Category Archives: Review

Italian Neorealism Folk Horror: Il Demonio

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As is regretfully so often the case, it’s been a minute since my last post. There is some kind of irony in the fact that as a horror blogger, I can so rarely successfully publish a post during October, and on top of that, in the lead up to Halloween, I think I found the time to watch fewer horror movies than any other month this year. I guess I was just too busy Halloweening to engage with others’ work. And here we are, the high horror holidays are well behind us (so is Thanksgiving to be fair) and out my window, winter has fully arrived and the whole world is cast in greyscale as the snow falls from leaden skies. And so, with this somewhat bleak yet beautiful view as a backdrop, I’d like to focus this month on a recent monochromatic discovery as desolate, striking, and magical as any turning of the seasons.   

In my last post on The Whip and the Body (1963), I was blown away by the central performance of Daliah Lavi, an actress that I’d not previously heard a thing about, but who just knocked my socks off in Bava’s ghostly, kinky, gothic-psychodrama masterpiece. Having praised her work in that film on social media, a commenter suggested I check out what Lavi had described as her favorite film and performance, Brunello Rondi’s Il Demonio (The Demon), and hey, isn’t it refreshing to have social media actually deliver what it promises – making connections with strangers that can broaden your horizons and introduce you to new things – rather than just being the usual cesspool of conflict and ugliness? So thanks, whoever you were, cause this was a tremendous movie: gorgeous, tragic, folksy, witchy, and genuinely surprising. It was a really refreshing watch – nothing about it was at all ‘typical’ – the sort of underseen deep cut about which I’m more than happy to spread the word.

There will be spoilers, but I’m not so sure this is the kind of film that can really be spoiled, so read on. (But if you want to watch it first – and you should – it’s great – I did so on Tubi)

Il Demonio (1963)

As I understand, Brunello Rondi was a frequent collaborator of Fellini’s, but this was his first solo feature film, and it is a doozy! A fascinating cultural artifact, documenting southern Italian folk beliefs and practices at the time, this is also a blistering portrayal of one young woman’s psychological damage and social downfall, trapped in an isolated, religiously conservative, deeply superstitious village, expressing her pain and torment through the only avenues available to her: the aforementioned folk beliefs and practices.  I feel justified in discussing this as a horror movie – it’s chock full of witchcraft and possession, but past that, there is no shortage of real life horrors. The main character, Purif (Daliah Lavi), is abused and ostracized, beaten by her family and raped by strangers (and her family, for that matter) – she is isolated and outcast, chased and stoned, and her home is lit on fire. But her nightmare is no less psychological, tormented by thoughts, desires, and impulses beyond her control. It’s a lot.

It’s also just so rich in cultural detail, in little kernels of life, in human comedy and brutality and fear. It is often a deeply funny movie, but ultimately sad more than anything else. And on top of all that, through all the cruelty and pain and absurdity and nuance, it is starkly beautiful. Seriously, every scene has something that made me laugh or gasp or hold my breath at how staggeringly stunning it all was. I can’t overstate my excitement at the filmmaking – truly cinematic pleasure amidst all these scenes of madness and misery – and that’s one of the main things I come to this genre for. What a treat!

In short, Purificazione, AKA Purif, having had sexual relations with a local villager, Antonio, is tossed aside by him in favor of a more “proper” match. We never know the extent of their previous relationship, except that she’s been left wounded and obsessed, and that he now views her as little more than an animal. With no other outlet for her suffering, Purif turns to witchcraft: cursing him, disrupting his wedding, and hexing his bridal bed. At the beginning of the film, the townspeople mainly see her as an off-putting nuisance, a weirdo they have to put up with, and occasionally drag away screaming when she has an episode; but over time, especially after she publicly declares her allegiance to Satan, writhing in the town square in demoniac ecstacy, what had once been mere cautious distaste grows into full-fledged terror and hate. She is subjected to exorcism (as well as folksier and more sexually invasive treatments), she is branded a witch, and she is blamed for all the troubles of the village, from dead children to bad weather, until they finally set out to burn her corruptive influence out of the very air.

This is an interesting piece, full of supernatural vibes, but concurrently, also rooted in psychology, a well observed document of human feeling and action and social constraints and taboos. Regardless of the spells and potions and some mysterious goings on, I never felt that there was actually anything otherworldly in the proceedings. Purif’s “witchcraft” is the kind of sympathetic magic you can imagine a child creating for themself. She feels so strongly, her hurt is so powerful, that of course the blood that falls from a needle stabbed into her breast, mixed with a bit of her hair, baked in the oven to ash, and sprinkled surreptitiously in his wine, would be enough to curse Antonio to suffer as she suffers, to ruin his life as he has hers.

Similarly, I never felt that there was any ‘demon’ in the literal sense in her possession. But that doesn’t exactly mean that it’s “not real.” It is real for her. It is real for the whole world in which she lives. How could it possibly be more “real?” She, and everyone she knows, lives in a realm of magical thinking wherein everything is true. Even if her possessed affectation is rather an available physical and verbal expression to give voice to her feelings, to her mental torment, than it is a case of some sinister “spirit” entering her body and refusing to leave, she is still possessed by that feeling, by her, let’s call it ‘madness.’ The wicked freedom that comes with ‘being possessed’ gives her free rein to howl out all the frustration and anger and sadness inside – it lets her laugh at any authority that might scold or belittle her for either her original ‘sin’ of physical pleasure or her inability to get her feelings under control, to tamp herself down into a socially acceptable persona, to let it go, “be normal.”

Accepting this loosely in the horror canon, I think it is interestingly situated – both as a late piece of Italian Neorealism (which is admittedly not at all a horror sub-genre), and a rather early example of Folk Horror (which is). On the Neorealism side (and I am NO EXPERT), as I understand, it fits the bill: a focus on underprivileged ‘real’ people, often episodic more than narrative based, and featuring qualities of a documentary style, including the presence of non-actors and shooting on-location. We’ve got all of this. Occurring in a remote village in southern Italy in 1963, it may be set in ‘the present,’ but it is as far from the bustling modernity of Rome as is Antarctica. In one shot, for about one second, a road can be glimpsed with cars passing by, and it feels shocking that they could even exist in this world, as incongruous as a boom mic dipping into a shot in a cheap B movie. But I’m sure this must be intentional, as significant as the nearby highway in Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling (which shares some similar themes).

While the main characters are professionally portrayed (Lavi is outstanding once again), the village seems primarily peopled with non-professionals. Just characteristic locals with craggy faces, and not so many teeth, and it is such an added value. They aren’t often called on to “act” too much, but their presence grounds the whole piece. Finally, the episodic nature of it all gives vast opportunities to follow the life of this place, of these people, as the seasons come and go, and they plant, and they marry, and they reap, and they die, all along carrying the traditions that make them themselves, that define their community for good and for bad. To liken it to yet another film, I was often put in mind of Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) (but maybe that’s because I don’t know much about Italian Neorealism past what I’ve read on Wikipedia – I’ve seen only a handful of old Italian flicks that aren’t horror, so of course I think of one of them…). You really feel the life of the place. Sometimes it’s quite funny, and sometimes tragic, but it is constantly so vibrant, thrumming with life.

On the Folk Horror front, this is really a case in which the “horror” is “folk.” The villagers are a threat to the ‘witch’ – not the other way around. While their folk beliefs have a kind of rural loveliness, they also doom Purif to suffer, and many take advantage of her in her outcast state, sexually and otherwise. The beliefs that hold the community together bind her in an inescapable hell of rigid social mores in which her own inner drives – healthy and natural ones like sexual desire, and problematic ones like her possible mental illness can only be understood as the influence of the infernal.

 Interestingly, in the scenes of possession and exorcism, there are direct precursors to The Exorcist (1973). Purif thrashes in her bed, her hands pressing towards her crotch just as she fights them away, suggesting a kind of tortured masturbation that Regan would later experience, and most notably, during her exorcism, she even does the “spider walk” that would be excised from The Exorcist’s theatrical release ten years later.

That said, however, these could not be more different films. In Friedkin’s religious horror, a young girl is assaulted by something from beyond society, beyond mankind, and so much of the horror is rooted in the realization of its radical evil – science fails her and reason fails her, and she can only be saved by virtue of faith. In Il Demonio, Purif is beset upon by the intolerance of her village, by their inability to understand the world in any terms beyond the religious and the supernatural. And she can’t understand it any other way either. In a way, faith is the monster here; a belief that sentences her to all kinds of pain. You can’t help but feel that if Purif lived in a modern city, she might not exactly enjoy perfect mental health (who does?), but with some therapy, with some good pills, and with a more open society around her (where she wouldn’t immediately be cast as a fallen woman for one dalliance with some guy), with all of that, she might be closer to alright.

She is far from alright.

That said, though the horror lives in the beliefs and actions of the villagers, I actually don’t feel that Rondi’s film views them in an entirely negative light. At no point does it feel like there is a snide authorial voice saying, “hey check out how cruel and stupid these superstitious dummies are!” Rather, there is a documentarian’s generosity towards these people and this place which a modern perspective might judge harshly. The villagers live in an unforgiving world that offers few comforts, and if they have developed a series of beliefs and practices that give them a sense of meaning and agency in the face of the vast indifference of the sun and the wind and the saints, I can’t entirely discount the value of that faith. And truly, those folk beliefs are so much of what makes Il Demonio singular, presenting so many ethnological details along the way (the film opens with thanks to the particular ethnologist whose work had inspired it).

During Antonio’s wedding, after he and his bride have had to answer questions at the door and then hop over the threshold to enter, the candle on his side of the church begins to flicker as if it might go out and the entire village watches with baited breath, excited and fearful, as that would be a terribly dark portent. Was this the result of Purif’s curse? Who knows?

After the wedding, the two sets of parents prepare their adult children’s marriage bed – a scythe is placed beneath to ward off the devil, raisins are spread in a cross on the bedsheets to absorb all evil from the room, a bag of salt is places under the pillows, and there is an elaborate ritual governing how and when the newlyweds may enter the room.

There is a long procession up the hill to the village, everyone carrying heavy stones that represent their sins, some of them being whipped by others – when they reach the town square, they are called on to publicly admit their wrongdoings and put down the weight of their sin, and some of it is so much worse than anything that might be attributed to the local madwoman/witch – the father that angrily turned out his disobedient son (who subsequently died) or the lonely widower who admits to having sexually abused his teenage daughter both seem so much more shocking than Purif and her dalliances with hedge magic, but they both seek and are apparently granted absolution and thus can continue to be part of society. Not so with Purif. It is in this scene that she declares her possession and starts to flop about in the town square. It feels performative, almost calculated as she listens to all of the other villagers’ declared sins and then chooses to top them. Furthermore, she does not want and will not accept forgiveness, and will never fully be a part of this society again.

In a striking scene, as Purif sits in a nearby tree, eating an apple and laughing, seemingly the whole village is gathered on a hillside to drive off storm clouds that threaten to wash away freshly spread seeds – they recite their liturgy, beat rocks with sticks, and ring bells to repel the rain – and it is kind of beautiful. These are poor people of little power, standing together against the dark times to come. Their folk magic is just as simplistic as Purif’s curse in the opening scene, but it comes with the weight of repetition and history, and it is a moving form of natural sorcery. Of course, then they notice Purif, decide this coming storm is all her fault, chase her to her house and try to light it on fire – so yeah, sometimes these otherwise bucolic impoverished folks are just the worst.

Finally, by the end, the villagers cut down a grove of precious old growth trees to build a ritual fire in the square and they carry burning brands through the village streets to cleanse the town of Purif’s darkness. At first, it’s genuinely scary – is this enraged mob actually going to burn her? But when it is clear that it is just a benign ceremony of purification (as they seek Purificazione), it takes on a different character, even at times fun and festive. Sadly, that doesn’t mean it ends well for Purif – but how could it really? The only way for her to thrive is away from here, but that world is forever beyond her reach.

Truly, there is nowhere for her to go. At one point, her family hides her in a cellar, pretending that she no longer exists, that she has moved away. This imprisonment seems heartless, but it’s hard to blame the family in this moment. It is actually for her protection, and their own (see the aforementioned attempt to burn her out of her family house). Early in the film, we saw her father beat her with a belt after some of her more wild actions had gotten back to him. Incensed at the shame she’d brought on the household, he lost control and her brothers had to fight him off of her. At that point, he seemed monstrous. But by this moment in the film, you can kind of understand what he’s going through.

Purif is our protagonist and we are entirely in her corner, but how can one not sympathize with those who have to deal with her all the time? She is always getting into trouble and it is always weird trouble. She steals a pack of goats to lay siege to the church where Antonio is being wed. Later that night, she attacks his home (which has wisely been guarded against such an eventuality), attempting to hex his first born by throwing a dead cat at his threshold. She shows up at the death bed of a child where all the women are uncontrollably weeping (in ritual fashion) and entirely inappropriately makes it all about Purif. She’s a problem for herself and others and no one knows how to deal with it. Not the priest (who does make an effort), not her father (who beats and imprisons her), not her mystic uncle (who takes sexual advantage of her), not Antonio (who no matter how often he throws her to the ground and leads angry mobs against her is always moments away from tearing off her dress), and of course not Purif herself.

Purif in shadow, about to throw a cat.

The best she can do is to choose to be the problem that she is, to choose herself against the society she does not fit into. As in Matka Joanna od Aniołów (1961), Purif’s possession, not her exorcism, feels freeing, revelatory. Whether she’s trying to lasciviously lick a crucifix or demonically speaking in tongues, embracing “wickedness” allows Purif a freedom she has no other access to, and it feels so, so good. Towards the end of the film, after trying to strangle a nun who’d tried to lead her in prayer, Purif defiantly refuses salvation – for the first time in her life, she feels powerful, and that can’t be lost.

This is a unique and special piece and I’m so glad I gave it a chance. What brought me to it was Daliah Lavi and she does not disappoint. It is a totally different style of performance from The Whip and the Body, released the same year, but it is probably even more impressive (I guess the fact that she’s in almost every frame helps with that). From start to finish, the filmmaking wows at every turn, Rondi making such good use of the ragged, sun drenched environment. Purif is usually in black and she just pops against the brightly lit stony village and its surrounding hills. Rondi also does so much with long shots, pulling back, for example, from a close focus on Antonio sitting with his future mother in law, to an extreme wide view where Purif can be seen watching on a hill in the distance, to a snap zoom on her own distraught face. And it is a film of faces. The supporting cast, which I assume to be non-professional actors, offer so much character and Rondi captures every coarse feature with the same crisp contrast that he does the arid landscape.

And for a film with so much visual contrast, it is rich in ambivalence and nuance. On one level, it is a story of witchcraft and folk magic and possession, but then we never feel there really are any demons or that there is any magic, but we also feel, in the ways that are most important for the life experience of its characters, that all of that is real anyway. I don’t think we’re ever meant to be wondering if something is ‘real’ or not. Clearly, there are “realistic” explanations for everything – at least it feels that way, but then there are some things that are never explained. Did Purif’s curse actually cause the candle in the wedding ceremony to almost go out? Did it cause the terrible bleeding rash that Antonio developed? Did the spirit of the recently deceased boy meet her at the river? How did she know the tree at the convent was so important (where someone had recently hanged himself)? I don’t know, and interestingly, I feel the film isn’t interested in me asking those questions. What people experience is simply, in fact, what they experience. And this is about those people and their experiences. It is heady and affecting and really worth seeing.

This is only nominally a “horror movie” and it won’t scare you or gross you out, but if you feel you could have patience for what I’ve described, I think you’ll find it’s really worth your time. It was worth mine.

Working out the Kinks: The Whip and the Body

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It’s so good to give things second chances. Years ago, I’d tried watching today’s film, having read that it was really worth checking out, and I just couldn’t get into it, couldn’t get past certain oddities of its existence, and I gave up. And what a shame it would have been if I’d never come back, cause having finally watched it (multiple times now), I gotta say, it’s an (admittedly somewhat flawed) frickin’ masterpiece! So, let’s just get right into it and dig into Mario Bava’s eminently gothic, eerily old fashioned, surprisingly kinky, and mind blowingly beautiful 1963 classic, The Whip and the Body.

The Whip and the Body (1963)

So let’s begin with what I couldn’t get past the first time as I think it could be a hurdle for many. This movie is Italian (though you might not know it from the opening credits where everyone goes under an English name – Mario Bava is listen as John M. Old). Generally, genre pics in Italy in this era never shot sound on set, often featuring a polyglot cast, each speaking their native tongue and dubbing it all in post for each market where the film was to be released. That’s just par for the Italian horror course.

This film also stars the inimitable Christopher Lee, an actor with both great physical presence and a voice of rich and silky timbre. But he didn’t do his own ADR for the English language release (something he said he’d always regretted) and the first time around, hearing him dubbed by another voice was just so offputting that I couldn’t take it and had to stop. Fortunately, when I decided to try again, the version I found on Shudder only came in Italian with English subtitles, which really did make it better. Since then, I’ve rewatched in both languages and I think the Italian dub is just superior all around – the sound mix is more effective and the voice actors simply more expressive. The English voice work feels stilted and artificial in comparison. Though the lead actors were actually speaking English, if you have the option, I strongly recommend the Italian – and you will be rewarded with a real gem.

In short, Bava’s film is about Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), a young noblewoman who has just married the milquetoast younger brother of her former lover and lives in his family’s castle on a craggy coast where the wind literally never stops howling. Her husband, in turn, still carries a torch for his cousin, Katia, who lives in the castle as well. Along with Nevenka’s aged father-in-law and a couple of servants, they all live in unsatisfying stasis, until one day when Kurt (Christopher Lee), the older brother and lover in question, returns. He’d been sent away for murdering (after probably abusing) a servant girl and no one is happy to see him back.

But no matter how Nevenka hated him and how he’d physically and emotionally abused her (and others), she can’t help but respond to his unfeigned desire (so unlike her husband), and though I don’t think she understands herself and is disgusted by her own feelings, she does get off on the beatings, as in an early scene where he finds her on the beach and brutally whips her before they passionately make love among the rocks and crashing waves as he coos, “You haven’t changed I see. You’ve always loved violence.”

Then in rapid succession, first Kurt and then the Count (her father in law who’d hated and feared Kurt) are both murdered in the dark of night with the same dagger (the very one that he’d previously used to dispatch the poor servant girl) and the film’s (psychological?/supernatural?) horror begins in earnest as Nevenka keeps seeing Kurt outside of every window, looming over her bed, creeping from his tomb, leaving muddy footprints that only she can see. His voice coasts on the howling wind, and his ghost haunts her conscience, her heart, and her yearning flesh. And it goes from there.

First off, it must be noted just how much this resembles an entry in Roger Corman’s Poe cycle: the castle on the rocky coast, the indeterminate setting (in the past, some time; in a castle, somewhere), the particular psychological flavor of repressed feeling surfacing as violence and madness. All of this is for very good reason. Apparently the producers had shown co-screenwriter/assistant director, Ernesto Gastaldi, Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum and requested something in that vein. And I can really see it. Watching the film, Poe came to mind more than once, especially in terms of pathetic fallacy, wherein a character’s internal state is externalized in the setting, in the environment (think The Fall of the House of Usher).

This castle, lashed by the wind, by the sea, locking up so many warring emotions, its characters isolated together, doubting one another, sometimes both loving and hating each other and themselves in equal measure, feels quite like something old Edgar could have written, or at least like something old Roger could have adapted, walking that blurry line between insanity and a real ghostly threat. I particularly liked a haunting scene in which Nevanka is draw to her late lover’s room late at night by the sound of whipping, but in a bit of a  jump scare, hanging vines that have been beating against the window knock it open, letting in the omnipresent gale. For her, he is everywhere – on the wind, in the trees, invading the castle of her mind.

But while I really do like Corman’s work, the visual splendor that Bava brings to the proceedings just raises this all up to another level. It is just breathtaking filmmaking, and at the same time, it must be said that it is all so effective – not simply pretty shots to be pretty, but it all serves the film, it all helps to get into Nevenka’s tortured mind and body, and it absolutely sings. The camera glides around, looking for the nuances of fear and passion in her expressions, finding the sadistic glint of joy in Kurt’s eye. The camera brings to life what could sometimes be a staid and static family drama, highlighting beauty and monstrosity, often at the same time and in the same place. I felt such cinematic joy in its stunning presentation of psychological horror and trauma that come with a searing pinch of beauty that can lead a character to her own destruction, making me feel for her while at the same time grinning from ear to ear at the absolute glory of it all. It’s the kind of movie that makes my attempts at description inexcusably, self-indulgently florid.

It’s often said that a given film couldn’t be made today, and I think in this case that may be true. In many aspects, it’s all pretty old fashioned, but it works so well. More on this in a bit, but Nevanka’s portrayal is one we don’t generally get any more (which is probably for the best): the trembling woman, in love with not only her abuser, but her abuse. While that kind of representation can even be harmful when writ large across culture, in the isolation of this one story, it is poetic and gorgeous and tragic, and I adored every melodramatic moment of its distillation of awful need and sublime suffering. But it’s not only issues of outdated gender issues. The filmmaking itself is quite old fashioned as well, but in ways that really work for it.

These days, when we make a historical piece, there tends to be a lot of care put into accuracy – caring about the buttons a man would have on his jacket in 1906 that he wouldn’t have had in 1850 for example. Now, there are often failures (my wife is into historical costuming, so I hear about them – apparently hair is pretty much always disastrously wrong), but effort is made, and there is an industry of professionals who do the work. That wasn’t always the case. Often when watching older films set in an even earlier period, everything is more non-specifically “old” (and this is especially true for low-budget genre work). Are we in the late 19th century, the early 18th? Who knows, but men sometimes toss on a cape, and women’s dresses are long and pretty. I’m pretty sure they also have long fake lashes, which look more 1963 than anything else, but are striking when a small band of hard light falls across eyes in the darkness.  All of those anachronisms are certainly present here, but as the saying goes, I think that’s a feature, not a bug.

In being so ahistorical, the location never specified (the Wikipedia entry just says that it is set “in Europe”), it all takes on the quality of a fairy tale / psychological allegory / dream-nightmare. Thus, all of the fear and desire is lent a broader significance. It feels bigger than itself in what I can best describe as a theatrical fashion. Not anchored by base realism, not flattened into something “natural,” the viewer’s willing suspension of disbelief can go further, can make other connections, approaching the ineffable, the subconscious. And the same can also be said for other aspects of Bava’s work.

I’d previously mentioned the beauty of the filming, but past the camerawork, I must praise how the film is lit, which is something we don’t often discuss with more modern movies. For quite a while, it has been in vogue to “realistically” light every shot when possible, even going so far as to film night scenes only with natural sources (the moon, candles, etc). As I understand, technology has developed to make this more and more viable (it was a great technical feat when Kubrick did it in Barry Lyndon, but is now much more easily achievable), but even when standard lights are still used (which is usually the case), the approach tends to be attempted realism – light that looks like it comes from real sources in the filmic space. That wasn’t always true. Bava lights scenes so expressively; in one shot, Lee passes out of a pale blue light from the left, into a sickly green light from the right, into shadow, into a red light from below – where are these well focused lights coming from, and how are they colored with such saturation in this old timey setting?

It is totally unrealistic, but each offers a different view of his character – ghostly and dead and monstrous. He is such a fearful presence, but looking out of Nevanka’s eyes, she doesn’t pull away from his kiss, and we are treated to a really special, creepy, unsettling moment. Throughout the film, expression and feeling trump “realism,” and this is a breath of fresh air in this era when even well-shot films can sometimes feel dark and muddy. That said, this isn’t a neon lit exercise in pure color. It isn’t “style over substance.” Everything serves the piece – it’s just that it serves it by underlining emotion and atmosphere rather than just making it look like a place being lit by a source.

Furthermore, I think that when a director has a heavy hand with light and shadow and color and camera angles, it’s easy to imagine a lessened focus on the work of the actors, the performers simply being flexible props to costume and light and move through the shots in service of visual storytelling – and it’s even easier to expect that in a case like this where we can’t even hear their original voices, but it is absolutely not so. Though this must have been a very technical shoot, with actors having to hit very precise marks to achieve the director’s vision, I feel they are also given real room to do their work. There are great stills I can capture and include in this post, but you have to watch the film to see how gently the lens explores the contours of the actors’ faces, the light and shadow catching and amplifying the delicate and nuanced work they are doing. And particularly in the case of the two leads, Lee and Lavi, that work is tremendous: layered, intriguing, and exhilarating.

I came to this movie because I knew I knew and loved Lee and Bava, but I hadn’t known anything about Daliah Lavi, who I must say floored me as Nevenka. What a performance! I knew Lee’s name first, but it is absolutely her film, revolving as it does around her inner turmoil, and she gives such an exquisitely detailed performance. An Israeli actress and model, it looks like she did a fair amount of work through the 60s, but I’ve not seen any of it. Seriously, judging from what she did here, I don’t know how she wasn’t a bigger star.

There is a centerpiece scene that serves as an encapsulation of the film’s strengths – the performances, the camera, the music, the lights. Nevanka, terror stricken, seeing Kurt’s ghost around every corner, and who is furthermore haunted by her scandalous desire for this man who had been so cruel to her, overhears her husband declare his love to his cousin. It had been, I think, pretty obvious, but explicitly hearing it wounds – even if her feelings for him were cool to begin with, the betrayal lands. In the next shot, we see her before her mirror, running her hand over the skin of her neck, over her bodice, her body hungry for contact, needing to be needed, when suddenly Kurt’s dead and ghostly face appears behind her.

Over a wordless minute, as they rotate around each other, his face is almost perfectly still, but a question seems to pass over it, while she is in turn terrified, lustful, defiant, amorous, and hateful. And as she moves in and out of shadow, the light somehow enhances each of these expressions in different ways. Finally, she takes up her scissors in defense, but he gingerly plucks them from her hand. She leaps across her bed to ring a bell and call for help, but his whip easily binds her wrist and he proceeds to lash her bodice off, leaving her lacerated and beaten. She cries out how she hates him, but bites her knuckle and sinks into her bed, giving herself over to sensation, to this extremity. By the end, no matter what she says, her eyes tell a different story – she is bound by desire for him. For this. The ghoul moves in for a kiss and we fade to black. It is an absolutely delicious performance.

For a period piece made 62 years ago in which there is no nudity, this is an extremely horny movie. So much desire and almost all of it repressed – so terrible is that desire for Nevenka, so confusing. In modern times, there can be some effort made to present kinkiness with some model of best practices: safe words and explicit consent and all that good stuff. Here, there is none of that, but there is a nexus of sexuality and self-recrimination and anger and need that rings true – complicated and not at all nice, but significant and real, making demands that can’t be denied. Kurt is a monster and an abuser, and she gets off on it, and she needs that release – perhaps she even needs the shame that comes with it – human psychology is complex. The buttoned up existence she otherwise leads will never satisfy her and that is part of her horror. He is a monstrous threat, but for her, the unquenchable need she feels is even worse. Just as her body is scoured, her psyche is possessed, her agency broken – by her own nature, her carnal drive that will not be denied. That is her nightmare, her horror. And in true Freudian fashion (without going into too many spoilers of the ending), it is the inevitably failed repression of these impulses that results in murder and madness.

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t fare well with the censors in the early 60s. It got banned in its native Italy, and the English language version cut 14 minutes, including all of the sado-masochistic stuff, resulting in a story that was entirely unintelligible (and was released in America with the title What! which seems fitting for a film that makes no sense, having had its very heart removed). For all that it has many old fashioned elements, its boldness in terms of unconventional sexuality is quite modern (or is it – I mean the works of both de Sade and Sacher-Masoch predate it by more than a hundred years). And its horror, Nevenka’s horror, lands.

There is little killing and almost no gore (though there are some graphic whippings and throat cuts), but this piece lives somewhere between the sumptuousness of the gothic and the tension of the psychological – and it is a treasure. The dubbing is really unfortunate and I can’t say I was totally enamored of some scenes with characters who weren’t Kurt or Nevenka, but all of that said, I am so glad I watched it. Give it a try – stick out the language issues, and I think it will be more than worth your while.

Consuming Culture in Sinners

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I may have a horror blog, but I rarely catch new films in the cinema. There’s just too much to stay on top of it all, and let’s face it, not everything that comes out is exactly great (plus, movie tickets are expensive and life is short). Past that, I don’t feel like it’s my job – I don’t fancy myself a journalist – I don’t imagine that most readers come here for up to date movie reviews – or if they do, they probably leave disappointed. But every once in a while, something new gets on my radar and I manage to seek it out, and I’m so glad that happened with this week’s movie cause I left Ryan Coogler’s Sinners just buzzing. Since then, it’s come to streaming and I’ve watched it two more times and, while it doesn’t, on subsequent viewings, give me quite the same electrical charge, I do believe it holds up as a great movie: rich in character and cultural detail, excitingly filmed, gorgeously shot, with a fun and thrilling vampire siege and a moving, loving portrayal of a group of people trying to make something of their own, high on the power of music and culture and community, and ready to fight to protect it all. It is an emotional movie, a beautiful movie, even a thematically challenging movie, but as this is a horror blog, it must be said that in spite of its vampires, it isn’t a “scary” movie – so don’t go to it for that or you may be let down (honestly, the same can be said of many a vampire flick). So, that said, let’s get into Sinners… I figure this is a very available film, so there will be spoilers.

Sinners (2025)

Off the bat, it must be said that this movie is a hit, a huge box office success, meaning that people have seen it and people have written about it. This is no obscure gem to sing the praises of. Rather, this is a Imax released blockbuster, which developed tons of hype (without which, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it while it was still new), and inevitably, tons of counter-hype – people writing about how they don’t get what all the excitement is about (which I must say I understand, as I’m often allergic to hype – I don’t even know why it was different in this case). That said, knowing that it has been widely reviewed, I will endeavor to focus less on detailing its qualities (or weaknesses), and rather attempt to dig into what I think is most interesting about it as a whole.

In short, set in a Black community in Mississippi in 1932, Ryan Coogler’s story (which he wrote and directed) follows “Preacherboy,” Sammie, a young aspiring blues musician whose pastor father is trying to pull him back from a life of sin in illicit nightclubs to walk the straight and narrow with him in the Church. His cousins, Smoke and Stack, twin gangsters who left town years ago (I guess they fought in WWI and then stayed gone) have just returned after years of involvement in Chicago organized crime, with a truck full of stolen booze (prohibition is still on, so it’s quite a haul) and a dream of opening their own juke joint nightclub. The first third of the movie consists of Sammie riding around with them as they get the old gang back together so they can open tonight on very short notice. Following that, the next leg of the movie simply consists of the joint itself as it opens and the people come. There are interpersonal dramas along the way (who left whom years ago and why) and conflicts about financials (can they accept company scrip from the poor sharecropper clientele – which supports community, but won’t be economically sustainable?), but overwhelmingly, the feeling of the first half or more of the movie is one of joy and excitement.

There’s that old sense of “come on gang – let’s put on a show,” there’s a Blues Brother-esque camaraderie in “getting the band back together,” and there is such energy and passion in the music making itself (I just love when Stack is driving Sammie to town and has him play for him – Sammie starts with a simple blues riff – ok, but when he opens his mouth to sing, Stack lights up – damn, this kid has a voice – and it is unique and his own and glorious – he exclaims that they are “gon’ make some money!” But you know it’s more than that).

But on top of it all, there is the palpable intoxication that comes with knowing they are making something of their own, with their own hands, their own power, their own music, their history and love and pain. That is what freedom feels like. At one point, the old blues man, Slim, says to Sammie, “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. Nah, son, we brought that with us from home. It’s magic what we do. It’s sacred… and big.” And he’s right.

Around the halfway point, Sammie plays at the juke and just burns the place down (Coogler literally filming that as a striking visual metaphor), and in what has to be the most famous sequence in the film, we see musical ghosts of the past and the future summoned by his song – images of African dancers and a George Clinton-esque Afro-futurist guitarist and hip hop kids and Chinese Opera singers and Ballet dancers drift through the electrified crowd. People carry their histories and their futures. And music brings it to life, gives it all expression, tears a hole in the world and lets all the feeling and possibility pour through – pain, yes, but also joy and lust and pride and glory. But something that powerful casts a bright light and can garner unwanted attention, in this case, from Remmick, the primary vampiric threat.

Before getting into what he brings to the story, I think it is interesting that he could have been excised and this still would have been a powerful flick. Had there been no supernatural danger, this could be a great period drama about community and music and social issues and antagonisms (the KKK very much still being a thing), full of well-researched cultural detail and standout performances (Michael B. Jordan delivers as the twins, Miles Caton’s Sammie really does have a hell of a voice, and I really appreciated little nuances like the role of the Chinese couple who can operate their grocery stores on both the White and the Black sides of the street). The first time I saw the movie, for all that I had genuinely loved it, I read it as a big glorious mess, kitchen sink filmmaking – just throwing in every idea that came to Coogler’s mind that he felt would be fun or moving or exciting, with little care to whether it entirely tracked or was exactly “necessary.” It didn’t need to be a vampire movie, but vampires are cool, siege films are thrilling, and raising stakes (boom, tish) makes for heightened drama. Just put it all in and then make it work (and some of the best parts of the movie do feel like just barely controlled chaos – notably the sequence when Pearline is singing “Pale, Pale Moon” as Smoke deals with the card cheat and the newly vamped Mary lures Stack into the back room to turn him – it is all frenetic and tight and tense and wild).

But the more I thought about it, the more important vampirism became to the story, and the more I felt the influence of a larger theme which I find both engaging and even, as I wrote above, personally challenging. The impression is that Remmick is particularly drawn to the juke this night precisely because of Sammie’s talent, because as an interpretation of the ‘soulessness’ of a vampire, Remmick is cut off from his ancestry, and Sammie’s power can be a bridge to that which he has lost. The music is so soulful that it inspires a voracious hunger and hence, the events of the latter half of the film.

Remmick shows up with two recently turned companions, all presenting as local musicians who have come to join in the party, spend some money, eat some food, drink some booze, and play some music. They audition at the door with a prettified rendition of an old blues song, “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” As I’ve come to read, this is one of the oldest known blues recordings, and has a very rough bluesy sound (as well as a second verse full of racial epithets – but they don’t get to sing that long). The three White musicians (two of whom we come to learn are (former?) Klan members) deliver it in such clean, “old-timey” tones. Their smiles are just a little too bright. Their promise that they only believe in “fellowship and love” and that they hope that for one night, they can all just be one big, happy family just feels a bit too earnest – something is clearly off. Plus, the old song, which is about, I think, cheating someone out of all their money, coming out of their mouths (which we, the viewers, know to be full of fangs), takes on real cannibalistic overtones (“I picked his head, I picked his feet, I woulda picked his body, but he wasn’t fit to eat”).

The twins turn them away, saying that there are many White joints in town where they could play and eat and drink if that’s what they’re after. The vamps challenge this exclusion, seemingly disappointed at being discriminated against for the color of their skin, but for the community within the joint, besides them being creepy, there is a real historical cause for concern. They live in the segregated south. The main street of their town clearly has a White side and a Black side and they really look like completely different worlds. If a White person were in the juke and some kind of argument started, the hell that could befall the Black community could be cataclysmic. Remmick et al. may talk a good game of progressive ideals, but Smoke and Stack live in a world where lynchings and worse are still common.

But eventually, no matter the precautions taken, things inevitably go south and we move into the final act (not counting two or three epilogues still to come – ala Lord of the Rings, this is a movie that ends at least 3 times) – vampires attack, most of the attendees at the juke get turned, and those that remain do their damnedest to make it through the night, with one suspenseful scene of internal suspicion echoing John Carpenter’s The Thing, as they all must eat a clove of garlic to prove their humanity. And for a long time, Remmick and his growing gang wait outside, knowing that they are certain, sooner or later to take what he’s come for. And while they do, they have a party of their own, a Ceilidh if you will, singing and dancing traditional Irish folk songs – featuring a rousing rendition of “Rocky Road to Dublin” with Remmick high kicking at its center. He may feel cut off from the soul of his people, but his culture and its music is clearly still vitally important to him, and he still carries it. He speaks with an Irish accent and we learn that he was alive when Christianity conquered his island (his description of that fact echoing Slim talking about how “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion”), making him at least 1500 years old.

When Sinners finally becomes a vampire movie, it does feel like a big change, but beyond being a good choice for a popular entertainment (exciting action-horror movies can put butts in seats in a way that period dramas may not), I think vampirism is essential to the themes of the story. We’ve already seen a justified need to police the boundaries of a closed space for the protection of the community inside. That is both important for them to be safe, and similarly, for them to feel safe. But this takes it to a larger, more symbolic level.  I don’t remember where I first encountered it, but I read somewhere that “where there’s a monster, there’s a metaphor,” and here I feel the vampire is an embodiment of cultural threat – some amalgamation of cultural appropriation, selling out, and cultural assimilation to the point of losing one’s identity, to the point of disappearance. And, of course, if the bloodsucker isn’t given what he asks for, he will take it by force.

I believe that Remmick honestly loves what Sammie does – he is not disingenuous in his appreciation, but when he says that he “wants his stories,” “wants his songs,” there is a dangerous appetite there – a hunger that could consume until nothing remains, or at least until nothing remains Sammie’s anymore. Is Remmick a bit of a studio executive, here to sign this young artist, offering a better life, in a world where the color of his skin doesn’t matter so much as the color of the money he can make, but who will buy out everything that is uniquely his – and it will all become the property of the label, of the culture at large? In the world of Sinners, when someone is turned, they seem to tap into a bit of vampire hive mind – Remmick knows all of their memories and they know all of his. There is an element that is truly post racial and shared and utopian, but there may also be a horrific loss of personal identity, not to mention the heart of a culture being cut out and put on sale – maybe the real horror is capitalism?

Frankly, this is one bit that I wish were clearer. We have a sense of this endless hunger for culture, for identity, for music; we have a sense of the threat to concept of self; for all that Remmick is charmingly cheeky and fun, he is clearly “the bad guy” and there is little humanizing of the larger vampiric threat – once turned, the vampires seem ‘evil’ and less ‘themselves.’ And yet, when in the mid-credit epilogue, Stack and Mary show up as vampires at Sammie’s blues club in the 90s, they do basically seem like Stack and Mary, albeit wearing painfully early 90s fashion (the 30s look amazing in comparison) – was there actually any danger? Was being a vampire not really that bad? Has it changed them (this question bringing to mind the moment when Smoke stakes his former paramour, Annie, before she can turn, and vamp-Mary cries out in horror – perhaps Mary really saw good in the change and looked forward to the whole gang moving forward together in this new, bloodsucking paradigm)? It wasn’t clear to me. But hey, sometimes things are complicated and it could be better for a work of art for its themes to be a bit blurry around the edges, for there to be questions, to have room to breathe and to be read in different ways. The alternative is polemic, which very rarely, if ever, makes for good art.

And so we have this core fear of culture being stripped away, or of giving it away. This assimilation, this being subsumed feels like more of a preoccupation of the film than the direct assault of the Klansmen who Smoke so effectively dispatches at the end – it is a far more insidious and personal danger. And I have to say, I have mixed feelings about all this. I can only come to this discussion as who I am: a White, cis/het, male American. I may never be rich or powerful, but I understand that I benefit from what I was born into and that my culture, such as it is, has traditionally eaten up any other it’s come in contact with. There is a long history of imperialism and theft and exploitation – an endless story of wrongs done, of irreparable harm – some perpetrated out of active cruelty, but much also done out of mere expedience, out of simply wanting and taking and not being all that concerned with how that makes others feel. And yet, even if I understand all that, I have to admit I’ve always bristled at least a little bit at accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ as if culture is a static thing that can ever be fixed enough to be owned, and thus stolen. I like cultures meeting each other and infecting each other and borrowing from each other. I like cultural exchange. I like cultural cross pollination.

For example, I live in Poland, a country that missed out on the colonialism and imperialism of the 18th and 19th centuries as it was busy being divided up by other European powers at the time (this is not to claim that Poland wouldn’t have liked to have colonies, but they didn’t get to – resulting to some extent in its present homogeneity – it’s generally pretty White, with the vast majority of residents being of Polish heritage – though that is changing as it grows economically and more immigrants – such as myself – show up). But something I think is cool is that there are vibrant communities of people here who study Irish or Scottish Dance, or Blues music, or American Gospel, or Hula, or Kathakali, or Japanese Sumi-e painting, or what have you (without a significant history of communities of Irish, Scottish, Black, Hawaiian, Indian, or Japanese descent). And isn’t that good? Wouldn’t it be restrictive and shuttered if Polish people only practiced “traditional Polish folk” forms (and the same were true for all other nations or sub-groups)? Isn’t that protectionist approach what one expects from racists and nationalists with essentialist views of the unbreakable connection between a given “people,” “race,” “religion,” “nation,” and “culture?” For me, if it comes from a place of respect and appreciation, it’s really difficult to understand how there could be something wrong about a person from one culture meeting, liking, and ultimately picking up forms from another, and in turn making them their own – isn’t that how all art is made? We live in a world, we are influenced by everything we encounter, we process it all inside and put out whatever we are able to – and if we’re very, very lucky, maybe it’s occasionally worth something.

And yet, watching Sinners, I have to say that I can, on some level, understand the discomfort, the hesitance, the fear of what all that could mean, could result in for a person or a people whose ‘cultural product,’ or less abstractly, whose personal expression, is the “form” being “picked up” – how that taking could feel like theft, or at least, could feel disrespectful. If so much of the early joy of this movie is ‘making something of your own,’ then obviously warning flags may shoot up when someone comes along, smiling a bit too wide, making beautiful promises of a loving, open future, who asks you to share that something with him, so that it can also be his. Will it still be yours? Will it even still be, or will it forever be changed by being assimilated into something larger, something more general? It’s easier to dismiss the idea of cultural ownership when yours is the culture taking freely of what all others have to offer, while at the same time, forcing your dominant culture onto them, whether they want it or not.

In Sinners, this is all about the Blues, but I think these are issues that someone from any marginalized group could wrestle with (and it is often out of such groups that new developments of culture spring, whether Black or Queer or representing some specific National Origin or Religion). This isn’t to say that I’ve completely come around to viewing all “appropriation” in a negative light, but the film does, at the very least, challenge me emotionally – it is complicated. I still believe cultural exchange can be a net good but something can clearly be lost in the process, and for those on the losing side, that can be a tragedy. If someone feels harmed, and you ignore that because, at the end of the day, you want what you want, and you value it more than the people who have it, there is a moral cost akin to blood sucking. And what are we, as humans, as art makers, to do with that? I honestly don’t know…it’s hard…

Wow – that all got heavy – wasn’t this supposed to be a fun movie about vampires and stuff? So in closing, I do just want to return to how this movie made me personally feel on first viewing. A lot of the cultural issues came to mind the following day as I went for a long walk to think about it all, but that night, I came out of the cinema electrified, just so excited, so charged with the thrill of creation, art and music and life. It is an earthy movie, filled with lust and sex and laughter and feeling. It is a vampire movie with a cool, charismatic, central bloodsucker. It isn’t a “scary” movie, but it has got plenty of action, intense sequences full of bold panache, and an intriguing vampire mythos. It is an absolutely spectacular movie to look at, to be enveloped by. It made my face hurt from smiling and it made me weep at its beauty. Coogler throws in every idea he can think of (Gangsters, Vampires, Blues, Social Criticism, Sex, Economics, etc.) and pulls it together into a rousing popcorn movie that is, yes, about ‘things,’ but which is also just tons and tons of fun. It lifted me up, but it also left me with stuff to ponder that I could engage with on a very personal level. It was a great night out, and I look forward to seeing what Coogler does next, in the genre or not. If you haven’t seen it yet, well, you probably shouldn’t have read this far – but go give it a chance; it’s widely available.

Horror Diary Recap

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I had a good run for a few weeks there, on a roll and banging out blog posts. And then, as it often does, life happened (travel, work, art, Covid, etc.), and now more than a month has slipped through my fingers when they clearly should have been typing away about horror. So, not to overthink it, I just want to very briefly run through some horror stuff I’ve been digging into during that time – nothing particularly deep, but just sharing a few things I’ve enjoyed. Perhaps some of these will warrant more attention in the future, but for now, I just want to jot down some first impressions.

So, here we go…

His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood

Ok – I’ve found a new author to get into. This is a very small collection of short stories published under the name Poppy Z. Bright (who, since transitioning, now goes by William Joseph Martin). I mean no disrespect by using the old name, but I believe their horror fiction was all published under the Bright name, and it’s one that I’ve long heard bandied about, but had yet to read. Wow! Their work kinda gave me Clive Barker vibes, an author whom I hold in great esteem. In this tiny volume, I only had four short stories, but I loved them all – a bit of splatterpunk, a bit of southern gothic, oodles of sex and belief and need and obsession and bodies and art.

Two young lovers on a boundary pushing death trip rob from the wrong grave with fatally seductive results. A possessive ghost pulls the only young woman who can see him to join him in death, a tale both romantic and abusive. A zombie outbreak in Calcutta does little to change the flow of life in the city, but brings the story’s protagonist into an encounter with the holy. Two young musicians travel to New York City for a gig and find more than they can handle, but have solace in music and each other, and this new, overwhelming city. I can’t underline how driving and captivating the prose was and how much the thematics spoke to me. I’ve got to check out more of Martin’s work, published under the Bright name. I’m open to suggestions.

The Black Cat (1981)

I’m not quite sure what box to put this film into, ostensibly based on the Edgar Allan Poe story (but only sharing a title). This has long been on my watchlist – I love Lucio Fulci and it’s been ages since I saw something of his for the first time. I’ve seen this one listed either as top-of-middle tier Fulci or as a disappointingly perfunctory exercise that he did as a favor to the producer, but his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe both are true. The first third of the film, maybe more, I kind of loved. It doesn’t feel so much like a product of the man behind The Beyond or City of the Living Dead, but it does feel a bit like it was made by the mind behind The Psychic, a significant movie in its own right. Early on, I was really into the atmosphere and the absolute confidence of the largely visual storytelling. The music by Pino Donoggio is great – at turns pastoral, like something off of a b-side of The Wicker Man soundtrack, and playful or eerie and tense – really gorgeous work. Patrick Magee (whom I mainly know from A Clockwork Orange) really pops as the sweaty psychic in an unhealthy, abusive relationship with the titular black feline. There is solid atmosphere – all foggy and spooky, and enjoyable sequences of a cat killing (or more precisely, causing the deaths of) a whole bunch of people – and it’s all in the edit – cutting between close ups of the cat or its chosen victim, back to the cat’s eyes (ever watching, waiting, hunting) – I expect the actors were rarely actually in the room with the murderous kitty, but the kill scenes really track.

But somehow, after the midway point, I just had trouble staying focused. Was that the film’s fault, or was that a me problem? I don’t know, but for all that I appreciated so much of what was going on, I just found myself less and less into it.

Anyway, if you dig Fulci, I think it is at least worth checking out: there are endless, foggy abandoned streets; cat scratches draw pints of blood; Magee exerts his psychic domination on others as the sweat pours down his face and his eyes bug out of his head; the practical effects are obvious (there is at least one unmistakable mannequin), but the obviousness really doesn’t matter – the total effect is striking and effective; the dead talk, and scream; and there are more close ups of eyes than you can shake a stick at (Fulci gonna Fulci…). Also, it is just so well crafted. I think people often associate Fulci with extreme gore, and in his goriest work, he threw logic out the window, making pure nightmare flicks, but that doesn’t describe his whole oeuvre. He could be a real craftsman, and I think this film is an example of him in a high craft, though possibly low inspiration, mode.

But one content warning – everything may well have been on the up and up, but watching an Italian production from this era, I’m just always nervous about how the cat or cats were treated during the filming. If that’s the sort of thing you’re going to be distractingly worried about throughout the film, maybe give this one a miss.

So in the end, I’m quite glad to have finally seen this, but I don’t know that I’m going to make a habit of it.

The Metamodern Slasher Film (2025)

So, one of my very first posts here was about this exciting online conference I’d had the pleasure of attending (a lovely side effect of the pandemic was how many things opened up and became accessible when they went online), the “Slasher Studies Summer Camp,” back in 2021, and one of the stand out presentations at that conference was the keynote speech by Dr. Steve Jones on what he’d termed “the metamodern slasher film.” What he was describing felt immediately familiar and it has stayed with me as I’ve watched many recent slasher flicks that do, indeed, seem to share a similar ethos, if not approach. Since then, I’ve followed Jones on social media, so when he announced a pre-order discount for the softcover edition of his full book building on those same ideas, I was eager to snatch it up quick as can be (and happy to get the discount – academic books can be bank breaking).

I must admit, I’m not quite finished with it yet – but it is a consistently enjoyable and intriguing read. I must also admit that I still have difficulty putting my finger on exactly what the “metamodern” entails, but it is basically one interpretation of our current post-postmodern moment, and insofar as we all never fully agreed on one set meaning of “postmodern,” I think it’s fair that I have some difficulty wrapping my head around this proposed sentiment that both grows out of and reacts to what had come before.

Throughout, Jones presents case studies of contemporary slashers (the highest profile example would be Happy Death Day, but his cited filmography is deep), many of which I’ve seen and many of which I haven’t, identifying certain shared elements and/or underlying philosophies. In short, they frequently feature a knowing sub-genre self-awareness, allowing for a great deal of meta-play, but without the ironic distance/genre criticism that postmodernism frequently presented. Jones further identifies a new emotional earnestness in the work, as well as a surprisingly optimistic note – whereas postmodernism may critically suggest that it had all been done before and there was nothing new under the sun – just the same tired old tropes at which to wink, these films show a creative commitment to innovation, aware of tropes, but open to twisting them into something that feels new and fresh and fun. The optimism he reads here, particularly as identified in a bunch of what have been described as cynical “dead teenager” movies, intrigues me, given the extent to which I feel like we live in a scary, pessimistic age, where it is hard to believe that we could possible walk back the harm being done.

Honestly, I’m not always sure about the implied criticism of the postmodern set, Scream (1996) being the dominant example, but I’m curious to follow his ideas to their endpoint. I’m sure it will continue to challenge and enlighten. Also, I am certainly collecting a list of lesser known, very interesting sounding films that I’m now very eager to track down.

Race With the Devil (1975)

First of all – this movie, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is a blast! I feel like we don’t get a lot of horror-action flicks, or when we do, it’s more in the domain of an unseen war between denizens of the night (Nightwatch, Underworld, etc.), featuring horror monsters (vampires, werewolves, demons, etc., but not so much a horror movie of some “normal” person encountering a horrific threat that then takes on action beats (I wonder if it’s about action characters having a certain kind of agency and horror characters more having things happen to them). I think action movies with horror characters are much more common than horror movies with action characters. But this really walks the line – it might not be the scariest movie ever made, but I think it is frequently unsettling and creepy in a way I like horror to be, and then about the last third of the movie is basically a big car chase with assailants attacking our protagonists, trying to climb into their RV or drive them off the road. Cars flip or blow up driving off a bridge or get shot out. It’s exciting the way I like an action movie to be. The cast is great – I really buy the friendship between Peter Fonda and Warren Oats, two buddies who have set off on a long needed vacation in their brand new motorhome, and while the film can be faulted for giving their wives (Loretta Swit and Lara Parker) too little to do, I think they’re both great, really selling the terror and the stress they are buckling under while on the run from Texas backwater cultists. Now, I think it’s an entirely fair criticism to point out that the women disproportionately have to communicate fear and weakness while the menfolk get to heroically fight back, but as a viewer, I think the wives’ reactions are far more likely to resemble my own, and having characters carry that fear is essential to the flick. Also, while they could have had more, they did get small moments to shine, like their great scene doing research on Satanism in the local library, where they end up stealing reference books and running away all giddy. There is a real friendship dynamic there as well, and it was a treat.

In short, these two couples go off on a vacation together, setting off from San Antonio and driving through rural Texas in the direction of Aspen, where they plan to go skiing. Their first night out, having struck camp in a wild spot not far from the road, they witness a group of Satanists across the river as they first dance naked around a fire (oooh, titillating) and then stab a girl with a ceremonial dagger (uh, concerning). Then the black cloaked cultists notice they have an audience and chase the couples as they drive away. Much of the rest of the film features the couples trying to either get the authorities to do something about the murder they witnessed, or just trying to escape to the nearest big city (Amarillo – not even that big) as it seems that every rural resident of the Texas panhandle is somehow in on it. Wherever they go, people watch them strangely, phones mysteriously don’t work, or road accidents seem to have been orchestrated to force them into a trap. Every gas station attendant, every overfriendly, personal space invading neighbor at the campground, every police officer they encounter seems equally likely to be a secret Satanist out to silence them, sabotage their beautiful new motorhome, or kill their dog and fill their camper with rattlesnakes. Travelling around these rural regions, it all takes on a kind of folk horror vibe. Everyone out here in the sticks is part of one big, weird, religious conspiracy – the whole world seems like a slowly tightening noose around the necks of the two couples, until it all explodes (literally even) in the big car chase/fight at the end, not to mention a solid horror downer of a final twist.

This is one of my favorite kinds of horror in that I don’t feel like the filmmakers were trying to “say” anything particularly, so much as to just make a scary, exciting movie; but I feel like something is clearly expressed about the time and the place – the American south (perhaps extendable to non-urban America in general) in the mid 70s. This came only one year after Texas Chainsaw Massacre and while it is nowhere near as harsh or as artful, it has a lot of similarities – in both cases an urban group leaves the city, somewhere in Texas, and finds that everyone out there is a danger. Interestingly, with its focus on a group of young people, Texas Chainsaw shows them, easily identified with the counterculture moment, being hounded by a malevolent, embittered poor rural, group, all of an older generation – the heartland has poison in its heart and it’s not a safe place for anyone who could be part of the future.

In Race with the Devil the sheriff who seems in league with the cultists (or is just really bad at his job – but seriously, he worships the devil) keeps talking about those dang hippies, about the corruptive element of youth, but it’s all a cover for his own, for his group’s own corruption. And rather than attacking a bunch of hippies, he and all the other cultists are coming after four people who, from my modern, non-southern, non-Texan perspective, seem not all that unlike them. They are both working class/middle class/middle aged couples. The guys run an automotive garage and are into motorbike racing. Their big aspiration is to get out of the city, avoid crowds and basically be left alone in nature. But their seeming cultural similarities are no protection – they are no less targets. I feel like the film is just trying to be scary and paranoia filled, and the particular Satanist angle is just a convenient fill-in-the-blank horror threat, but there is a cultural impression in how all of these ‘normal people,’ people not that dissimilar to our protagonists (who are more urban, but hardly what I’d call “big city”), people who might otherwise come across on film as salt of the earth, good old-fashioned country folk, how they are all in an evil conspiracy, all dangerous. They’re not presented like the Sawyer clan in Texas Chainsaw (who are all clearly rather weird, to say the least) – nope – they’re the blood of the soil (if you want to get all 19th century nationalistic about it) and they are everywhere; you apparently can’t throw a rock in rural Texas without hitting a Satanist. The real social danger is not counter culture kids with their long hair and loud music – it’s ‘normal’ folk who will hunt down, harass, and destroy anyone or anything they feel threatens their stasis. That could be the obvious outsider. But it will also be you if you get in their way. I’m sorry to say it has contemporary resonance.

But again, while this may serve as an interesting cultural document, the real reason to watch this is that it is simply fun. Come for the paranoid horror-action flick, but stay for a bit of sociology.

Suspiria (2018) and Stacie Ponder on Suspiria

I needed some comfort food the other week and found myself gravitating back to this recent favorite, which I’ve written about before. I watched it over the span of a few days, savoring it a section at a time, regularly pausing to rave to my indulgent wife about how much I adored a given moment or character or historical artistic reference.

It’s interesting. For all that I love this film dearly, I find that I have difficulty offering my own clear reading of it. It is dense with narrative and symbol and character and simply life. While I feel hard pressed to detail what I think it may all add up to, moment by moment, I am constantly enamored with it. Its politics, its subtextual sexiness, its awfulness. Its witches who are all both monstrous and cruel and cool and utterly aspirational. Its view of a collective art making process that is both inspiring and beautiful and abusive and exploitative. Its nexus of magic and dance and bodies and power and political conflict and sadness and pain and grace. Life is complex and so is this, and I love every single minute of it.

So, having taken such joy in this recent re-watch, and wanting to spend a little more time dwelling in its moods and imagery and ideas, I went to re-read a gorgeous bit of writing from a favorite horror blogger. Stacie Ponder of the Final Girl blog went on a deep dive back in October of 2019, writing a post a day on Suspiria for the whole month, doing what I think is really significant and valuable work in picking apart nuances of the film as well as researching its influences and references. I fear any analysis I might provide would be so indebted to her, that I should just link to her entries and say if you even kinda liked this movie, you owe it to yourself to explore her explications. They were a great pleasure to revisit. Also, it gave me a few mornings of something to read with breakfast instead of the news – I like my horror fictional, thank you very much…

The Coffee Table (2022)

I’d heard great things about this Spanish language feature last year and was so happy to have a couple of hours to sit down and devote myself to something new. Having watched it, I have mixed feelings. There is a lot to like, and many elements linger in my mind, but ultimately I was unsatisfied. Still, I’m glad to have experienced it and to be considering it now.

This will be short, but I need some caveats. First, many horror fans may come away from this feeling that it isn’t really a horror movie, and I get it – there’s no monster, no slasher killer, no supernatural element. Also, it is arguably a comedy, though of the blackest vein. But, I will posit that it is all to do with “horror,” writ large, its protagonist being thrust into an encounter with a terrible truth that is beyond all that he can bear. Also, for all that this could be accurately described as a family drama (or possibly an absurdist tragedy), it features imagery, events, and pervasive discomfort that will be hard for anyone but horror fans to stomach.

Secondly, it is nigh impossible to discuss the movie in any meaningful way without significant spoilers, so if you think you might want to check out this intriguing, frequently intense, doom laden, blackly comic, tight little bottle movie about a man reckoning with the worst mistake of his life (namely, that he bought the wrong coffee table), go do so, even if I found the ending oddly unaffecting. I’d say it’s probably still worth your time.

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Ok, so here are some thoughts:

-I appreciate that when ‘the terrible thing’ happens, we don’t see how, and we never really learn how. It remains shocking, unimaginable. Jesús was there, he saw it, and he still doesn’t understand. But really, the ‘how’ is not important. It was an accident. It is terrible. It can never be reversed. If he could actually explain it to his wife, would it make it any less mind shattering?

-I wonder how critical we are meant to be of Jesús. When he first starts to clean, I was puzzled – how could he think he could actually clean this up – does he think Maria somehow isn’t going to notice? But I get it – he just can’t deal – he can’t face the difficult thing. To be fair, I can sympathize in this case – what could be worse? I think many of us would freeze up and do something stupid, undergoing such a horror. But the more I think about it, the more I feel his failure to deal is symptomatic of his whole character. Maria has to force everything in life because he refuses to make his own decisions (building to the point that he lashes out and buys the stupid table out of spite). Now, few of us are heroes, and most coast through life as he does, trying to avoid difficulties, but there is a cowardice at the center of his character that’s hard to like, though it can certainly be sympathized with (and if we’re to be honest, we all probably share). Furthermore, I’d assumed Ruth was lying/imagining things, but now I wonder – did he do something and his response was then just to shut down and deny and avoid? Who knows? I don’t exactly think he did, but the response would match his life pattern.

-How are we meant to receive the ending? The tension that runs through the lion share of the film is so engaging, and yet when revelations finally come, I feel the film pulls back. The soundtrack covers the screams. The camera looks left, looks right, and Maria has already taken decisive action, and Jesús follows. But I didn’t feel much. I didn’t cry. I didn’t laugh (it is frequently a pretty funny movie). It just felt like a bit of a relief that it had finally happened and we were no longer waiting in suspense for something to predictably go from horrible to even worse. I wonder what the filmmaker’s were hoping for. About that ending, I think perhaps the film suffers from predicating its narrative tension on waiting for something to happen that it’s hard to imagine going much of any other way. Sure, it piles on with its timing, and the actual actions taken by its characters, but sooner or later, Maria was bound to learn the truth. And then, well, it would be bad; and then she does; and it is. Ok.

-Finally, coming from theatre, I did enjoy how much this felt like a play – intense action in generally one location in a contained period of time, with a small set of players. Aristotelian unities all over the damn place. Past that, there is an absurdist approach to over the top tragedy that just feels like it often lives in the theatre more than on screen. I wonder how this would be, staged in a small space, intimate, the audience really trapped in the apartment with him, waiting for the inevitable.

So yeah, glad I watched it, kinda wished I loved the ending, but certainly food for thought.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

I have got to spend more time with silent cinema. Every time I do, I always come away so rewarded. Sure, there are elements of performance that can feel dated, eliciting laughter at moments I expect hadn’t been intentional, but it is a joyous laughter. It is great how much we can understand, connect with, feel without words – how little we sometimes need them. And I love how, only reading a few words from time to time, I’m given additional space in my head to think, to consider, react, and process what I’m viewing. And I feel that happens without at all taking me out of it, but there’s just that extra bit of space left to me when everyone shuts up.

I’d seen Phantom before, but was excited to rewatch it as presented by Joe Bob Briggs on the Last Drive In on Shudder. I knew it was the sort of work that he’d be able to share deep history about, and I wasn’t disappointed. If you’re interested, I recommend the episode and I won’t repeat his research here.

But I will say I enjoyed this, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, even more the second time around. It is a huge picture, executed at such a massive scale. The sets, the cast of hundreds, the early use of color. And it is just fun and exciting from start to finish. It is a crowd pleaser, with tons of successful comedy, atmosphere up the wazoo, and indelible images and sequences that have become icons of the medium (I mean, the unmasking scene alone). It is thrilling and intriguing and beautiful.

And Lon Cheney’s praises could not be sung enough. I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen so little of his work. Basically, I think I’ve only seen this and The Unknown (1927). In this, he brings such flair to the part. Everyone of course talks about his self-administered makeup, but the performance itself is such an absolute delight. The film does everything it can to turn you against him, making him not only physically repellant, but actually a monstrous person. But Cheney’s performance overpowers any efforts of the script. I can’t imagine how anyone today could watch this and not cheer him at every turn – for his charisma, his vivacity, his playful whimsy, his cleverness. I don’t support his actions (he is rather a controlling, entitled proto-incel), but Cheney embodies him as impish and light and brilliant. And the cognitive dissonance of how I receive him makes the film all the more interesting.

He and, by extension, the film are really something to treasure. This was a treat to re-watch.

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And that catches me up on the last few weeks. I’ve honestly watched much less horror than usual, but almost all of it has been really worthwhile – there wasn’t anything that wasn’t worthy of at least a mention on this here blog. Thanks for following along with me. I hope you stick around.