Author Archives: Glen

Threatening Innocence – The Bad Seed & Village of the Damned

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When you consider the things that scare people, some are obvious and some are not. Though most spiders and snakes won’t bite you, some can kill and it’s hard to know which is which. Though standing at a great height on a windless day, there is no reason to think you might fall, if you did, it would be fatal. Though most of us will probably never be stalked by a madman with a knife, that would certainly be unpleasant and we could be forgiven fearing such a thing. But then there are some fears that seem less rooted in realistic threat: open spaces, for instance, or public speaking, or a doll, or a clown.

I think films like Child’s Play or Puppet Master work because toys should be safe. They exist only to entertain children and therefore, carry a de facto innocence. They are in our homes, with our kids, and we trust them, but trust necessitates vulnerability and maybe that’s scary. So if they happen to carry the spirit of a serial killer or have been animated by an ancient Egyptian spell, and come to life in the middle of the night to prey on our children or ourselves, beyond just being a danger, the corruption of the trusted, innocent plaything lends an additional sheen of horror, of wrongness.

So, too with clowns, a common fear. Again, they exist to make kids happy, but their image inherently suggests that something else might lie beneath the façade of a painted smile. Thus, it’s not that surprising that, while most might be perfectly nice children’s entertainers, the monstrous clown, grotesque beneath the greasepaint, has become a common image of fear.

And if these markers of innocence, these things that become horrific because it’s wrong for kids’ things to be scary, if they can send chills down the spine, what about kids themselves? I doubt I’m alone in thinking they too can be eerie. They are human, but they’re not really like us – and are thus somewhat alien. They come from us and we try to “raise them right” to share our values and perspectives, but they retain their interiority and we can never really know what’s happening behind their eyes. We love and protect them, treasuring their innocence for as long as it lasts, but we also know that they can lie, and take, and act out of a wrathful, violent sense of having been wronged. I read somewhere that every two-year-old is essentially a psychopath, but that most of us grow out of it. I’ve never been a parent, but I can imagine it’s a terrifying thought that yours might not.

And so, with that, I’d like to look at two films today that offer iconic treatments of the creepy child: The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned. To really discuss them in some detail, there will be spoilers so I recommend seeking them out before going any further.

What Is It With Overly Mature Blonde Kids?

There are many currents that run through both works, some of which are surface similarities and some of which speak to a deeper resonance. In both cases we have creepy children with flaxen hair, who can be unnervingly adult in their demeanor, whose threat is linked to their heredity, who kill remorselessly to get what they want, and whose parent figures take it upon themselves to kill them.  I think in both films, the creep factor is linked with this sense of a maturity beyond their years. For a child to be cold and calculating, to enact its own gaze, declaring itself a subject of equal or greater prominence as the adults around it, can be unnerving. Rhoda is often praised for her maturity, but sometimes her mother seems uncomfortable with it as well. The children of the village are never demure minors to be watched by their elders – they look back and with their look, they actively use their power, controlling people’s minds and bending them to their will.

We also have an interesting treatment of sociopathy in both cases, but they do differ in significant ways. Rhoda is described as a “natural little girl” who “knows what she wants and asks for it – not like these over-civilized little pets that have to go through analysis before they can choose an ice cream soda.”  Unhampered by social mores, she unashamedly voices her desires and does what she needs to in order to realize them. If this means murder, that is no bother to her and she feels no guilt; after all, she wanted it, now she has it, and she’s not the one who drowned so why should she be upset? The children are also free from remorse, and it is there that their alien potency lies. In their words, “If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are.” It’s not only mental dominance, but rather this amoral freedom that gives them an edge. And in both films, their parent figure futilely tries to instill a moral sense, only to come up against a brick wall (though said wall becomes quite useful in the second film). Much of the horror of both films is the realization of the impossibility of that moral instruction. They are simply different and cannot be shaped by a ‘good upbringing.’

The Bad Seed (1956)

Based on a book, and later a play, of the same name, Mervyn LeRoy’s film is high family melodrama of the first order, and it is a treat. At its center is Christine Penmark, the mother of a young girl, Rhoda, the titular “bad seed.” Having grown up with loving and doting parents, and then loving and doting on a child of her own, Christine has always feared somehow that she was adopted. After noticing concerning behavior from her daughter, she presses the issue and learns that she had been born to a famous serial killer. Somehow this penchant for killing skipped her generation and has been planted in her beloved eight year old child, a child whom we know is responsible for at least three murders and by the end of the film is unashamedly planning a fourth. Christine poisons Rhoda and subsequently shoots herself in the head (in the first of three endings in the film – it had trouble with the Hayes Code and had to do some narrative gymnastics to secure a release). It is an emotional, intense film and the confrontation with a horrific truth, long dreaded and now impossible to deny, situates it in the genre even without the presence of a creepy killer kid.

Central to the story is the classic question of Nature vs. Nurture.  The film is peopled with psychologists, crime journalists, and writers, and they are generally all of the opinion that the results are in and that environment alone shapes personality – a child from a good home, well raised, simply could not become criminal – it is only the socially and economically deprived who fall into a life of crime. The idea that a child could be born with such murderous inclinations is simply beyond belief. Thus, as Christine comes to this reckoning, she is alone in it and her concerns fall on deaf ears.  I think in this, the story circles around issues of class in an interesting manner.  It is clear that Christine comes from money (particularly in contrast to the Daigles, the parents of Claude, the child Rhoda kills), and it is unthinkable that a child of her station could commit a crime – that is something that only poor children do. Now, is the film’s stance progressive in showing how this villainy can grow even in the richest soil, or is there an ugliness in the suggestion that ‘bad blood will out’? After all, it is because Christine’s mother was a killer (from lower circumstances) that her daughter is doomed to be one as well. It is of central importance that Rhoda’s moral deformity is not just a question of happenstance, but rather of heredity.

The main thing that distinguishes this from today’s other film is how emotional it is.  Christine is so distraught by Claude’s death and it is so shocking when Rhoda isn’t. Christine is confronted with the weight of that loss by Claude’s mother, Hortense (Eileen Heckart, who rather steals the show as the drunk, broken mother, with nothing left to lose, gasping for the truth). The juxtaposition of Rhoda happily banging away Au Clair de la Lune on the piano as Leroy burns to death on the lawn is chilling and the choice to focus solely on Christine’s face through the sequence is heartbreaking – she knows whose responsibility this is – hers. And ultimately, the revelation of Christine’s birth is a source of great trauma, and the degree to which she is tragically torn between the need to protect her daughter and to destroy the evil she has spawned is powerful. When she finally decides to give Rhoda an overdose of sleeping pills (which she happily gobbles up as a new vitamin), it is to protect her from a world which would hunt her as a monster. It’s all very effective and it’s a shame that the censors of the time forced the adoption of such a bizarre ending (which I won’t describe, but is fun in its sudden, out of left field, over-the-top ridiculousness).  

Even with this oddly tacked on final moment, the total effect is enjoyably melodramatic and tragic, and it’s got a real bite.

Village of the Damned (1960)

The second film is also concerned with emotion, but more as a study of its absence. While Rhoda can be calculating, she also has a psychopath’s rage. In contrast, the children of the village are totally distanced from emotion, and this remove makes them uncanny. Furthermore, taking an unemotional, scientific approach is what distinguishes the main protagonists as well.

The story begins with a strange and intriguing occurrence. One day, everyone within the border of Midwich, a small British village, falls unconscious. In response, a military team investigates methodically, setting up a perimeter, seeing what happens when someone new enters (they pass out as well), and testing everyone when all is said and done.  One moment sets the tone for the rest of the film. Major Bernard, unable to reach family in Midwich, goes to investigate. When nearing the town line, he sees a police officer enter to check out a crashed bus and immediately collapse. He doesn’t run in after him or try to help him at all, but immediately turns around and drives the other way to call in the authorities. What a reasonable thing to do.

It’s soon discovered that every woman of child bearing age is now pregnant (a fact resulting in some heightened emotion – both good and bad as some husbands have been away on work or some teens have never even kissed a boy) and those pregnancies develop rapidly, resulting in a batch of eerie, platinum haired babies all born on the same day, who can telepathically communicate with each other and have some power of command over others. We largely follow Gordon Zellaby, an older man with a young wife who finds himself the supposed father of one of these children. A man of science, he does not seem overly bothered by his lack of true paternity, but is thrilled at the possibilities the children may lead to: “they are one mind to the twelfth power. Now just think what it would mean if we could guide it…we cannot throw away this potential just because of a few incidents.”

Others in the town, in the government, or in other countries where this strange event also occurred are made uncomfortable by the kids, and in some countries we learn that the children, and even sometimes the mothers, were all killed (in the USSR, the whole city where they lived was nuked because they had taken control and there was no other way to stop them). However, Gordon defends their value to science and human progress, establishing a school that they will all be moved into, where he can try to teach them, instilling human values of empathy and kindness.

In the end, he comes to understand the threat they pose to humanity at large (planning to spread and start new colonies), he calmly sends his wife away under some pretense, and managing to block them out of his mind, he goes for his final lesson with a bomb in his briefcase and blows them all up. While The Bad Seed chews the scenery at every opportunity (delightfully so), this films plays it cool, and that is perhaps its central theme. The children’s lack of passion, of affect is both troubling and powerful. They are more open to Gordon than some others because he is able to approach them from a position of scientific curiosity and not outrage, and in the end, he defeats them by acting in a precise, calculated manner.  It’s even easy to miss his change from their defender to their killer, and when I first watched it, I found that to be a flaw – something was missing.

While the first half had been so intriguing, in the second half, as we moved towards the climax, it was all so cool – where was the drama of this final decision? But on reflection, it is fitting that his was the only possible solution. The angry villagers with pitchforks and torches were immediately rebuffed and/or burned to death. The scientist who has simply made a reasonable decision and who goes to carry it out in a dispassionate manner can successfully mask his intentions and carry them to completion, thus saving the town, and possible the world itself.  It is not that he lacks emotion (he seems to love his wife, had been initially quite happy at the prospect of parenthood, and played the piano wistfully waiting to go off and explode), but he can act without it, and thus triumphs.

What’s Worse – Fire or Ice?

While Rhoda lacks empathy or true tenderness, she experiences passions. She wants, and demands, and takes hotly, lashing out when not accommodated. The children of Midwich are rather the opposite, acting only out of a calculated biological drive to live and to spread.  They do not rage or feel wronged; they do just that which is necessary. And which of these is really the larger threat?

In both cases, morality and ethics are absent. Neither cares about how others feel or what they think. But one is hot, chaotic, and probably far easier to identify with – we all get angry sometimes, feel wronged, want to have what we want when we want it – and the other is cold, reasonable, and organized. For my part, Rhoda is scariest in a personal sense – we know that the world is full of jerks and egoists who only care about themselves, and we constantly have to interact with them (though hopefully none of them will burn us alive, drown us, or push us down the stairs). Furthermore, the horror of a child being so irredeemable is really awful. But the children of Midwich represent something much scarier on a larger, necessarily impersonal, scale. In their uniformity and cold, functional intention, they are the drive of progress, of power, of the future, of any system or machine that cares not who gets crushed beneath its wheels as it moves inexorably forward. Do they have a whiff of Nazism in their Aryan appearance and drive to power and domination?  Perhaps Rhoda is a more horrific person (because she is a person – a simplified perhaps, but well-drawn young sociopath), but the children of Midwich are a more chilling concept, especially since it probably can’t be forestalled by thinking of a brick wall: the future will come for us – it cannot be reasoned with – and it will break us.

But I’m sure your kid is great. A little angel. Nothing to worry about at all…

A Quarter Century with Buffy

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It’s always the anniversary of something – we can’t help marking the passage of time, noting that this or that happened sooo long ago and that we, therefore must now be old.  Just a few months ago, coinciding with the lead up to the new Scream movie, I ran into countless reassessments of the original, then hitting its 25th anniversary. I remember seeing it in the cinema, home for Christmas break my first year of college (somehow I seemed to be the only person in a packed house who thought it was funny – the guys I was with were all disappointed it wasn’t scarier), and to think that was a quarter of a century ago is, what, humbling, perhaps? But we’re not looking at Scream today (though I do think it’s great and I did rather enjoy the most recent outing) – it’s recently been brought to my attention that something else just had its 25th anniversary back in March, something of which I became such an obsessive fan that I feel behooved to mark the occasion. So today, let’s have a look back at a TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This is the first time I’m writing about TV here and it is a bit daunting. It’s one thing to write about a 2 hour movie, but where do you start with something that’s over 100 hours long? I think that short of rebranding my entire blog, I can only approach it as personally as possible, try to approach why I responded to it as strongly as I did, and look at where it connects with horror for me, as that is ultimately what this blog is about.

How I Came To It

Though Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Hereinafter, BtVS) premiered in March of 1997, I came to the party much later. I had really liked the poorly received 1992 film (it was worth it for Paul Reubens’s death scene alone) and when the show first came out I thought it looked nothing like the film I’d so enjoyed and just wrote it off as some stupid TV thing that wasn’t worth my time. I was also in my first year of college and really too busy to commit to a weekly serial.

Five years later, I was out of school and newly relocated to Chicago where I shared an apartment with a good friend, thanks to whom I finally reappraised the show. But I must say, on reintroduction, I was not much more charitable than I had been back in 1997.  I remember one Sunday night, I’d come home from a party with some friends and my roommate was watching TV. I asked him what it was, and when he said “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I kind of laughed and went to my room to crash. The next week, I’d again been out with some friends and when I came home, I once more asked what he was watching and when he told me the same thing, I was like “Again? Ok, I’m going to bed.”  Finally, one week later, when I came home on Sunday night and he was watching the show, I gave in, sat down and started watching too, starting to pester him with questions about who everyone was and what was going on. By the end of that episode, I was hooked.

At that point, on Sunday nights, there were episodes from the end of Season 3. On Saturday afternoons, there were episodes from late in Season 4. When either of these would hit the end of Season 5, it would loop back around to the beginning of the series. Finally, on Tuesday nights, new episodes from Season 6 aired. This still being an era of VHS, I was taping all of them and working my way through three different points of the timeline simultaneously. Everything was spoiled in a way, but it was also an interesting, engrossing kind of immersion. And soon, the DVD sets started coming out, so when my roommate started buying them (he had a computer with a dvd player), I finally watched the beginning. By the middle of the summer, I’d caught up and was waiting with bated breath for the 7th and final season.

What Hooked Me?

In the beginning, I’m sure it was a combination of the wittiness of the dialogue and the scale of the plotting that got my attention, but it wasn’t long before I’d really come to love the characters. On top of that, there was an ambition to some of the filming and a richness of themes and ideas that simply went beyond what I had expected from a silly teen superhero-horror melodrama.

I loved the scope of the storytelling. With a relatively limited budget, and some admittedly shaky CGI, we have huge tales of ancient vampires vying for power, a Hellmouth waiting to spew forth all manner of eldritch evil, returning earth to its original, monstrous state, a chaos god who will rend reality to go home, a demon called forth to swallow the world, and a really affable politician who really just wants to be a big snake. Standing against it all, we have one girl who never volunteered for this and her not terribly cool friends, all of whom have to deal with these grand conflicts while enduring the countless normal trials of high school.

Buffy the character, on one level, embodies the most standard reluctant hero tropes, but situating all of that in the bubbly blonde girl, constantly underestimated, forever discounted, sometimes even by herself, gives it a freshness, a lightness. She is called on, time and time again to sacrifice herself (she dies – twice), her lover, and her family – in many ways she is a classic tragic hero – and yet so much of her journey is finding the way to do all of that and still live, laugh, love – staying connected to the world, to friends, to community and thus, not to succumb to the role (in fact, in the series finale, the group manages to share Buffy’s power with countless other young women – thus both empowering that community and making her no longer the sole lonely hero – to quote Giles, “the subtext is rapidly becoming text”). As an overarching theme, it’s hard to resist.

Essential to this larger story then of course, are the friends and lovers and family that ground her, and they are also what make the show so addictive. Buffy is surrounded by, at least in the beginning, “normal” people – without power, without social position (though some of them certainly become quite powerful by the end), just a shy bookish wallflower, a kinda goofy guy lacking direction, a nebbishy librarian, and a single mother trying to get a fresh start. It’s easy to know them, to love them, and written in such a pleasant and piquant manner, you want to come back each week to hang out with them. We may not all be tortured heroes, doomed to tragic romance and burdened with terrible purpose, but a central ethos of the show is that it does take a village.

Another hook here is the show’s format, one which now may seem old fashioned, but may have helped usher in the current age of prestige television. These days, shows are made to be consumed in a weekend – a season of about ten episodes, each one ending on a cliffhanger so you have to start the next to let the story continue. But around the time that BtVS came out, procedurals were pretty much the order of the day. For a show that aired once a week over about 22 weeks, it was pretty standard to make each one a standalone story that didn’t require audiences to have seen everything that had come before (there were of course exceptions to this – soap operas and weekly dramas, but I do think it was the dominant model). What BtVS managed to do, when it was at its best, was to really thread the needle.

Every episode could be a “monster of the week,” but woven through these over the course of the season, there were also large narrative arcs – with seeds planted early which could come to fruition later and set off a larger conflict/development/threat that would really deliver a powerful dramatic climax to the story each year. This arc was propelled by the characters and it would see them undergo real changes. It was really satisfying plotting. At the same time, the episodic, procedural nature kept things fresh and let characters just be together and interact while getting the necessary work done. They had room to breathe, to have downtime, to be people, people with whom it was easy to identify.

On that identification, the sixth season, the one with new episodes that year I got hooked, took a real turn from those before it. Previously, there had always been some “Big Bad,” the main villain of the season who ultimately Buffy and the gang would have to thwart in their evil plans. This might be a really old master vampire (the Master) or it might be a crazy god (Glory), but in this season, that was turned on its head. Ostensibly, the main villain was a triumvirate of toxic, geeky guys, but that was a red herring. Really, the “Big Bad” that year was just life. All of the main characters at that point were out of school, their parents were out of the picture, and life was just kicking their butts. Engagements fell through. There were substance abuse issues (magic abuse, actually, but still). Everyone had to be responsible for themselves and make ends meet, and it was hard, and people were just self-destructing.  I can’t say that I had any particular problems that year; in fact, life was pretty good. But it was my first year out of college and I could really feel for these characters who had accomplished so much, but who were now struggling to live in the real world, having lost the structure of childhood, school, and family. It was one way that it really felt personal.

Is It Horror?

Though it may contain myriad monsters (vampires, of course, but also werewolves, witches, mummies, ghosts, zombies, demons, giant insects, ventriloquist dummies, fish-people, cultists, tentacled otherworldly mind crushing beings; the list goes on), and there are even a couple of episodes that approach scary (Hush; Helpless; Killed by Death; Same Time, Same Place; among others), it’s hard to say it’s really a horror show. But it is rooted in horror (see the beasties enumerated above) and it does something that horror does; using the fantastical, the supernatural, it talks about real, emotional, social, political, psychological experiences, and specifically, fears.  Beginning with the central metaphor that ‘high school can be hell,’ it brings that to life more effectively by having Xander, for example, get possessed by a hyena and eat a cute pig, than it would be able to as a straight teen drama. Sometimes it can be a bit ham-fisted (oh, Beer Bad…), but most of the time, there is a positive feedback loop between the superhero-horror story and the difficult life experience represented by it.

Probably the prime example of this is when Angel, Buffy’s vampire love interest for the first couple seasons, literally loses his soul after they sleep together for the first time (due to an oddly conceived “gypsy curse”).  He’d seemed like such a nice guy and suddenly he’s this cold, sociopathic monster. An event like that could exist on a “realistic” teen drama, but it is elevated beyond the melodramatic by playing out on this nigh mythic level, part of a tale of magic and revenge, and love and betrayal, of literally life and death, with the world at stake; and at the same time, that epic storyline benefits so greatly from the emotion that comes from this familiar, realistic, identifiable experience that any teenager could have.

Perhaps due in part to the extent to which BtVS and Horror in general both lean into metaphor, an interesting trait they share is that they are both very much analyzed and written about. That first summer that I’d really gotten into BtVS, I stumbled upon what was for me at the time, a really novel book, “Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” This was a multi-disciplinary series of academic essays, all focused on the TV show I’d just gotten obsessed with, and I ate it up. I’d recently finished grad school, in Performance Studies (focused on performance theory and, in an anthropological sense, using performance as a lens to view human activity, and vice versa). But I’d not yet encountered serious scholarly investigation of a pop culture artifact such as this, especially given how hard I had fallen for it. (This may now be hard to find, but Slayage: the International Journal of Buffy+ Studies is still active and all publications are free on their website.)

After this first book, I found a few others, and I’m not certain, but I think there’s a pretty good chance that it was going down this rabbit hole that led me to scholarly works on horror (Noel Carroll, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, etc.), and it was discovering these readings of horror texts that really changed my relationship to the genre. This was possibly when I really became a fan. I didn’t just enjoy a good scary movie occasionally, but now I was really thinking about the genre, considering its artistic and philosophical value in a wholly new way. In horror I found another collection of work that people readily scoff at and put down, but which is rich in meaning, in experience, and the appreciation of which invites interrogation. So, it is possible that I have Buffy to thank for that.

What About Joss?

So a certain name has been notably absent in my discussion thus far – Joss Whedon, the creator and show runner of not only BtVS, but also its spinoff show Angel and a few other fantastical fan favorites. In recent years, unsavory details have come to light about how he ran the show and what the dynamics were like behind the scenes. It hasn’t quite risen to #metoo levels, but it seems he sleazily used his position to secure romantic relationships with employees and was abusive and cruel, particularly to certain actresses and female staffers. This is more than a little disheartening as the show always had an outwardly feminist self-presentation and his voice is just all over the show. That warm wittiness, the dramatic choices made for characters and the larger narratives – it feels like him. Having watched 5 different series that he created and a few films, his voice is clear. Many have said recently that it’s important to focus on the fact that many, many people are involved in making a TV show and have thus tried to minimize his influence on it all, but I think that’s disingenuous. From what I’ve read, this really was an auteur situation, even with a large team working beneath him.

I think that while of course the show stands on its own and holds up regardless of what details have come out about its creator, now when watching it and hearing dialogue that is so clearly in his voice, a pall is cast, a reminder of the ugliness that has gone into this artwork I love – and it can leave a sour taste in the mouth. And yet, I do still love it. And there is that bad taste. Both things can be true.

We live in an era when we are called on to hold ourselves accountable for enjoying the work of people whom we’ve learned bad things about, and thus to stop enjoying that work. To some extent, I see the value in not giving my money, which I work for, to someone who is actively using it to do something I disagree with. But if I were to decide that I shouldn’t watch this show anymore, a show that I have found such joy and comfort and excitement in, who benefits and who is harmed? Is anyone affected but me? Probably not. Some may feel that the bad taste makes it impossible to appreciate the material as they had once done, and I can understand that feeling (perhaps, I am able to stomach it only because I haven’t had to directly put up with certain things in my life – and that is a position of privilege), but for myself, as I attempt to navigate an ethical life, I think I’ll just ride that train of cognitive dissonance. The world is complicated. Twas ever thus.

Plus, I’ve already got all the dvds and I’m not giving them back.  

Three from the Woods – Just Before Dawn, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Eaten Alive!

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So, I try to ensure a degree of variety here. Two weeks ago, I published my silly poems – which was a lot of work and a lot of fun, but not really scary. Last week, I wrote about yet another Polish film which has a relationship to the genre, but however excellent of a film it is, it’s not quite what one would generally think of as a horror flick. So this week, I felt it was time for something kinda grotty, something that could be described as nothing less than horrific. I even found myself with a bit of time on my hands and was able to check out a few flicks I’d been meaning to get around to for a while. In the end though, while I appreciated everything I watched, I’m not sure if I have enough of a take on any of them to fill a whole post, so this week, let’s take a short look at three weird, violent little filmic oddities, all of which might convince you to stay out of the woods, avoid secluded lovers lanes, and maybe just steer clear of Texas entirely.

Just Before Dawn (1981)

I was prompted to give this one a chance by the main character of Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, who waxes enthusiastic about it and its final girl, Constance, and I’m glad I did as there is a lot here to love (and some other stuff to wade through until you get where you’re going).

It’s a pretty standard backwoods slasher setup: a group of young people head into the deep woods of Oregon despite the warnings of the quirky forest ranger (an enjoyably odd George Kennedy) for a weekend of drinking, skinny dipping, and carrying on. They don’t all come out again. Along the way, there’s some pretty languid pacing, surprisingly bloodless kill scenes, strange tonal shifts (from pastoral, to a bit goofy, to rather intensely brutal), and a “twist” that doesn’t feel all that shocking when it’s revealed.

However, it also features Mike Kellin (Mel from Sleepaway Camp) as a drunken voice of doom, an effective score by Brad Fiedel (composer for Terminator and Fright Night, among others), a beautiful location, well filmed and well utilized in service to the horror set pieces, and a twist which, while admittedly not very surprising, does set up solid tension based in dramatic irony as the only characters who had learned this information are dead, and those remaining are led to a false sense of safety.

In fact, pacing issues aside, Just Before Dawn offers a lot of really playful and potent teases – letting the audience see something or know something while (very obviously, but no less entertainingly) contriving reasons for the characters not to. Early on, the kids (let’s call them kids anyway) are all driving through the woods in a camper. One girl re-angles the rearview mirror so that she can do her makeup; the driver objects, but she’s like, ‘come on – there’s no traffic – what do you need it for?’ A moment later, we can see the killer (who had recently leapt aboard) climb across the back, clearly visible in the rear window, but unseen by all of the kids. A particularly fun scene later hinges on a character having lost his glasses and mistaking the figure moving towards him. These gags are hardly subtle, but the audience is invited in on the joke and there is a fun game of suspense in how it all plays out.

And finally, as this film came so strongly recommended by a fictional character obsessed with final girls (I’m sure I’ll write about My Heart is a Chainsaw sometime soon – for now, let’s just say it’s worth your time), it has a greatly interesting presentation of one. Constance (Deborah Benson) comes across as some kind of thesis statement on the idea of the final girl, which is notable as the director, Jeff Liebermann, didn’t seem to list slashers as his primary influence, but rather claimed inspiration in Deliverance and the work of Ingmar Bergman. She starts off as a very reasonable character – possibly the only one who’s actually dressed appropriately for hiking and camping – who has experience in the great outdoors and is mildly irritated by the goofball irresponsibility of her boyfriend and compatriots. She might have some wine, but she doesn’t overindulge, and if anyone’s going to pull off their top and jump into the water, it’s probably not her. So far, so standard fare.

But then something kind of interesting happens. Some of the boys who had gone to the camper for more wine play a prank on those who’ve stayed behind to make camp. Just out of sight, in the woods, in the dark, they make some noises, scaring the others by the fire (who had all ignored the drunk guy ranting that he’d been chased by “demons” and come here anyway). Though her friend Megan picks up a knife and is ready to stab at one of the boys as he jumps out of the shadows, Constance freezes up – and over the course of the next day or so, really reacts against her failure to take action. She’s so capable – she knows how to survive in the woods, but when there was a threat, she felt helpless. And so, she begins a transformation, borrowing Megan’s makeup and clothes, making herself into less of a ‘responsible-boring’ type and more into an impulsive, proactive, powerful woman. In all honesty, perhaps the director simply wanted to get her into skimpier clothing, but from a contemporary perspective, in light of what became the standard patterns of the sub-genre, this really subverts expectations in an intriguing way. Either way, this change coincides with her need to rise and do battle with the killer.

And what a battle! I mean really – it’s not very long and it doesn’t really have much in the way of gore, but it is just jaw dropping in its intensity (and without wanting to spoil the big finish, pun intended). I find it an interesting spin on the still being established tropes (filmed in 1980) that the ‘final girl’ first visually turns herself into a character who might be expected to die first (the over sexualized girl) and that while no killer in this film wears a mask, in effect, she does. The makeup that she keeps applying gives her a totally different face, and it seems that it is only once this mask is complete that she has finished her metamorphosis into the kind of person who could take down the killer in such brutal, spectacular, screaming fashion.

It probably could have gotten there faster (though I suppose it’s thematically appropriate to sometimes feel like it’s wandering aimlessly in the forest), but the destination is 100% worth it.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

This second film is rather a curiosity.  If Just Before Dawn has some shifts of tone, this swings so wildly back and forth that it feels like at least three different movies. One is a procedural true crime docu-drama about a police hunt for a serial killer in Texarcana in the 40s. The next is a really savage proto-slasher with increasingly weird and genuinely scary scenes of stalking and assault. Finally, somehow it’s like the Keystone Cops are on the scene, with zany slapstick sequences set to banjo music. This is one odd duck.

Directed by Charles B. Pierce (who also portrays Patrolman Benson, A.K.A. “sparkplug,” the main source of police themed comic-relief), the procedural elements here suggest a precursor to Fincher’s Zodiac. Loosely based on a true story, the film focuses on the police investigating a killer who targets couples in secluded areas (lover’s lanes and such) and toys with the police, taking pleasure in the media circus and public terror in response to his crimes. The structure is somewhat non-narrative, rather approximating a kid of reportage as we shift from killing to killing, interspersed with the police’s attempts to build a profile of the killer and follow the extremely limited clues they have to work with. By the end, the killer’s identity, motives, and whereabouts are still undetermined (true to the historical record, though most of the film apparently plays fast and loose with the facts), suggesting that though these attacks had all happened about 30 years earlier, the killer was still walking the streets of Texarcana, free and at any point could kill again. He could be sitting behind you in this very cinema as you are watching this film right now!

The less said about the comic elements, the better. While not quite as off putting as the bumbling police in, say, Craven’s Last House on the Left (which along with Just Before Dawn also claimed a Bergman film as an influence), the inclusion of the cop-comedy is unfortunate. It’s not even terribly done per se, but it feels like the procedural and the proto-slasher really could have successfully co-existed in one film, but the utter goofiness of this slapstick really undercuts both of them. Still, I suppose the oddness of its presence is one of the weird little details that make this flick rather memorable.

But, of course, in terms of the focus of this blog, it is the scenes with the killer that are most significant. Released in 1976, two years before Halloween would kick off the slasher boom, the killer here matches so many of what would become the conventions. He is masked (a sack with eye holes, suggesting both the Klan and a menacing killer scarecrow, or a precursor to the Jason of Friday the 13th, Pt. II), silent except for heavy breathing, a stalker in the shadows who kills for reasons totally obscure to both the audience and his victims, and grows more creative in how he carries out his crimes.  At first, his primary weapon seems to be a simply a silenced pistol, but as the film progresses, he improvises, using what is at hand, such as a pitchfork, or in one rather disconcertingly off-beat kill, a bladed trombone. He is scary and the scenes of him hunting and setting upon his prey are tense, visceral, and frightening.

Again, this is a weird, idiosyncratic little picture. It is filmed beautifully, but some performances and choices seem amateurish. It adopts a tone of Dragnet-esque “just the facts,” down to the voiceover narration, but also features sequences of both such over-the-top silliness and atmospheric horror that sap its pretense of factual reporting of any authority. It’s kind of hard to guess who they thought they were making this film for; but that is also, of course, its charm. There is no clean, successful formula at work here. The film is what it is. Part of that is an engaging study of police process. Another part is honestly pretty stupid. And finally, about a third of it is a really great scary movie.

Eaten Alive (1976)

At the end of The Town that Dreaded Sundown, the killer disappears into Texas swampland. So it is fitting that today’s final film, from the same year, takes place in those same Texas swamps and is also loosely based on another historical serial killer, this time Joe Ball, A.K.A. the Bluebeard of South Texas, A.K.A. the Alligator Man. Beyond that point of connection, it seems that more than the rural settings or early slasher vibes, the main thread running through these three films is their unbridled tonal fluctuations. Tobe Hooper’s 1976 follow up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absolutely bizarre nightmare that weirdly bridges the grindhouse and the arthouse.

The story, if you will, centers on a series of people unlucky enough to stay at the Starlight Hotel, someplace in a swampy stretch of Texas. The place is run by Judd (Neville Brand, who delivers a spirited, committed, pungent performance) , a mumbling, threatening, utterly unhinged nut job who’s seemingly in the habit of murdering everyone under his roof and feeding the bodies to his pet crocodile. First we meet Clara, a young runaway who has just been kicked out of the local brothel. Seeking refuge, she comes to exactly the wrong place and is never heard from again. Then a young couple shows up with the family dog. Once Snoopy ends up inside the same reptile as Clara, Angie (the young daughter, played by Kyle Richards a couple years before Halloween) freaks out and her parents check in to calm her down. It’s not long before the father is Croc food, the mother, Faye (Marilyn Burns, returning from Texas Chainsaw to scream her lungs out again), is tied to a bed with tape round her mouth and young Angie is being chased through the crawlspace by Judd with a scythe. A local sleazebag (a young Robert Englund) and his girlfriend check in to pay by the hour; unsurprisingly he gets eaten. Finally, Clara’s father and sister, Libby, show up looking for her. He doesn’t make it, but once she rescues Annie and Faye, the three of them escape into the swamp where Judd unsurprisingly is eaten alive!

So that is the series of events, roughly as they occur, but it does the film a strange injustice to suggest that this all somehow forms anything as pedestrian as a “plot.” It rarely feels like there is much connection between events from one moment to the next, suggesting either inept editing or a thoroughly intentional nightmare logic. As opposed to Chainsaw, this was all filmed on a soundstage and it makes no effort to mask that fact, rather embracing artifice throughout. This is true from the deep, rich theatrical colors of the lighting, to some eccentric acting choices, to an absolutely abrasive sound design. This film seems to have no interest in following any rules of “good film making.” This may sound like a criticism, and I suppose anyone with little tolerance for such things should be forewarned, but I think it is all part of what makes this one noteworthy. This is a unique, strange, utterly non-formulaic, very personal exercise in horror. It may be rooted in a kind of amateurish failure, but it feels like genuine experimentation and expression.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its vacillating tone (again, a running thread through these three movies). Many of the scenes take on a cartoonish vibe, supported by the color palette and some broadly stylized performances. There is an unreality permeating it all which can be really unsettling, but also funny and engrossing.  There are times that I found myself just in shock, wondering what on earth this thing was.  But in that cartoonish grotesquerie, the film establishes a madcap hellscape – a horrible place filled with terrible people who are all at best “off,” and at worst, monsters.

And then, just when the film is at the height of absurdity, of a kind of shrill, wild, laughable insanity, it can turn on a dime and be absolutely brutal. In the moments of actual violence, there is nothing light – there is no room to breathe, there is only a sustained scream of terror and mindless, uncontrolled wrath. It is genuinely intense, successfully scary, and bleak and dark as all get out.  It is clear that this was made by both the same creator as Chainsaw as well as its much zanier sequel which he would direct ten years later. More so than anything else he did in the 13 years between, I think this bridges the gap between those two totally different films.

I can see a lot of people not taking to this one. It would be easy to discount it as a failure on a wide variety of levels, but I suspect artistry in it, a mind at work, taking a dim view of humanity and the world, and painting a mad picture of the cruelty people are capable of and the petty, impulsive irrationality that drives them. It is not exactly a ‘fun’ picture, but in a peculiar way, it is satisfying, especially in its commitment to its own project, its own dark, loony vision. Sometimes you may hear it said that a certain film from the past ‘just couldn’t get made today’ and that might actually be true in this case, but it’s not about the exploitation elements of sex or violence. Rather, I think these days there might just be too much pressure to make a “well-made film,” which could quash the kind of creative self-expression so weirdly and gloriously on display here.

Polish Horror Series #4 – Demon

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It’s not a new question, but what exactly makes something a horror film? Does it need a supernatural monster? Do there have to be jump scares? Does it need to show us horror, make us feel horror, both, neither? Does it need to actually be scary, or if it rather has the feeling of a mournful, anxious, mad dream, can it make the cut? I tend to cast a wide net, and while there are some thrillers, for example, that I’m not particularly keen on looking at through a horror lens, who am I to object if someone else wants to do so?

Today’s film is one that I’ve been impressed by for years and which is I think sadly underseen. One could argue quite fairly that it isn’t a horror film at all, but I would disagree.  If anything, I think it has perhaps suffered from people coming to it expecting a certain kind of spooky possession flick (perhaps its name doesn’t help in this regard) and instead finding an art house drama, but I think the horror is there.  A horror of remembrance, of terrible guilt uncovered – of what exactly – it may not actually specify, but the degree to which pains have been taken to cover things up, to consciously forget an irreparable pain and loss, and make a life atop the bones is surely the stuff of horror. It may not scare, but it surely haunts.

Demon (2015)

Like a mix of Wyspiański’s Wesele and Ansky’s Dybbuk, with a dash of the Jedwabne Pogrom on top, Marcin Wrona’s final film (he sadly committed suicide while promoting it) is a delirious, surreal, lingering meditation on the sins of the fathers, on the weight of past wounds that can’t be healed, on the drive to forget and the need to cling to what has passed and cannot return. A young man, Peter/Piotr comes to a village in Poland from London to marry his girlfriend Żaneta and fix up the old house she has inherited from her grandfather.  The night before the wedding, working on the property, he uncovers a human skeleton, thus stirring up a painful mystery of the past – whose home had this been before and what happened to them? How exactly did Żaneta’s grandfather come to possess this land? What isn’t being talked about?

The next day, Piotr is behaving very strangely – throughout the ceremony and the party that follows, he keeps seeing a dark haired, possibly dead, young woman whom he calls “Hana” (having seen the name written on a doorframe in the grandfather’s house, tracking a child’s growth). He has fits which are diagnosed as epilepsy, tries to get information out of Żaneta’s father who rebuffs him, and inquires with the priest about seeing the spirits of the dead. Finally, in a climactic seizure, he is possessed by the ghost of Hana, a young Jewish girl who had lived in the house long ago.  Żaneta’s father does everything within his power to keep a veneer of normalcy on the proceedings and save face within his community, but when Piotr/Hana disappears and cannot be found, all descends into drunken chaos and the next morning brings a sense of broken devastation. Piotr’s car (its driver having never resurfaced) is deposited in the water of the quarry that Żaneta’s father operates, the house is demolished, and all is forgotten once more.

The sparseness of the story is a strength here. There is very little to the plot and yet, a sense of mystery prevails, adding to the emotionally conflicted atmosphere of the whole. While we generally follow Piotr throughout, we are not privy to his inner life, and when his behavior shifts, we are initially unsure of exactly why. Similarly, the world of the film is somewhat inscrutable. In its opening, as Piotr is taking a ferry to his destination, he sees a woman in her nightgown screaming inconsolably and trying to walk into the water, her arms restrained by others who try to pull her back on shore. Who is she? Why is she screaming? Is this another possession? Is it just the presence of grief? We don’t know, but it sets a tone for what follows.

But it isn’t only gloom and sadness at this wedding. There is also a strong element of the absurd, of a desperate mania suffusing the event. From the start, in the behavior of the guests, in the music, in the rituals of the wedding party, there is a folksiness that is, in the beginning, simply fun and lively, and oh so specific. This is not a general presentation of ‘wild party,’ but the idiosyncrasies of both culture and character give it all a real life which is both appealing and intimidating – Piotr is a complete outsider. He knows his bride and her brother (with whom he worked in London) and no one else, and under the best of circumstances, it could be daunting to come into this kind of insular, intense community, where he doesn’t quite speak the language (though as a foreigner living in Poland, I think he does very well, and I wonder what we are supposed to surmise of his family background).

And everyone in it is so well drawn, so present and physical and earthy – sometimes ridiculous, sometimes threatening – from the new father-in-law who does not approve of this too short courtship (and moves to immediately have the marriage annulled once, now possessed, Piotr is deemed defective), to the doctor who makes such a big deal of being sober, but is the town’s biggest drunk, with the heart of a morose poet, to the friend of Żaneta’s brother, who seems dangerously into her and has it in for Piotr immediately (it’s even possible that he kills him, but nothing is certain), to “the professor,” an old, Jewish school teacher, doddering in his age, but also carrying a gentle sadness, the only remaining Jewish person in this town, which is implied to have had a thriving Jewish community before the war.

As the evening develops, and Hana’s emotional and spiritual grip on Piotr takes hold, the winds rise, rain pours down, the vodka flows like a river, and the revelry of the whole mad town of guests builds to a fever pitch. Generally, many of them don’t even seem that interested in the wedding itself, and the fact that the groom is practically frothing at the mouth is only a temporary oddity—they are caught in their own tempest, their inebriation echoing the storm outside in a feedback loop of pathetic fallacy, echoing a drive to live now, forget the past, and deny tomorrow. It is animalistic and corporeal, edging past what might conceivably be deemed ‘fun.’ When the sun rises, after all is done, they stumble across the fields of the village, at one point crossing paths with (even literally bumping into) a funeral party, the solemnity of the latter in such stark contrast to the absent respect of the former. And isn’t the lack of respect for what has come before, for the dead, at the heart of the ghost story?

The films follows a rather odd trajectory, the second act building in emotional intensity as first Piotr loses himself, and then Hana, speaking through him, is confronted with the disappearance of all that she ever knew. And then suddenly, they are gone. Really and truly – we never see either of them again. Everything unravels, but not in the hot explosion the previous rising action would have suggested, but rather the listless, slurring, drunken blackout that everyone has coming. Some go searching for Piotr/Hana, and at night, the streets are filled with fog, illuminated by searchlights, and it is beautiful and sad. The professor reminisces aloud about all that is gone, the world and community of his youth. These ghosts now walk the streets-we don’t see them, but the presence of absence is felt. The following morning, Żaneta’s father implores the guests that “we must forget what we never saw” – that there was no wedding – (there literally is no groom, after all), they were never there, he was never there. This is all just a dream that all will soon wake from and then everything will be clear.  The accusing bones are once again covered with dirt; the world now is the only world that is and there is no reason to ever question how it came to be that way.

This is an interesting spin on the idea of the haunting. In an American context, we have endless tales of “Indian Burial Grounds,” of the original genocidal sin of America, the blood staining the land and dooming endless generations of nice enough, middle class white people to unpleasant interactions with newly acquired real estate which they never could have afforded if not for the stink lingering from past crimes and which they now can’t afford to leave, no matter how the walls may bleed or the flies may buzz.  In the European context, history is long, and regardless of where you step, you will find yourself on land that was, at some point, stolen bloodily from someone else. And yet, relatively recent history (WWII, the Holocaust, etc.) looms especially large, certainly in Poland, a country which felt the effects of this history as few places did. Trauma still inhabits the land, and even if those holding property now did nothing unethical to acquire it (though some did – without casting any aspersions on the whole, some individuals will always be selfish and cruel), the murders of former owners linger, haunt. And at the same time, there is a vibrant, modern life going on, which needs to thrive and can’t exist constantly beholden to the past, to sadness.

I think Demon dwells in these contradictions, in this tension between the forgetting which is necessary to live and laugh and move forward and the memory which is a vital responsibility, often shirked. It is not a scary movie, but I would consider it horror. More significantly, it’s a stunning little picture, and it’s a shame that Wrona will never make another.