Category Archives: Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fresh (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

Run Sweetheart Run (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Wounded Fawn (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect Blue (1997)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Fulci Pt. III – Fulci for Fake and A Cat in the Brain

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Maintaining my weekly writing schedule can sometimes be a challenge (case in point, I’m a couple days behind). Just choosing a topic can be difficult, especially since I don’t want to just review the latest thing I’ve seen. Rather, my goal is to only write about topics/films/books that I really find interesting or noteworthy. And so for the last few months, I’ve settled into a bit of a routine. I had my stint on “Lesbian Vampire” movies. I spent a month looking at Slashers and the “Final Girl.” I had a couple posts in a row on Argento. And now, most recently I’ve been digging into another notable Italian maestro, the prolific, varied, enigmatic filmmaker, Lucio Fulci.

Having first watched some of his early thrillers (all new for me) and then some of his most iconic horror work (all films I’d seen before and knew I liked), for my final post in this series, I wanted to look at a couple of pieces that might help contextualize him and his oeuvre: One of his last films, the 1990 quasi auto-biographical A Cat in the Brain (1990) and the recent biography, Fulci for Fake (2019). For some additional context, I’ve also referred to a book I picked up at Argento’s book store in Rome, “Lucio Fulci: Poetry and Cruelty in the Movies.”

Fulci For Fake (2019)

Simone Scafidi’s biography is framed with a somewhat odd narrative conceit. We follow an actor, Nicola Nocella as he prepares to play Fulci in a dramatization of his life. He spends hours in the makeup chair, sits around in his underwear drinking whiskey and contemplating images from films, and makes pilgrimages to interview a wide range of people who were either close to Fulci or are authorities on his work. The interviews are real, but nothing else is – there is no biopic and he is an actor playing an actor. Apparently the title homages a film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973), a largely fabricated documentary about an art forger. I have mixed feeling about the frame – the film probably could have functioned just fine based on the interviews alone, but there is maybe something to it. In accompanying this “actor” as he tries to get under the skin of his enigmatic subject, we try to do the same. But however much information we have, however many family members share their memories, Fulci remains more than a little unknowable. Which would be true for anybody; we all contain fathomless depths, and going on this actor’s journey helps highlight this truth. Approaching the mystery of this idiosyncratic, private, driven figure, both we and Nicola may get close, but we will always come up against a wall at one point or another, and watching him go through the process perhaps suggests a possibility of how we might engage emotionally with this investigation as well.

Nicola removing his makeup

As for the interviews, they are very warm, very personal reminiscences. A portrait is painted of a workhorse professional, proficient and flexible as he, chameleon-like, moved from one genre to the next, capably crafting effective work regardless of the subject matter or intended effect, and a probably loving but still emotionally removed father and husband, a figure clearly not without faults. Scholarly and technically adept, he’s presented as a very thoughtful, intelligent, practical artist, one who’s private life generally remained private, though it was sometimes touched by great sadness (his first wife committed suicide and his daughter broke her back in a horse riding accident).

The input of his daughter, Camilla adds a lot of personal, emotional detail.

Given my focus here, it is striking to hear some of the interviewees track his turn to horror. Now it’s probably clear after the last couple of posts that I am a big fan of (what I’ve seen of) his horror work in the 80s, but I can still totally understand how one could view even the best of them as weird, funny, messy, or even boring little films – ultra-violent, lurid B movies that don’t make sense, with odd acting choices and terrible dubbing. That said, I was fascinated, having learned more of his very accomplished early career, to hear friends and family speak of how he had never been so artistically satisfied before he left narrative coherence behind in pursuit of horror effect. One speaker countered the suggestion that these horrors suffered from their budget, that some potential had gone unfulfilled, that some kind of flaws were on display, stating that what the movies looked like and sounded like, every element in them, was actually exactly how Fulci had wanted them to be.

This suggests an interesting if obvious reading – everything is intentional – criticisms that something feels cheap or is unrealistic or non-logical are as aesthetically constructive as suggesting that “Guernica” would have been a better painting if Picasso had only learned how to paint photo-realistically. Clearly, here is a technician and an artist who fully grasped the methods of a typically understood “well-made-film” and simply decided that his path involved something quite different.

It is also quite sad by the end. Following a bout of illness in 1984, he simply didn’t seem to still have the power to do what he had once done. This led first to a decline in quality and then, as investors and producers lost faith in him, a massive and devastating loss in the opportunity to work at all. From 1959-1978, he had directed 33 movies in a wide range of styles. From 1979-1991, he worked almost exclusively in horror and ultra-violent thrillers (17 movies, 50 in total). He died in 1995 from complications of diabetes after not working for the last four years of his life.

A Cat in the Brain (1990)

His penultimate work, A Cat in The Brain is a fascinating, at times confounding, testament to leave behind. Fulci plays a horror film director named Dr. Lucio Fulci who begins to be haunted by the disturbing, violent images he’s committing to film. After opening credits featuring a cat puppet devouring brains, we meet Fulci as he calls “cut” on what had initially seemed to be a “real scene” of bloody dismemberment, thus initiating the film’s fungible relation between cinema and reality. He then takes himself to lunch at a nearby restaurant, only to find that seeing meat causes him to flash on the gory, cannibalistic scenes he’s just finished filming.

Plus, steak tartar REALLY shouldn’t just be left out unrefrigerated, on display.

This has been happening to him a lot – uncontrollable images, rooted in his own work but not exclusive to it, appearing uninvited, driving him mad. He can’t have a moment of peace without brutal violence impinging on his imagination, interfering with his ability to work, to eat, to maintain any normal human interactions. Unsurprisingly, he seeks professional assistance in the form of a psychiatrist who lives around the corner. Unfortunately (and this is a spoiler, but it happens very early in the film), the therapist, Professor Egon Schwarz, sees this as an opportunity to carry out some mayhem himself, and subsequently hypnotizes Fulci to think himself possibly responsible for a series of murders that Schwarz is undertaking. Really, Lucio should get his money back.

NOT a good therapist…

And so it goes: Fulci is attacked by his own dark thoughts, but is also witness to his therapist killing a bunch of people, thinking he might be guilty of these crimes (if they are, in fact, happening at all and not just his own fevered, hallucinatory imaginings).  But by the end, the real killer is found out and Fulci leaves with a beautiful woman on his boat, “Perversion” for a much needed holiday (better for the mind than a therapist and it won’t frame you for multiple murders). Or he kills her and cuts her up for bait. Nope – that’s just one more film being shot – off they go on vacation.

This is such an interesting almost final film – at once self-reflective, impishly playful, and as over-the-top sensationalistic as anything else he’d done. One detail of note is that it was almost entirely constructed in post, repurposing gory scenes from a number of unreleased recent projects. Just about the only new scenes filmed are those focusing on Fulci himself. With the help of his daughter, Camilla (as I understand from Fulci for Fake), he managed to salvage a string of recent disappointments and craft a bizarre, gorily personal work of quasi-autobiography.

But for all that it is so very personal, it is also deeply ambivalent. On the surface, it suggests a man who is disturbed by the work that he’s doing, preyed upon by the horrific images he’s in the business of producing. He wants them to leave him alone, to be able to enjoy a moment of “normal life,” but is being driven mad by the “cat in his brain,” scratching at his spirit, gnawing at his mind, driving him to obsession and unwilling to let him go. And yet, the tone is generally blackly comic throughout. Though filled with endless sequences of bloodletting (probably more than any other film he produced – because it is so explicitly about them), this feels less like a horror movie. I mean, it’s not really funny, per se, but the feeling is much more that of a light comedy, a lark. I just don’t feel he intends us to take all of it at face value, but is rather sending up the notion that his artistic predilections are anything to be at all disturbed by. The film feels playful, though the content is brutal and generally played straight – this is irony, not satire. And yet, you can’t help but wonder if it does reveal something true.

I don’t think this stands as a masterpiece of the genre, but it is really worth watching (and can sometimes be quite fun) for the sake of contextualizing him and his work. Plus, while he almost always gave himself a tiny cameo in his films, this was the only time he really “acted,” and he acquits himself quite well.

In Summation

So that’s Lucio Fulci. It’s been an interesting three weeks of really getting into him and there is so much more to explore in the future. There are a few other early 80s horrors which, while not as acclaimed as those I’ve covered, sound like they could be worth checking out (I hear The Black Cat is good). Some time, I’d also like to dig into his later, apparently less successful works (maybe Aenigma or The Devil’s Honey). Someday, I may even take in an old western or musical, just to scratch that itch of curiosity (Four of the Apocalypse sounds cool). I can’t say I’ve always considered him a favorite director exactly, but this focused time of consideration has really left an impression. I think it took me time to come around to embracing his particular flavor of dreamy, messy, sleazy, weirdly-transcendent splatter-art. But it really is something special, and when you are open to it, utterly effective.

I had read that he described the “Gates of Hell” trilogy as “total films” but misinterpreted what he’d meant. I had imagined an Artaudian (see Antonin Artaud and the “theatre of cruelty”) intention, assaulting the viewer with every available tool, using surreal non-reality as one of many devices that might crack open a receptive mind: a horror film as “a victim burned at the stake, signaling through the flames.” But the phrase was touched on in Fulci for Fake and apparently, he meant rather a kind of total freedom. The films are free to be film, not story exactly, but its own artistic medium (something Artaud would have approved of as well). After years of working as a craftsperson, honing his filmmaking prowess as an adroit gun-for-hire, he finally allowed himself to pursue “Art.” However, his particular brand of art would probably be seen as trash by many and I think that is an element of what makes it so very lovable. And not everybody has to love everything.

His is an oeuvre all his own, and I think the world is a richer place to have had him in it.

Fulci Pt. II – The Gates of Hell “Trilogy”

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Last week I began a dive into the output of Lucio Fulci, prolific Italian genre filmmaker famous within horror circles as a purveyor of extraordinarily gory, creepy, atmospheric, and sometimes not-quite-coherent horror films. I approached his work in search of some heavy “horror” and was surprised to find among his earlier films a very different tone. Sure, there were blood-soaked or nightmarish moments, but these were more thrillers with moments of graphic violence, and sometimes they could even be lyrical, emotional, visually stylish, or even classy in ways I wouldn’t have expected of him. But that is the point of such an exercise – to learn what I didn’t know. Still, I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface.

That said, this week, I’d like to take a look at three of his most acclaimed horror films, all of which I’d previously seen, and all of which embody the grisly, oneiric, often putrescent aesthetic with which he’s most associated: The City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery. Taken together, they are often termed “The Gates of Hell trilogy,” though they are all actually discrete, standalone films with no continuation of story from one to the next, and some actors returning in different roles (at least Catriona MacColl is in all three). While there is no narrative thread between them, other than a weakened boundary between worlds, more than anything else, they share a mysterious, ominous, Lovecraftian vibe and a unique approach to horror cinema. Whereas The Psychic only a few years earlier had been a tightly wound, perfectly constructed supernatural puzzle box, each element fitting into place just so, following his success with Zombi 2, Fulci dove head first into a nightmarishness cut loose from the strictures of narrative, resulting in some of his most acclaimed, most disturbing, and most niche work. It’s an interesting progression. So, let’s get to it, shall we? (This time, given how decentralized narrative is, I won’t be issuing spoiler warnings. If you think you might like to watch these unspoilt, go do so now. They’re available on many platforms.)

The City of the Living Dead (1980)

Catriona MacColl almost turned down her part as she felt the script was just “a series of special effects without a story.” She wasn’t entirely wrong, but I think that if one is willing to go along for the ride, it can be a ghastly good time. This is not my favorite entry in the trilogy, but I think it stands as both a wild, atmospheric midnight movie and a clear transitional experiment as Fulci really tried committing to the horror first and foremost. What story there is feels quite insubstantial, but the series of nightmare images, the horrors upon horrors upon horrors, can be mind-blowingly effective. It’s the kind of movie that might not always frighten so much as disgust, but it’s also trying to crack your mind open, just as its undead figures like to one-handedly tear open skulls, squeezing out the gooey brains within (apparently undeath does wonders for your grip).

If you want classic horror atmosphere, it’s got howling wind, fog, and old rickety houses. If you want something gross, it’s got head drillings, disembowelments, and all the viscera you can stomach (tee hee). If you want crazy, why-is-this-happening moments, it’s got bleeding eyes, storms of maggots, unexplained resurrections, surprise blow up sex dolls, goopy cross impalements, exsanguinating wallpaper, and so, so much more. If you want a compelling story, you should remember one you read some other time because that’s in short supply, but if you want unrivalled, creative awfulness, this movie is for you.

In short, a psychic, Mary Woodhouse (MacColl), at a séance, has a vision of a priest in an old misty cemetery hanging himself, and she goes into a fit, somehow understanding that he has just fulfilled an ancient, 4000 year old prophecy and opened the gates of Hell. The only way this can be reversed is for his corpse to be found and destroyed before All Saints’ Day (a few days hence). Unfortunately, the shock of it all is too much for her and she drops dead. Fortunately, her grave diggers are pretty lazy and leave her coffin in the ground with only a spattering of dirt on top, citing “union hours” such that when she suddenly comes back to life in her coffin (which is never explained) and starts desperately clawing at the interior, shredding her fingers in the process, intrepid reporter, Peter Bell (Christopher George), hears her screams and rather than, you know, opening the coffin by its latch, rescues her by slamming a pick axe into the lid multiple times, almost destroying her face in the process.

It’s intense and scary – her initial terror at coming to in such circumstances, her desperate, self-harming attempts to free herself, and the axe blade coming so close to her head as she is “rescued” by this hard drinking newsman. Anyway, she convinces him of the need to go to Dunwich (a clear nod to Lovecraft, whose work was a clear inspiration for the feeling of all three of these films, though none of them are adaptations of any of his stories), home of the dead priest, and thus, they set off to save the world.

Meanwhile, in Dunwich, odd things start happening. Rotting toddler corpses appear out of nowhere, startling teenage sex offenders. A crack opens up in the wall of the local dive bar, the fresh crevasse possibly leading to otherworldly terrors. A teenage girl is attacked by a mysterious hand shoving rotting, wormy goo into her face, prompting a heart attack. The denizens of the local funeral home start disappearing and turning up in people’s kitchens, I’ve already mentioned the maggot storm, yes maggot storm, and of course, there is the most famous oh-dear-god-why moment of the film (if you can’t take heavy gore, you might skip the next paragraph). Story wise, they eventually close the hell gate…or do they? Duhn, duhn Duuuuhn!!!

Ok, so the centerpiece of the movie: two teenagers are making out in the front seat of a car someplace creepy. The girl stops, having heard something, so the boy (Michele Soavi, director of Stagefright, among many others!) turns on the headlights and for a split second, they see the dead priest in front of them, hanging from a noose, his eyes boring into hers. Then he’s gone. Then he appears outside another window and stares her down until his dark magics start to work on her and her eyes start bleeding – first just a trickle, but it becomes a torrent; then her mouth begins to foam and she starts vomiting out her own guts. This continues for quite some time until, I don’t know, a liver or something comes out. I remember the first time I ever watched this, my jaw on the floor. “What is happening? Why is it happening? Ugh! Ew! Wow! How are they doing this? This is incredible. When will it stop? Why won’t it stop?” This time, I could clearly see when this is no longer a real human head, but a bloody, sheep intestine regurgitating dummy, but on first viewing, I was so shocked by the audaciousness of this crazy, awful, disgusting thing that I didn’t even clock the replacement. It is repulsive, and also just so weirdly amazing (and oh, that poor, poor actress – the bleeding eyes alone must have been so uncomfortable).

There are moments in the movie that don’t work – some acting is leaden, the dubbing is typically bad, and there are things that just do not make much sense. Also, Fulci follows some of his artistic impulses to their logical conclusions, which while being inevitable signs of an auteur, doesn’t always result in the most effective choices. For example, he always had a thing about close-ups of eyes – but here there are whole scenes of dialogue where we only see the speakers’ peepers. But, hey – good for him for following his joy. However, the stuff that does work is breathtaking: the pervasive doom of it all, the unexplained, and probably unexplainable horrible occurrences, the fun play with goopy zombie creatures, surprise skeletons, and EC comics inspired lighting – it all results in a non-cerebral, non-narrative play of horror-ness. And while this engenders a certain surreality, I think this first outing in pure horror is just a taste of what was soon to come.

The Beyond (1981)

Having flexed certain cinematic muscles in the last film, here Fulci’s less narrative, more poetic, and still very, very, very gory approach to horror really comes to fruition. Heads are impaled on iron nails, distressing things are done to eyeballs, bodies are dissolved by lye and acid (not at the same time), faces are destroyed by little hairy creepy crawlies, the dead rise, a child’s head explodes, and there are more close ups of eyes than you can shake a bloody railway spike at – but all of this grue serves an end beyond simple spookhouse shocks and disgust – the gestalt effect is bleakly poetic: a mad dream in which everything at first appears menacing but more or less understandable, but by the end of which, reality comes unmoored and you find yourself hopelessly, eternally adrift. It is an odd, chilling little picture and it has plenty of charming, lovably idiosyncratic, though not always successful, elements, but taken as a whole, it is a real masterpiece of the genre.

Liza Merrill (MacColl returning) inherits a run-down New Orleans hotel where 60 years earlier, a sorcerer had been lynched, tortured to death, and walled up in the basement for practicing black magic. Attempting to fix up the place and make it financially viable, Liza encounters problem after problem. One worker falls from a scaffold, startled by a creepy image in a window. The basement is flooded and the plumber called in to check it out is soon found dead, his eyes squished, floating next to a decrepit, much older corpse. The housekeeper’s head ends up impaled on a spike. What a money pit! 

But desperate for cashflow, Liza’s not going to be deterred, plus, as she says, she’s “lived her whole life in New York and if there’s one thing I’ve learned not to believe in, it’s ghosts!” (for any fans of Community, all I can hear is Britta saying “and I lived in New York City!”) So she keeps plodding ahead, surprisingly unbothered by both the weird goings on and the crusty-white-eyed blind woman (who might not actually exist) who tells her that the hotel stands on a gate of Hell and that it’s in danger of opening. She befriends a grumpy local doctor, John McCabe (David Warbeck), whose apparent belief in science is stronger than his ability to reckon with the supernatural weirdness directly in front of him, and together they fall down a rather hellish rabbit hole.

My tone may be glib as, for all that I love this movie, it is full of odd, weird, nonsensical moments. The acting is stiff (and I’m being kinda charitable). The dialogue strains one’s ability to suspend disbelief (such as when a county clerk (Fulci himself in a cameo) explains that he has to leave his office for a two hour lunch because after weeks on the picket line, the union won this concession – in America in 1981? Not bloody likely – it’s just a hilarious giveaway that this was written by a European – still they do understand something about America – the doctor keeps a loaded revolver in his desk, like you do…). The dubbing is worse than usual and though it was mostly filmed in Louisiana, there’s still some great set dressing signage, such as the notice outside the morgue: “Do Not Entry!” Still, all of these elements that may be deemed faults just make me love it more. That and they also add some levity to an otherwise overwhelmingly desolate, dread filled nightmare of a film.

One of the things I love is how I can’t track the moment when things change. When is the gate to Hell opened? When do Liza and John pass its threshold? When did everything completely stop cohering? It’s never obvious, and while this lack of narrative clarity may be deemed a weakness, I think it’s central to the film’s success. At the beginning of the film, there is a hot, sticky, fetid atmosphere of doom, but the story feels more or less straightforward (weird, gross, and badly dubbed, but straightforward). As far as halfway through the story, I felt like events more or less logically followed, but by the end, everything had come loose. Characters may exist, but also may not. We see an item someplace and then it is gone. Nothing makes sense anymore, but the transition from very weird but essentially understandable, to total dream logic is so smooth as to not notice it happening. Furthermore, this is accompanied by a sojourn into dream geography.

Early in the film, Liza finds an old landscape in the hotel which we had seen the tortured warlock painting before he was killed. It shows a barren grey land, scattered with bodies of the dead. Attacked by an undead employee, Liza and John leave the hotel for his hospital, finding the streets of New Orleans now mysteriously empty. So too is the hospital, except for its dead, which have all started to shamble about. This prompts a somewhat ridiculous action sequence wherein the doctor just cannot pick up on the fact that every time he shoots a dead person in the chest, nothing happens, but if he shoots them in the head, they fall down (also, his revolver seems to hold at least 9 rounds – is that a thing?). Stubbornly, he just keeps aiming for body shots until finally, they escape down a stairwell only to emerge in the basement of Liza’s spooky hotel. After passing through an opening in a wall, they find themselves in the desolate landscape of the previously discovered painting with no sign of the former cellar, no means of egress. Looking at this endless, inhuman expanse, their eyes go white and they are frozen in existential horror.

All three films of the “Gates of Hell” trilogy are often labelled “Lovecraftian,” but this has to be one of the best expressions of Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror I’ve seen committed to film. An often fair criticism of old H.P. (beyond the unfortunate racism and xenophobia) is that his stories were rarely character driven, but rather, characters found themselves delving deeper and deeper into the bowels of some otherworldly madness, mere witnesses to the horrors within, doomed to be destroyed by that which they uncovered. That is somewhat the case here, but somehow the above described passage from typical spooky reality into full-blown nightmare makes it work, and the film is really chilling at the end – the horror lands. Reality has unraveled so seamlessly that characters’ (often bad) decisions feel more or less natural and you go along with them. And the place they get to at the end is so ethereally awful, with no warmth, hope, or humanity. It is not the Hell of a Christian mythos, but rather a cosmically unforgiving no-place – a state of lifeless, listless hopelessness more than a metaphysical location.

And along the way, the horror beats are just at the top of the form. There aren’t many jump scares, but one at least really got me. The gore is so very over the top and squirm inducing – the sort of stuff that makes you laugh for how strongly you’re reacting to it, such as the scene when an architect falls from a ladder in the above mentioned clerk’s office and an army of tarantulas come out of nowhere, for no clear reason, and proceed to Eat. His. Damn. Face. Gah! For minutes of full on, gross out, fleshy, bloody, crawly, bitey, “dear god, why is this even happening and I’m pretty sure tarantulas don’t work this way, but still, ewww, ick, ugh!” horror fun. Sometimes the special effects are not totally believable and you can spot the moment when there is no longer a real human face (or a real arachnid for that matter), but a bloody prop, but it really doesn’t matter – the extremity of it all is so over-the-top that the very concept of what is happening (not to mention the rivers of the red stuff) just makes my brain scream. It is delightful in its way.

It also must be said that this is a beautiful film: the steamy setting, the mysterious quality of being lost in a fog, the play of light on beads of sweat forming on a man’s brow as he scrambles to survive. There are often comparisons made between Argento and Fulci, especially as they both took a turn for supernatural work around the same time (Argento’s Inferno has some definite similarities to this week’s films). But whereas Argento took an aestheticized approach to occult horror in his “Three Mothers Trilogy,” Fulci’s work, and particularly The Beyond, is no less artful, for all that it is clearly less aesthetic (if that makes any sense – it works in my mind). The framing of the shots, the edits, the lighting, the totally effective gut-wrenching sequences of bodily destruction – all of it is so intentionally and masterfully executed, and absolutely unique.

The House by the Cemetery (1981)

It’s a bit strange to consider this third entry a part of a “trilogy” with the other two as it lacks any gate to Hell and its tone is decidedly less grand, less apocalyptic. Still, as a more intimate “family moves into a spooky house and spooky things happen” movie, it is still bizarre and wild, with characteristically strange (one might even say ‘crazy’) character beats, atmosphere thick as really melancholy butter, very bloody practical effects (though perhaps less over-the top than the other two) and a surreal, dreamy quality that feels akin to that of the first two films. It also might be the strangest of the three, which can make it the most fun or a bit of a slog depending on how you take your weird.

There is a story, but having fully settled into his personal style of bizarre phantasmagoria, Fulci doesn’t seem particularly invested in us really understanding it. Paul, some kind of scholar, relocates his family from NYC to a small New England town to continue the research of a colleague who recently went mad, murdered his mistress, and hanged himself. Along with his reluctant wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl back again – maybe it’s her presence that makes these three a trilogy) and their young, gratingly dubbed son, Bob, Paul settles into this creepy house where we’ve already seen a young couple (one of whom is played by Daniela Dora who we recently saw bleeding from the eyes and regurgitating her gastrointestinal tract in The City of the Living Dead after similarly complaining to her boyfriend about his creepy choice of make-out locations) brutally murdered and dragged into the basement (she can’t catch a break).

Of course, this is a bad place to bring your family and it ends poorly for everyone. A mysterious ghost girl keeps telling Bob to stay away from the house, but he’s got no say in the matter and sooner or later, everyone falls prey to the dark force below, the enjoyably named “Doctor Freudstein,” a mad scientist, now giant, worm and slime filled, murderous mound of flesh, who had conducted his evil experiments here many years ago and has been prolonging his life by harvesting the body parts of any who make the mistake of darkening his door.

When we discover the doctor in the end, it is an odd turn, but the film is full of such very strange moments that it doesn’t feel at all out of place. That eerie, menacing, utterly weird quality runs through the whole film. From moment to moment, it’s effective and gloomily unsettling, but it can also feel ridiculous – more so than the first two films this week, I think this really depends on the viewer’s mood and openness to going on this either envelopingly spooky, or absurdly insane ride.

Early on, when they’re still in New York, Bob (a, let’s say, 4 year old boy) has a large framed photograph of an old farmhouse on his wall. Only he can see the ghost girl open the curtains in the photo as she warns him not to go in the house. His mother seems slightly irritated that her son is a bit crazy. Later, of course it turns out to be the house they’re going to – why would it have been on a small child’s bedroom wall in the first place?

One of the more evocative scenes features the ghost girl standing in front of a shop window where she is shocked to see the head fall off a mannequin as its neck burbles up a fountain of blood. When it happens, we don’t know for sure she’s a ghost, but she already feels somewhat unreal and the whole sequence feels puzzlingly hallucinatory. Later in the film, Bob’s seemingly sinister babysitter, Ann (Ania Pieroni, very recognizable from Argento’s Inferno and Tenebrae), who bears some resemblance to the un-headed mannequin, has been sharing odd, menacing looks with others throughout the film (especially Paul – there is a scene that features a volley of close-ups between their respective eyes – and at least one shot of Lucy’s eyes, noticing, as no one speaks but something is happening), and has tried breaking into the forbidden murder basement, finds herself trapped down there and gets her head graphically sawed off. First of all, it’s peculiar that the ghost girl has such a premonition of the death of this side character and not a member of the family she’s trying to warn away (I mean, everybody dies), but it seems stranger to me that this little ghost girl is going window shopping in the first place.

Everyone in the town thinks they’ve seen Paul before, that he had recently visited with his daughter. He denies this and it is never resolved. Had he been here with Ann perhaps? Was it some kind of doppelganger? Was he somehow fated to come to this place? Whatever it is, there is a cryptic feeling of bad portent that hangs over the town and somehow settles on Paul and his family, and he does fall into a kind of obsession, uncovering the truth of Dr. Freudstein. Also, and wholly unrelatedly, he has an epic fight with a fake bat that clamps onto his hand and won’t let go no matter how much he stabs it (seriously, this bit went on for about 25 minutes).

Sometimes characters pick up on the bad vibes and are duly creeped out, but sometimes, they are so blasé about truly disturbing things that it makes you wonder if they see what you have seen, if anything is real. This can add to both the lyrical, looming unreality and the what-is-going-on potential laughability of it all. A favorite moment for me takes place the morning after we’ve seen an estate agent visit the house when no one was home only to get repeatedly stabbed with a fireplace poker and then dragged into the basement, leaving a long streak of blood across the floor. So now it’s the morning and we see creepy babysitter Ann in the kitchen, shot from above, cleaning up what is obviously a huge puddle of blood outside the cellar door, with a look that communicates, “I should probably clean up before someone starts asking questions.” Then Lucy walks in and we shift camera perspective so we see the Ann’s face in the foreground, with Lucy behind her (which means we no longer see the blood). From the previous set up, we know what Lucy should be seeing and it makes sense when she asks, clearly put off by Ann’s dire scowl, what the babysitter is doing. Ann pauses and just says, “I made coffee.” Satisfied, Lucy walks out of frame and a beat later, she’s carrying a tray with coffee service into the bedroom and telling her husband how strange she finds this girl. She never responds to the giant pool of blood. She never mentions the giant pool of blood. Did she actually see the giant pool of blood. Did I?

You can take this as a hilarious mistake, as bad acting, as nonsense, but I feel like giving the benefit of the doubt and calling it intentional. I think we are being wrong-footed at every turn and not in service of some kind of convoluted plot twists as might have been true in an early giallo thriller, but rather in service of a non-rational state that the horror seeks to inculcate. This runs through the film, culminating in a final moment where it seems that Bob alone has escaped Freudstein’s attacks, only to realize that he is now a ghost child himself, walking down the lane with the girl and her mother, now part of the Freudstein family (maybe he was always a part of the family – I don’t know). It is a somber, haunting ending to a delightfully specific film.  

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So those are the “Gates of Hell” films. I’ve watched a lot of horror movies and I swear, there’s really nothing else like them. And while some threads can be found between them and the earlier works discussed last week, they are also so unlike where Lucio began his journey into darker fare. That said, they won’t be for everyone. Some won’t be able to stomach the gore and some won’t have patience for the slow, dreamy non-linearity. But if you have any appetite for such things, especially in such a combination (delivering the most insane, bloody terror along with something poetic and occasionally elegiac), these are just masterpieces: ridiculous, disgusting masterpieces.