovery of “Mima’s Room” a blog ostensibly written by her, filled with intimate details that no one else would know about, such as which foot she puts into the bath first, or what she bought at the shop on the way home today. At first she’s tickled by the novelty. The internet is a new thing and she had to buy a computer and have a friend teach her how to use Netscape to even be able to see this site. But it quickly becomes threatening and unsettling. Is someone following her? She suddenly seems alone and vulnerable, her curtain flapping in the open window. Even worse, is there a “more real Mima” out there blogging and she is somehow the imitator, she who is doing things professionally that “the real Mima would never do.”

And we do know there is at least one stalker, Me-Mania, a super-fan and regular reader of the website who is in regular e-mail contact with “the real Mima” and will do anything to “protect her.” Does that mean he’s behind the killings? Maybe. Maybe not. The film maintains a tension of uncertainty such that it feels possible that he’s the killer, the idealized doppelganger is the killer, or that maybe Mima herself has been behind it all as she descends into madness.

And descend she does. Mima just comes apart at the seams. In one moment she is clearly filming a scene for the TV show, speaking with another character about her terrifying dreams, and the next moment she is stabbing the photographer in the eye, before waking up in her bed, before being back in the same scene of filming, discussing the same nightmares, before waking in her bed, unsure of what day it is, of what has happened or not. She can’t hold on to what is real or fiction and neither can we.

Somehow it feels strange to speak of live action filmmaking terms like camera work or editing in terms of an animated piece (though it probably shouldn’t), but how this film is cut plays such a large part in its success. It is a very rhythmic piece as we slide, hop, or march from one reality to the next, from the present moment to a memory, to a fantasy, to the brutal present again, and back into a life of the mind. Bursts of sound and silence accentuate these beats, these changes. All of this serves an effective tension, tight as a drum, as ready to snap as Mima.

By the end, all is revealed, more or less. I won’t go into details here, but she comes to understand who has been behind all this violence, and why, and after a final confrontation, Mima emerges, again fully herself. Without revealing the agent of these killings, everything has been tied up in the given image that Mima has chosen or rejected. Some people – fans, friends, even parts of Mima  – have not been able to accept change, and their desperation to protect the innocence and sanctity of “the real Mima” led them to brutal acts.

Significant here, is the presentation of fan culture. These days, it’s not uncommon (I’ve written at least one post on it) to hear of “toxic fandom,” that supposed fans of given works can be so demanding and unforgiving of the work and creators they claim to love, that it results in a dark, cruel pettiness, an ugly, often racist, misogynistic attack on any artistic choice that deviates from their idealized perception of what the work is “supposed to be.” Whether Star Wars, Marvel movies, or even, sadly, horror flicks, the internet is full of trolls complaining about how one thing or another has “ruined their childhoods.” Situated as it is today in social media, this feels like a contemporary dynamic. Thus, it’s interesting to see it presented so clearly in this film produced in the mid-nineties, just as the internet was starting to take off.

The film opens with a CHAM! concert (in which Mima announces her retirement), intercut with scenes of her coming home to her tiny apartment and discussing career prospects with her managers. It’s striking how the audience for this pop “girl band” consists solely of young men. Before the concert starts, we pan through the crowd, overhearing critical discussions of different idols, gossip about Mima’s pending retirement, and conflict between fans who have come just to stir up trouble and troll everyone else. It is the comment section come to life. I can only assume that there were women and girls at the time who listened to pop idol groups, but we don’t see them. Only present are “otaku,” mega fans obsessing over one aspect of pop culture, and it seems that at least in these public gatherings, these otaku are all males.

Given the uniform gender of the audience, it casts a certain shade over the performance of the idols themselves. Sure, there is a presentation of childish innocence (later in the film, the scene of Mima doing her nude photoshoot is intercut with the remaining girls from her group singing about how they want to wear comfortable clothes and read comic books and never have to change), but in their short skirts, watched only by young men, that presentation is clearly sexualized, the fetishization of the cherished chastity no less exploitative than the explicitly sexual presentation Mima later takes on. Notably, they also sing a song encouraging the listener to “Be much more aggressive and you’ll get a chance – the angel of love is smiling at you!”  

Late in the film, Mima is thrust into a confrontation with Me-Mania, who has been sent to destroy her by “the real Mima.” He speaks of how he would do anything to protect his “beloved Mima”, but in trying to stab Mima, he is also ripping her clothes off and climbing onto her. None of his lines explicitly state this, but it just feels that if his goal is her destruction, this sexual assault is an obvious part of that, suggesting how this kind of sexually possessive and violent mindset runs like a current through this male-oriented fan culture, not to mention “Culture”-writ-large. Of course, this is a film made by Japanese filmmakers about what they observed in their own society and I’m not qualified to judge the trends of a place I’ve never been, but I think that anyone who’s ever encountered a Youtube video complaining that Captain Marvel or the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot signify the downfall of society at the hands of “SJWs” will find this sentiment grossly familiar. To cast a critical eye on myself, earlier in this very text, when I wrote of how Mima’s squeaky girlie persona “bordered on irritating” I was probably unfairly disparaging a certain presentation of femininity as well (and/or I was guilty of a cultural chauvinism in my denigration of “kawaii,” a cultural value which is not my own). For either or both, I apologize.

In the end, it is all about image – Mima can either exploit her image in one way or another, but there doesn’t seem to be an option wherein exploitation is absent. I think when she reacts to filming the rape scene, crying in the bath later that night, it seems more that she is reacting to putting a certain image out into the world than she’s reacting to an unpleasant filming experience. When certain figures respond with violence, it’s because in their eyes, she doesn’t have the right to tarnish the image they had so obsessed over, and they are willing to destroy her, and, as a part of that, to violate her, to save her image from violation. By the end of the film, though, she does regain some degree of autonomy. She may be exploited, but how she exploits herself is at least her own choice to make.

Does that make it a happy ending? I don’t know – she seems happy. She’s a working, famous, respected actor, theoretically more free now to portray her own image differently from one role to the next. Her final line, to herself, in the mirror, is “Yes, I’m the real thing.” Has she landed on her feet, or is this a case of a more insidious commodification of her sense of self? However you read the moment, I think the film that precedes it is undeniably rich in its exploration of the fraught position of a young woman in Japan in 1997, and more broadly, women, and even more broadly, humans in the web of profit, commerce, and industry, in which we all reside in our current era of social media, self-promotion, and personal branding.

—

So that’s Perfect Blue. One could argue whether or not it is exactly a horror film. Some might prefer to call it a thriller, but I think the distinction here is not helpful, and for me, between the tense thriller elements, the momentary bursts of bloody violence, and most significantly, the horrifying loss of personal identity and autonomy, it clearly qualifies as a standout, unique, effective horror film.

Also, to return to an earlier point, it is wild for me just how similar it is in structure and plotting to A Cat in the Brain. In both cases, we have a main character experiencing existential ambivalence regarding their relationship to their art and how they present themselves to the world, going crazy as they slip back and forth between what is “reality” and what is a “scene being filmed,” taken advantage of by a trusted figure who preys on their mental instability to kill a bunch of people and makes them think they may be doing it. And both have a ‘happy ending,’ with them going on with the once doubted career in question, newly confident in their choices. Otherwise, they’re as different as can be, but the coincidental similarity is fun.