Category Archives: Review

Polish Horror Series #5 – The Lure

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So it’s been a few months since my last entry in this series. I guess I’ve just felt intimidated at the prospect of working my way through the films for which no English subtitles are available. However, that day is not here yet. Today’s movie, The Lure (Córki Dancingu) is readily available (with English subtitles) and is really worth taking a look at, especially in terms of genre in general and horror specifically in Polish cinema.

When I started this series, I pointed out how there were rather few local horror films in this country in which I’ve come to live. Today’s film, a horror/fairy tale/art-house/mermaid/siren/heart eating musical set in and around a Warsaw nightclub in the 1980’s, offers a fascinating case study, especially in terms of the differences between its release domestically and internationally. If you watch the International trailer below, it is mermaids, mermaids, mermaids, sharp teeth, a bit of choreography, and the nightclub setting:

If now, you watch the Polish trailer, all you get is the nightclub and sexy times:

CÓRKI DANCINGU - oficjalny zwiastun nr 1

The respective posters tell the same story. Even the titles imply different films. “The Lure” sounds connected to fishing, and hence, fish – and their tails, but also something alluring, lured towards some kind of trap. “Córki Dancingu” directly translates as “Daughters of the Dance-Party”; it is a movie about girls at a nightclub. Nothing supernatural here.

I can only assume the Polish distributer felt there wasn’t a market domestically for a mermaid-horror-musical and decided to lean hard into the cool sexiness of the nightlife. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t do great in its home country as people bought tickets for one film and got quite another. Internationally, distributors leaned into its weird-genre-hybrid charms and this ambitious, fascinating, admittedly not-entirely-successful-but-still-essentially-likeable oddity found its audience. It’s on Netflix here in Poland and I wonder if, having been around for a while, the people coming to it now are more aware of what they’re getting into, and are thus more satisfied with what they get.

The Lure (2015)

Narratively, the film is inspired by a number of sources. The parents of both Agnieszka Smoczińska (the director) and Barbara and Zuzanna Wronska (Ballady i Romanse, the band who did all the music for the film) were part of the Warsaw nightclub scene in the eighties (as a club owner and performers respectively) and the three women, having grown up in similar circumstances, reportedly wanted to engage with their shared childhood experiences. The local legend of the “Mermaid of Warsaw” (more on this below) also figures into things. Finally, the most structural narrative influence is clearly Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (a story that was explicitly written to give children something gentler and kinder to read, with a nice happy ending, but which to modern eyes, is incredibly dark and sad), which really shapes the main thread of the plot.

In short, two mermaids, Złota (Golden) and Srebna (Silver) surface in the Wisła river (which runs through Warsaw) and find the three members of a band, “Figs and Dates” (who may also be a family – it’s not entirely clear) grilling and singing on the river bank. Srebna is instantly enamored of the handsome young bass player so they come ashore and join the band at a nightclub. In this version, they have legs as long as they’re dry, but what they lack will play into the story soon. The owner of the club is wowed by what the band has found and having overcome very brief concerns of having seemingly underage girls in his club, puts them to work as backup singers and strippers (after having some private time to sample their wares for himself – in a way that, though we don’t see exactly what happens, seems to have clearly been abusive). The customers are amazed by their tails which appear once wet and their beautiful voices, and they are an instant hit. But the central story is how Srebna falls for the young bass player and how her sister tries to pull her away from this doomed love which will eventually destroy her. What follows is only a spoiler if you haven’t read the Andersen.

So, in Andersen’s story, the mermaid must sacrifice her voice in order to get legs so she can go on land to meet her prince. She does this under the condition that if he marries someone else and she doesn’t kill him, she will die and turn to sea foam. So, in this version, she has legs if she wants them, but only has sexual organs on her fish tale. As the drummer/father(?) of the band presents them to the club owner, “They’re smooth, like Barbie dolls.” Thus, her relationship with the bassist can only go so far and he’s pretty turned off by the whole fish sex thing. And so, she undergoes an illicit, underground surgery where her tail is sawed off and presumably given to the woman whose lower half she then has sewn on. In the process, she loses her ability to sing, the girls lose their positions at the club, the band kind of falls apart, and the bassist still doesn’t love her.

Before you know it, we’re on a wedding boat, he’s married, and Złota is begging her sister to eat him before the sun comes up. In the end, Srebna goes to him, they embrace, her teeth turn sharp and scary, and at the last second, as the sky goes all golden, she just hugs him, loves him, and dissolves into foam. Złota rips the guy’s throat out and runs off into the sea. You know, it’s a story for kids!

Now, when you think “mermaid” I doubt horror is the first genre that comes to mind, but I think a linguistic issue comes to play here. In Polish there is only one word for ‘mermaids’ (beautiful women with fish tales that lonely sailors have spotted since time immemorial – though they’re usually just manatees or something similarly pretty) and ‘sirens’ (evil women from Greek mythology – who originally had bird parts – who would sing beautiful songs to lure sailors into crashing on the rocks and drowning). As it is one word in Polish, the two creatures are combined in one, and the two mermaids in this movie are also sirens (a kind of monster) with a habit of luring men with song and sometimes ripping them apart and eating their hearts. We only see this once or twice, but I think it’s enough to justify classifying this as ‘horror’ insofar as it is a “monster movie” of sorts, though perhaps a bit closer to the old Universal classics in that the monsters are the most sympathetic characters – and are simply misunderstood, mistreated, and taken advantage of by the human protagonists.

Beyond the notes of horror, particularly when hearts get munched on, the dominant tone is that of a fairy tale in that these ‘monsters’ are totally of the world of the story. No one’s mind is blown that mermaids exist; it’s just extraordinary to have caught a couple of them. And it is obvious that, as sirens, they could be dangerous – one of the first things the club owner asks upon meeting them is if they bite, but the drummer/father says they’re still young (he’ll learn how wrong he was later). Sometimes in fairy tales, things just happen and they are accepted by the characters within without shock. That passivity is featured here. Also, I find it interesting that almost no character in the film gets a name, but just a role. In the end credits, the members of the band, all prominent in the story, are simply “Percussionist,” “Bassist,” and “Vocalist” just as in a fairy tale, the characters will be “The Prince,” “The Shoemaker,” or “The Witch.”

So, regarding fairy tales, another one is very important here. In Poland, it’s quite common for some legendary creature to be associated with a given city. Wrocław has its gnomes, Kraków (where I live) has got a dragon under the hill, and Warsaw has a mermaid – she’s even on the official crest of the city. The story of the Warsaw mermaid is that she came to the banks of the river and at first the local fishermen were upset that someone was eating all their fish, so they made plans to catch her, but when they heard her sing, they loved her and allowed her to stay. However, one greedy merchant decided to take advantage of the situation, caught her in a net, and took her around to fairs and markets, displaying her beauty and monstrosity for a price. But, fortunately, the fishermen heard her cries and came to rescue her. Ever since then, armed with sword and shield, she has been there to protect the city.

What this story brings to the mix, besides a historical link between the city and mermaids/sirens, is the theme of exploitation, a significant undercurrent of Smoczyński’s film. Just as the Warsaw mermaid was captured and put on display, Srebna and Złota are, almost immediately upon entering human society, brought into the sex industry. The drummer has them strip for the club owner to show off their oddly featureless groins before splashing them with water and inviting him to digitally explore the slits on their tails. Satisfied, the owner wants some time alone with them. It’s interesting how impassive they are through this process. The director has stated in interviews that she intended a parallel with the immigrant experience, and the exploitation inherent within. At least at the beginning, the girls are unperturbed by the requests these humans make of them. However, after being left alone with this sweaty, sleazy older man, they are found unconscious, naked (in human form) and seemingly hurt by the experience. Even these magical creatures of uncertain age and experience can be exploited.

This extends into scenes with the family/band. In a late scene, the girls ask why they never play Frisbee, or go get ice cream, or get paid. In short, they are not family – they are not treated with love and care as children, and at the same time, they are not employees, paid for their services. They give of their bodies and their love and their voices and are afforded no respect or care or remuneration in return. In fact, upon realizing that they may be responsible for a man murdered by the river bank, the drummer/father abruptly punches them in the face, knocking them out, and the band rolls them up in carpets and throws them off a bridge. Złota responds to this upon return by eating his thumb (so, they do bite) and Srebna responds by having her tail chopped off so she can finally ‘be a girl’ for the bassist and they can have sex.

Sex and the (nude female) body loom especially large over the proceedings, and it is interesting how much it feels like this is a film made by a woman. While so many characters may leer at Srebna and Złota, the camera doesn’t. The body is a (super)natural thing and there’s nothing remarkable about someone walking around with no clothes on; the two of them are often unclothed, but they don’t seem quite naked – they wouldn’t normally be wearing clothes anyway – and their matter-of-fact manner is striking. There is also attention given to the clammy, scaled corporeality of their fishiness, the most natural thing for them, but something gross and/or fascinating for others. Similarly, physical desire is a strong presence, whether in terms of a bloody hunger for men’s hearts, a sweaty late night hook up, or Srebna’s desperation to have a full female body with which to consummate her love, and finally feel her affections fully returned.

It’s striking to me that, for all that Srebna meets a tragic end, she is really the only character in the film who is ever actually happy. However ill-advised her love is, she does feel it and the moment before turning to foam, she is at peace, glowing with joy. Złota is distraught throughout by her sister’s choices. Triton makes a few appearances and tries to talk sense into her. The handsome bassist isn’t into the tail and once she’s had her surgery, is uncomfortable in new ways. And every other denizen of this vodka fueled nightlife world, in spite of the surface level hedonism, seems suffused with emptiness and regret. The film is sometimes frenetic and wild, and sometimes libidinous, but more than anything else, it is sad. I assume that these notes are the most autobiographical elements of Smoczyński’s feature.

Which brings me to the songs. It is a musical and some of the music is quite good. However, it is in the musical numbers that I think the film sometimes feels less successful. Many of the songs seem to exist to primarily express a feeling, a concept, and rarely if ever link directly to the action of the narrative. Thus, they bring the story to a halt most of the time and while there is artistic and lyrical value to them and their filming, they give the film a disjointed quality that doesn’t always serve. I think there is a 75 minute, tight, dramatic, effective story tucked away inside of this sometimes shambolic film.

However, I think it’s a less interesting approach to focus on how something doesn’t work rather than considering what these other elements contribute, even if I might find them frustrating. I suspect the director didn’t really want to make a straight narrative film, and that these other tastes of life that suffuse this world express something of her own personal childhood experience of this scene. I could be wrong, but it feels as if there had been a lot of openness in the filming, filling every nook and cranny with character and theme and expression in often unscripted ways, and that it really was brought together in editing. If anything, rather than the songs and ancillary action interfering with the flow of the story, maybe the strength of the central story stands in the way of the film working as a more stream of consciousness-abstract piece. My mind just wants to lean on narrative as it is the easiest thing; it’s what I’ve been the most conditioned to focus on.

In the song sequences, and also in much of the negative space around the central story, there are so many little details, glimpses of the lives and failures and betrayals of various characters. This night-time world is full of lived-in character nuance, clearly meaningful to Smoczyńska. In an interview, she described how it was in her mother’s nightclub that she had her “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment, and first important feeling for a boy.” For example, we see the relationship between the Drummer and the Vocalist fall apart and we don’t really know why. The film isn’t telling their story, but they are afforded their own lives in which significant things happen even if we aren’t paying attention to them. In the end, when the Bassist has been killed, I still wasn’t sure if he was their son or not. They were at the wedding, miserable and avoiding each other – do they now have this grief to deal with as well?

There are so many little pieces like this. In one aside, Złota is picked up by a woman presenting herself as Militia (what the Police were called during communism). The Milita woman claims that Złota had eaten “a member of the public who was out on the town” (which she had), and in song, they flirt, pretend to point guns at each other, and eventually go back to the Militia lady’s place for a spot of piscine sex. At the end of all of this, the woman puts a gun to Złota’s head and Złota looks like she’s about to rip out her throat. What happened next? We don’t know. I feel like this is here to see the difference of how the girls interact in human society. Złota can satisfyingly hook up with someone without needing to turn to sea foam (and then maybe kill her). Triton can front a punk band and garner a bit of worship, but still just be here ‘on holiday.’ Srebna, on the other hand, is trapped in her love, in wanting what she can’t have.

The final effect is wistful, lost. We have been through this fairy tale, and while the little mermaid is happy in her death (which is kind of true in Andersen’s story too in its strange, creepy coda), there are no happy endings for anyone else – just blood and loss, and the open sea. It’s a unique, odd little movie, and while I can’t claim that it entirely works for me, I’m glad it exists, and I’m curious what else Smoczyńska will do.

Relentless Subjectivity: The Witch and The Lighthouse

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So, finally last week, I had a chance to go to the movies for the first time in months and catch Robert Eggers’s The Northman before it left cinemas. While it’s not my favorite thing that he’s done, I was happy to have the chance to see it on the big screen and hear it at full volume (it’s a loud movie). On one level, I really wanted to catch it because – hey, an epic-mythic Viking tale of revenge, working with the same source on which Hamlet was based, just sounds pretty cool and also, having so appreciated Eggers’s first two features, I feel a sense of loyalty and will check out pretty much anything he makes for a while.

But this isn’t a Viking blog – it’s a horror blog, so today, I’m not going to delve much into The Northman, but rather those first two movies which so enraptured me: The VVitch and The Lighthouse. I’ve long wanted to re-visit them and consider them together as they share many elements and artistic/thematic preoccupations. Plus, they both just delighted me on first viewing. And as it’s also a blog about ‘delight,’ here we go…

The VVitch: A New-England Folk Tale (2015)

The film centers on Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), eldest daughter of a family of puritans kicked out of a New-England colony for somehow being too puritanical. The family patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson) thus drags them all into the wilderness to work the land and make a life for themselves, free to be as pious as he wants. Unfortunately, the only thing he’s actually good at is chopping wood (and this he does plenty of – in an obsessive, fevered, nigh masturbatory manner – his only outlet for the storm of emotions broiling within). Their vegetable plots are sad and barren, their corn beset by blight. They are barely scraping by, such that William has secretly sold his wife’s silver cup, her only remnant of her life and family in England, to buy a trap so they might catch animals to eat and somehow survive the coming winter.

Then one day, while Thomasin is playing peek-a-boo with her baby brother, he suddenly goes missing from one moment to the next, never to be found, and it doesn’t take long for their minds to first start teeming with intimations of the supernatural (the children had already spoken of a ‘witch of the wood’ before the abduction), before directly turning on Thomasin and accusing her of being the witch (having already been blamed for the cup’s disappearance), her adolescent female body a natural site for this confluence of desperate pride, religiosity, puritanical fear, and a terror of nature itself.

We see supernatural elements, but it’s unclear what is real and what is fantasy, and it all builds to a fevered, bloody family self-destruction. By the end, only Thomasin remains and when the devil appears before her in the form of the family’s goat, “Black Philip,” and offers her the opportunity to “live deliciously,” I can’t imagine rebuking her acquiescence. Her world is one of ‘sin,’ and she has already been labeled and attacked as ‘wicked,’ not to mention starved of the simple comforts of society. Under such conditions, if a goat seductively asks, “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter?” the answer is clearly “yes.” As she rises naked into the night, joining the fire-lit coven, it is emancipatory, rising towards an existence that simply must be better than what she’s known. Good for her. And at the same time, this sense of empowerment comes with the bite of tragedy and that juxtaposition makes the moment more than both.

This was, I believe, my fifth viewing since The VVitch was released seven years ago – and the experience of watching it has changed over time. I remember being so pulled in at first by the mystery of what was actually happening. Was there really a witch or was it just a case of this family projecting their supernatural fears onto the dire circumstances they had chosen to inhabit? If there was a witch, was it really Thomasin, or was this scary old crone actually out there, using baby’s blood as body lotion and/or wood stain for her broom? And was she the same as the lady in red or was there a group of women living in the forest and stealing children? The nightmare of it all was heightened by my inability to find firm ground on which to stand, and when it finally culminated in its explosion of goat/family violence and its denouement of triumphant, exultant, and willfully chosen witchery, it was deeply satisfying, while still inhabiting a space just beyond my full logical comprehension. Now, having watched it multiple times, I enjoy dwelling in that space of uncertainty. The film could be read in multiple ways – more or less supernaturally or realistically, sociologically, psychologically, religiously – but I find it most satisfying to leave Schrödinger’s Box closed, all states remaining simultaneously true and false.

I recently listened to an interview with Eggers on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and something he said there feels like a key to much of his work – in all of his features, he tries to approach his historical characters from their own perspective, without judgement. Thus, subjectivity reigns. There is no objective viewpoint of what is “real” – if the characters view the world itself, and the nature that surrounds and suffuses them as inherently sinful, it is. If they fear the devil, he is to be feared. If their worldview is one in which witches haunt the woods, they do. And in this, the film doesn’t make a claim of what was real in the past, but rather, it just gives us a glimpse through their eyes for the span of the story.

His obsessive attention to historical detail really supports this approach and helps to bring it all to life – the VVitch was filmed with natural light, among settings built using only period appropriate tools and techniques. The language is as accurate to how people would have been speaking then as he was able – it all comes together to situate the viewer in a time and a place and a mindset – and in this case, it is a troubling, eerie, emotionally fraught, and terrifying one. Somehow, this exactingly accurate past re-creation allows for a story that need not be rooted in realism, but is free to follow the often dark flights of fancy of its characters. I find it interesting that he was praised by both Satanists and Born-Again Christians for understanding their perspective and showing it in a good light. That subjectivity of character invites a similar subjectivity for the viewer.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Here, Eggers runs with that subjectivity and manages to take it to an extreme point of delirium and fractured identity. This can make the film delectable for some and exhausting for others as it is, in a narrative sense, pretty difficult to track what is or isn’t actually happening at any given moment. But when I saw it in the cinema, I was absolutely up for its wild ride, and came away from it enraptured. This is the first time I’ve revisited it since then and, while I think it did suffer from being viewed at home, surrounded by distractions, its madly ambitious hysteria still captivates, not to mention the absolute cinematic pleasure of its visually striking imagery and the simple joy of its performances. (Also, as an aside, I did – sort of – discuss its source material here.)

In short, a man, Thomas (Robert Pattinson), comes to a remote island lighthouse in the late 19th century to be an assistant lighthouse keeper, running away from a dark secret. He is thrust into tight quarters with his partner-boss, the main lighthouse keeper, or “wickie,” Thomas (Willem Dafoe). After one month, a storm prevents them from being relieved by the next wickies. He goes mad. He has sex with a mermaid. Poseidon makes an appearance. Mysterious tentacles writhe at the top of the lighthouse. The two men circle each other in a dance of aggression, attraction, mirrored identity, and ever shifting power dynamics. The older man’s eyes become lighthouse beams, pinning the younger man down with the searing light of truth. All the while, the storm rages outside, battering their fragile shelter, the water getting into everything and spoiling the food. They run out of booze and start drinking the kerosene. In the end, having ‘spilled the beans’ on his past crimes, the younger Thomas kills the older, finally gets to see the coveted light in the tower, and has his liver eaten by birds on the rocks as waves crash around him.

Or maybe none of that happens. Maybe he’s only there a couple of days before he goes mad. Maybe he’s freezing to death in Canada, imagining this all. Maybe he chases Thomas with an axe or maybe Thomas chases him. Maybe Thomas the elder is gaslighting him, lying about how many days have passed to make him think he’s losing time and responding to things that have never been said, toying with him cruelly by means of Sanford Meisner acting exercises because there’s nothing better to do on this rock than torment his assistant. Maybe they are really the same person, two parts of a divided self. Maybe he’s Prometheus, trying to steal the light of the gods. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The gestalt effect is one of being trapped within an ever-shifting sense of psychosis, pushed and pulled by emotional impulses, by overwhelming forces both without and within, compulsions, repressed aspects of one’s self, the needs of the body. And if you are up for it, it is a great deal of fun. I mean, Willem Dafoe’s “Curse of Triton” speech, pure Shakespearean bombast, amidst the comedy and tension of a domestic squabble over how Thomas the elder cooks his lobster, is just about the most ecstatic couple minutes of film I can think of. But I can also easily see how this wouldn’t be for everyone.

It is not a film of plot. Perhaps it doesn’t even have one – there are events, but is there really a story, or is it all just a tour through madness, exploring the dictates of psychological and natural impulses and mythic passion? In any case, it is filmed within an inch of its life. The stark black and white cinematography is never short of beautiful; the tight, narrow aspect ratio is claustrophobic and reinforces the verticality of the central image – this giant phallus that the two men (if there even are two men) are trapped inside, driving each other crazy; and the whole film is so physically visceral. For a film set within a mental state, it is obsessed with physiology – with these men’s bodies. It is a film of flesh and sweat and stink, of semen and urine and vomit and over-full chamber pots that the wind blows back in your face when you try to empty them. I think centering the body in this way has a similar effect as what I discussed for The VVitch above. Just as intense historical accuracy opens the door to something beyond realism, so too does this foregrounding of biology result in highlighting something psychic or spiritual.

I think at the heart of it all is a desperate drive towards some ineffable transcendence (perhaps a theme here in the last couple of weeks, given last post’s film) – this is the light in the tower. Thomas the younger craves it and the elder guards it jealously, locking the younger man out and stripping down to worship the glory of this alien, geometrically radiant beacon. The Nature that surrounds them is that of 19th century Romanticism – terrifying in its power, beyond human comprehension or endurance – more than what people’s weak minds can hold. Thomas is mired in flesh, in the constraints of his mind, and is pulled both towards some sense of stability (dreaming of earning enough money to settle someplace where he can have his own land and no one will ever again give him orders) and also towards the power of something beyond, something inexpressible, something unmoored.  It is a riotous, gleeful, terrible space to inhabit for two hours.

Considering Both Films

There are certainly threads that run through both. Firstly, as mentioned, this totally subjective viewpoint really characterizes them, but there’s more. These films situate their characters in a specific relationship with Nature (whether that of the wind howling through the trees in the dark, wild wood OR the waves crashing against the rocks as the skies open and the heavens pour down OR the uncontrollable dictates of the fleshy human form) – one that is fraught with both fascination, temptation, horror, and worship. And both seem focused on themes of the individual carving out a place within that threatening yet so desirable Nature – in that, they both carry a myth of America – entering the fearful wilderness and claiming what is yours to take. They also both yearn for something beyond – for something sublime, whether it is to be found in Christian faith, a pact with the devil, the wind whistling in the dark forest, a light in a tower, or sex with a fish lady. They both firmly plant their characters in very historically accurate and oh so physical settings where everything is solid, corporeal, and material, but from which those characters can encounter the danger and allure of something else. On the strength of these two, I’m surely going to check out anything else that Eggers puts out.

So What About The Northman?

Well, I’m glad I got to see it in the cinema. It deserved that rather than the diminished attention, smaller screen, and quieter sound of a home viewing. And Eggers continues to foreground historical accuracy, nature, and the drive towards sublimity. There is a lot here to love – especially in the recreation of Nordic culture, religion, ritual, music, and mentality. But I didn’t really love the film the way that I had his first two.

I think the main issue for me is that in trying, as he has described, to meet his characters on their own ground, from their own perspective, he dooms the film to be unsatisfying for a contemporary audience. The main character lives in a world of fate and his ultimate satisfaction is to see that destiny fulfilled – even when there is no other dramatic/character reason to do something. I really enjoyed so much that led up to it (particularly Nicole Kidman’s performance – revealing secrets that prompt Amleth’s final push towards vengeance), but by the time that two naked Vikings are battling to the death on the lip of a live volcano, I was simply not that engaged – the fight hadn’t needed to happen, not really – its outcome doesn’t really matter – but what has been foretold has come to pass. And the film doesn’t question any of this – there is no dramatic tension of whether he is doing the right thing or not – he is just doing the thing he is doing. Now, I think it would probably mean a betrayal of the characters and their worldview had the film really posed these questions (a choice that would have felt quite modern, the expected dramatic turn), but in avoiding judgment, Eggers sacrifices catharsis, something that didn’t happen in The VVitch or The Lighthouse.

But I’m glad he got to make his Viking epic and I’m glad I got to see it. Even if the end effect underwhelmed, it was still a big, bold, bloody, ambitiously weird outing, and though the whole was less than the sum of its parts, some of those parts are really great, and I’m glad they got to exist.

Finally Braving A Demanding Classic: Possession

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So as a devoted fan of the genre, and now a horror blogger, I feel compelled to maintain a certain degree of street cred, so to speak, and there are some films that loom so large that, even if I’ve never gotten around to watching them, I find myself behaving as if I have, as if ‘of course, I understand this reference, for I have undoubtedly consumed the canon of the great works of horror cinema in its entirety.’ And often, you don’t need to have seen something to have a strong impression of it, to have taken in so many iconic images, to have had the ending spoiled, to know a work’s themes and where it fits into the history and larger context of the genre, to know that this or that performance is most esteemed or reviled, to know that this is a ‘very-important-work’ of a ‘serious-film-maker.’

Today’s film is one of these.  

So, the other day, I finally sat down and subjected myself to Andzrej Żuławski’s Possession. The next day, I watched it again to take notes, and here I am now, writing about it…I just wish I had actually liked it. But, you can’t have everything in life and my intention on this blog is not to write movie reviews, declaring things good or bad, but rather to process my thoughts about work that is worthy of consideration, and even if I find it difficult to get through (this was not the first time I tried watching it, just the first time I succeeded), it is that.

One programming note: while Żuławski was indeed a Polish director, I’m not including this in my somewhat dormant series on Polish horror films (which can be found here, here, here, and here.) Filmed in West Berlin in English, I feel this doesn’t qualify – or if it did, so would Rosemary’s Baby, and that doesn’t seem like useful taxonomy. One day, I’ll finally return to that series and check out either his Diabeł or Szamanka, both filmed in Poland in Polish.

Possession (1981)

Apparently inspired by Żuławski’s own, this is essentially the story of a divorce. Mark (Sam Neil) is a spy who has finished a recent assignment and returns to his home in West Berlin to find that his wife, Anna (Isabella Adjani), wants to split up. They shout. He goes on a three week bender. They shout some more. She moves into a derelict building. There’s additional shouting, a small child covered in jam, and now some domestic abuse. He finds that their son’s teacher, Helen is Anna’s doppelgänger. Shouting continues. Anna stabs some guys and puts a head in the fridge. Shouting. Mark and Anna cut themselves with an electric knife and have sex in the kitchen. Shouting.  Anna kills her friend, Margie. Shouting. Mark drowns Anna’s lover in a toilet. Shouting. Anna’s been having a sexual affair with a giant, bloody, tentacled, squiddy creature (maybe feeding it somehow with these men she’s killed?). Shouting, and gunshots, and more doppelganging, and a final, disturbing image and soundscape of war. The end.

I mean, I’ve happily never gone through a divorce, but I guess that’s what it’s like?

I think a key in looking at a piece such as this is that, though it comes with the trappings of horror, it is really not a typical work of narrative, genre based storytelling. The dialogue vacillates between being naturalistically banal and unrealistically poetic and/or philosophical. The performances are totally stylized, expressionistic, making no attempt at recognizable, human behavior, but rather trying to express thoughts, feelings and experiences that transcend verbal elucidation. There are visual themes and concepts that reflect each other and all contribute to a kind of tone poem of bitterness and neediness and jealousy and separation and control, and a desperation for something that can’t quite be expressed, but which is no less necessary. It is captivatingly filmed, with a kinetic, ever circling lens; it makes no attempt to deliver likeable characters, focused as it is on two people in extremis, all kindness  and tenderness exhausted; the score is compelling and sometimes even surprisingly groovy; and somehow it is even occasionally funny. It is an idiosyncratic, challenging, unique piece of work, a nightmare vision of the lack of love, human connection, or any form of meaning, and the hunger for something to fill that gap, and while I still find it difficult, it is certainly an artistic piece worthy of respectful analysis – so, I’m sorry if I took a mocking tone in the previous paragraph – the constant level of shouting just wears me down.

So, how might I analyze it? What do I do with it all? Let’s consider some images and themes. It focuses on divorce and takes place in a divided city, the wall ever-present and East German soldiers always visibly surveilling through binoculars. Mark is a spy, and throughout the film, his jealousy and need to control mirrors those soldiers. This drama and trauma play out amidst brutalist modern architecture – spaces that do not seem designed for humanity or human relationships. We also have two pairs of doppelgängers; is the self doubled, or is it divided like the city? We barely meet Mark’s double, but Anna’s is totally different from her – warm, present, helpful, loving, articulating her thoughts in a way that Mark can receive. What and why is she? A fantasy for Mark – the ‘perfect wife’? A challenge to him? Even in the presence of someone so warm and giving, he is just as much of a bastard – how could he be otherwise with someone who doesn’t embody this ideal? And might that mean that with her tentacled paramour, Anna is creating an ideal as well? I don’t think the film sees a need to justify or explain.

I feel both characters inhabit a world where relationship is an impossibility. Mark is self-centered, abusive, and possessive. The possession of the title may reference that. Something he’d had was taken from him and he needs it back, even if he has already spoken of how he’s fallen out of love and has no interest in what his wife feels. Still, even lacking that interest, he needs to know what is going on with her – where she is – who or what she is in bed with – that knowing being a form of having her. Anna, in her turn, is inscrutable, driven towards an inexpressible exigency which Mark can only be an obstacle in the way of. There is really no way that these two could ever hope to relate to each other.

So much of this plays out in the performances, both of which are commendable, if also pretty arduous to endure. Mark is situated as the main viewpoint character, but no steps are taken to warm us to him. Emotionally clingy, physically abusive, and pettily cruel, he’s pretty much the worst. But all of these traits are also human, identifiable. It is easy to see the processes spinning in his fevered brain that result in his awfulness. Anna is not so readable. Her thoughts and feelings are an opaque mystery, and the deeply poetic words she speaks are inadequate to truly explain anything. One might assume that anyone would want to divorce this jerk, but I feel the film implies a greater depth to her dissatisfaction and desire for change.

I can only assume that this is rooted in the extent to which the film is informed by lived experience. Perhaps Żuławski could foreground a descent into the ugly emotional reactions with which he was more familiar, but the female counterpart remains essentially unknowable. Then again, perhaps I’m wrong to project my limited knowledge of his biography onto the characters. That may be an unfair oversimplification.

But the performances go farther than simply portraying difficult characters undergoing hard times. There is a stylization to the acting that pushes beyond anything so basically realistic. I must admit I found it more than a little off-putting, but I then also had to question why. I mean, the performances are really great: nuanced, physically and vocally extreme, expressive, unguarded, ugly (which is harder than it sounds), and magnetic – but they simply don’t talk and move and react like human beings tend to. However, I genuinely believe this is not a failing, but a clear artistic choice. In stage acting, performances are often stylized (the same could be said for the text), and in that context, I expect I would have had no issue, but in the cinema, we so rarely see anything like this, and that makes it more difficult. I am not well prepared to suspend my disbelief in this way in this medium, but it is surely not the responsibility of the actors or the film to only deliver that which we are used to seeing. If I have trouble connecting, it may simply be that I am not bringing enough to the film as a viewer, investing the attention and doing the work to meet the artwork in the unique space which it inhabits. I’m, of course, allowed not to respond well to everything; not every film is for everybody, but I feel like in this case, the film asks a lot of me and I’m not always up for it. I wonder how different it would have been if I’d had a chance to see it in a cinema rather than on my sofa.

This stylization is most clearly evident in the famous subway scene. In a rare peaceful moment, seeking to explain what she is going through to Mark, Anna tells the story of how she “miscarried her faith.” We see in flashback Anna walking through the subway and then simply snapping. She shrieks and shakes; she dances in a trance state; her groceries are smashed and, caked in egg and cream, she writhes and howls until blood and bile and pus and something bubbling and green start to pour forth out of her. The performance is intense, resembling more than anything, Maya Deren’s ethnographic footage of Voudou rituals, possessions in which the faithful are ridden by the gods. Possession has been put on display in countless horror films, sometimes very artfully and effectively, but this is different. It is an absolute act of performance art, but it feels less formed, not shaped to be scary, to tell a story, and rather more a documentation of a performer putting herself through something ineffable, something which I could only witness from some distance. And Adjani is really something here – there is a sense of truth to the performance, even if I had no concept of how to interpret what I was seeing on first viewing, or second. To be honest, I’m still not so sure, but here goes:

She confronts an essential existential absence. Nothing is important. Nothing is necessary. Life is empty chaos, a horror. She purges herself of whatever false faith she had still maintained and having done that, is somehow opened to the divine. She is ridden by it. Maybe she births it. She is consumed. And there is no possible return to life as lived before. She can live in her crumbling flat in worship of/service to/sexual communion with this phallic, cephalopodic monstrosity, murdering anyone who comes too close, who threatens her link with sublimity (How do I not absolutely love this? On paper, this is my jam!) and has no other needs, perhaps reflected in the fact that she never changes her dress for the whole film, though weeks or months have passed. This is beyond Mark. For him, god is a dog that has crawled under the porch to die. And, as he is our sole lens through which to view her and all the action of the film, we can never really understand what we witness. Our comprehension dies with him in a hail of gunfire as the whole spy subplot somehow comes back, and we are left as bereft of meaning, of the holy, as he is.

It is a confounding, confusing cinematic artwork which is horrific and funny and shrill and grotesque and ecstatic and somehow even somniferous (meaning it kept threatening to put me to sleep) – but maybe that’s just a defense mechanism on my part, seeking escape from the monotony of this emotional, sensory assault. And I haven’t even touched on so many other components that may carry meaning or may be there just to break the brain with their incomprehensibility: the esoteric lover, Heinrich and his suicidal mother, the pink socks, Mark riding a motorcycle, screaming manically before spectacularly wiping out for some reason, Mark’s double instructing a random lady to shoot at the spies; the list goes on. But I think it was worth putting myself through, worth reckoning with it. If nothing else, now I don’t have to pretend that I’ve seen it.

—

So, that was Possession, but why was it so hard?  I feel like the older I get, the more difficult it is to put myself through challenging work. Perhaps, had I seen this at 23, I would have fallen in love with its weirdness, its artistic unity, its extremity, its bloody, gooey, horrific divinity. But at 43, it feels a bit more like doing my homework, eating my vegetables. (Though I must say that I’ve enjoyed considering it and writing about it a great deal more than I did watching it, and the more I think on it, the more my appreciation grows – but I don’t think I’ll watch it again.) Am I getting lazy? Less adventurous? So much of what I come to horror for is just such extremity, to be challenged on a dramatic, moral, psychic level – and it does just that. In recent years, have I seen anything new to me that was such a challenge which I actually liked, or do I just have a warm place in my heart for difficult work seen first when I was younger (von Trier, Noé, Aranofsky, for example) and now I need films to be more ‘fun?’  If that’s true, is it a problem, and should I challenge myself more?

Maybe? Maybe not. Good art can also entertain and I don’t know that it’s exactly personal weakness to want to actually enjoy the things I take time to shove in my eye-holes. (Ouch.) Anyway, I’m glad I finally made my way all the way through it, twice. Whew. Good for me.

Queering Horror

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First, I should lay my cards on the table. I can’t lay claim to any of the letters of the LGBTQQIP2SAA… experience (hereinafter, in short, LGBT+), myself. However, I do find myself reading and listening to a lot that looks at horror from a queer perspective (e.g., the podcasts Horror Queers, The Gaylords of Darkness, and the sadly defunct Attack of the Queerwolf) and, as it is still Pride Month for a couple more days, I wanted to do something with the notion of “queer horror” and look at a couple examples that I enjoy. That said, I hope this is not received in any way as disrespectful. One might fairly ask why I, a straight-cis guy, should have something at all to say about queer-anything. All I can offer is that I write here about what I find interesting and I find this interesting and approach it with respect and appreciation. I hope that’s enough…

Muffinpines, Get Ready to be Babashook, 2017, drawing. USA. Babashook, Kylie O’Neil, 2018.

So to begin, I think there are a couple of reasons that I consume so much of this stuff. Firstly, the world of horror fandom can be a really varied place, featuring many thoughtful and insightful people, but also including some personalities that turn me off (e.g., the “horror-bro”), and explicitly queer and/or feminist content is simply a more pleasant listen; I feel I have more in common with an artist who would call themselves queer than an agro dude who would use that word to belittle someone or something. Secondly, I enjoy when discourse comes from a clear viewpoint. Having some inkling of the writer/speaker’s lived experience serves as a lens through which to view their opinion, making it all more personal, while also drawing attention to that lens itself. Now, to be fair, there are countless perspectives out there. One might look at horror from a Black perspective, or Jewish, or French, or Marxist, or Freudian, or as a person who does crossword puzzles, etc., but this is a very prominent one. You can find writing that looks at horror content from all of these other angles and more, but none of them have quite the profile in the world of horror criticism that queerness does.

Queer

And perhaps this is with good reason. ‘Queer’ is a once derogatory term, which has been reclaimed as a proud self-identifier of otherness (specifically in terms of sexual/gender identity). Horror is all to do with the ‘other,’ with what is outside the norm. What else is a monster? And while traditionally, the approach has been to posit that other as inhuman, abject, an object of fear, so much of the genre takes a position of at least sympathizing, if not outright identifying, with it. Who watches Frankenstein and roots against the creature (cue obligatory note that it and its first sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, which is very, very camp, were directed by an out gay man)? And even when the sympathies of the audience are not intentionally aligned with the monster or the monstrous experience on display (for another classic example, take Nosferatu, directed by another out gay man), there is still an inherent fascination, an attraction (sometimes conflicted) towards that which social/ethical/religious norms instruct us to abjure.

Especially given how focused the genre can be on the body, on flesh and fluids, on explicit, titillating, sometimes “gratuitous” sex and nudity, it is easy to make the leap from the allure of one deviation from the norm to another. I’d not be the first to observe that horror as a whole is, thus, pretty ‘queer.’

Reading a Film

But sometimes more so than others and in ways far more varied than I would venture to survey in such a short essay.  So, what kinds of ‘queer horror’ might we look at here? One major branch consists in queer readings of horror texts with no explicitly LGBT+ characters. This may be informed by knowing that the writer or director, or some key member(s) of the cast were not straight/cis, but also sometimes a text just lends itself well to the reading.

A great example here is Fright Night (1985). No characters are identified as ‘gay,’ but there is so much to read into it: Charlie ignoring his girlfriend, who is finally ready to sleep with him, because he’s so fascinated by the suave, magnetic man who just moved in next door (who is a vampire); Ed, a weird kid in a kind of showy way, ostracized even by his purported friends, who is seduced to vampirism with the line, “I know what it’s like being different. Only they won’t pick on you anymore… or beat you up. I’ll see to that”; the tragedy of Peter Vincent, a very queer coded (British accent, delicate physicality, lots of makeup), older character having to kill Ed (as a wolf) and watch him suffer and die – it feels like there is a connection there, like Ed would have been able to come to him for support and community, had things only been different; and of course, the fact that Jerry the vampire comes to town with his servant/roommate/live-in-carpenter, Billy (apparently they travel around flipping houses together and collecting antiques), and their relationship seems genuinely warm and tender (and Jerry seems truly crushed when Billy is killed).

Somehow, even the totally hetero-seduction of Amy on the dance floor (under very “bisexual-lighting,” long before that was a thing) carries a soupçon of queerness in her awakening to her own sexuality, identity, and the extent to which she is done with this immature boy – when she bares her neck to be bitten, she chooses otherness for herself (ending up somewhat shark mouthed for a time). Of course, by the end, the seductive/disruptive vampire has been vanquished, Charlie and Amy are back together, and everything’s very straight, but that does not erase all that came before.

I think the case of finding queerness in Fright Night represents the lion’s share of queer horror. A queer reading here comes easily, but any text can be “queered” or read in this way, and I enjoy hearing about/reading how individuals have found their own stories and experiences reflected in work that may have honestly never considered them. Sometimes it’s a stretch, but even then, there is the pleasure of a totally personal engagement with a work, which is far more fulfilling than a claim at objectively judging a work’s artistic/literary merits, or lack thereof.

A Question of Representation

Sometimes, interpretation isn’t necessary to find a character who is explicitly LGBT+; it’s all on the surface. This representation might be positive, as in the case of the basketball coach in Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, who is only ever shown to be a caring educator, seeking to help the traumatized young person in his care (who may also be gay – a plot point that is never firmly settled) navigate a world of murderous aunts and viciously homophobic police (though the real reason the film is so embraced is probably Susan Tyrell’s gloriously over-the-top performance, treasured by aficionados of high camp).

Sometimes, a case can be made for reading a film to be, even unintentionally, supportive of the LGBT+ community (I would argue this for Sleepaway Camp, but I don’t want to open that can of worms without a huge spoiler warning from the get go). Sometimes, a work may explicitly feature LGBT+ characters (such as an early 70s Lesbian Vampire film) but have obviously been made with a typical straight-male gaze in mind (though even in those cases, it can be compellingly liberating to watch a woman discovering what an improvement this alluring female vampire lover is over her brutish, abusive, and/or possibly deeply closeted and self-hating husband – e.g., Daughters of Darkness).

Very often, though, the representation can be toxic. This seems especially true with trans (or if not exactly ‘trans,’ then at least notably gender-nonconforming) characters, such as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

What fascinates me here is taking in how others navigate their own complex relationships with problematic texts. One may find certain elements noxious, or even harmful, and still treasure a given film. Hearing a trans person detail their complicated appreciation for Dressed to Kill, Psycho, or Terror Train, while reckoning with, challenging, and criticizing, or even decrying the perpetuation of the dangerous ‘killer-trans’ trope can be illuminating (outside of the purview of this essay, the same can be said, for example, of women, particularly survivors of sexual violence, who find comfort in exploitative rape-revenge films, such as I Spit on Your Grave).

This is an experience that I do not have personally, but I can find things uncomfortable; there can be that sense of ‘is this alright?’ ‘is it still ok to enjoy this?’ and sometimes I need to reckon with a film I love saying or doing something that I find ugly. Seeing how others thread this needle of engagement with work can be instructive. You can love something, and you can criticize it; you can find value and harm in the same place, and it is valuable to interrogate that juxtaposition. Life is complicated. (And of course, mileage may vary – a regressive, harmful message can simply ruin a film for a person as well.)

Queer as a Verb

The last strain of queer horror I’d like to look at is, I think, rarer, but might also be what interests me most, and it brings us first to a fairly academic discussion. In her book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler framed gender as something not natural but rather, constantly performed, continually being performatively played into being; furthermore claiming that certain performances of gender, such as drag, can serve as a kind of strategy of resistance; a heteronormative text/image/concept (one which not only presents, but reifies a gender binary/heterosexual norm) can be twisted, played with, mocked and thus undercut – in other words, it can be “queered.” I am no expert in queer theory (but I did read a bit of Butler, Sedwick, Newton, and Sontag in grad school 20-something years ago, studying performativity), so I can’t say if Butler exactly coined the use of ‘queer’ as a verb, as something one does, but I associate her with it. Ok, so let’s bring this back to horror and how it can be ‘queered.’

In discussing the way that religious, reactionary types may decry the corruptive influence of horror, Stephen King noted that, ironically, “horror fiction is as conservative as a banker in a three-piece-suit”; you have “normal society” – it is disrupted by an (often external) othered threat; eventually that threat is conquered, and everything returns to normal, or the threat destroys all and it is a terrible tragedy. With respect to King though, I think that only describes one (perhaps dominant) kind of horror.

Another kind of horror is, for me, represented by the work of Clive Barker, who I intend to discuss in far greater depth when I finally finish re-reading his 6 volumes of the Books of Blood, comprising the vast majority of his short stories. (Look for that at some point.) One of the things that makes him so interesting to me is how much he doesn’t do what King described above. Sure, he brings in threats aplenty, and they can be violent, gory, weird, and very often obsessed with sex/the body/flesh, but so often his work culminates in a point where that threat, that horror becomes revelatory.

Clive Barker – Midnight Meat Train 7, 2007

Whilst their experiences are still horrific, characters so often undergo a transformation that approaches the divine. What originally seemed terrible – scary – disgusting, twists into something of beauty.  By the end of the night, Kaufman in The Midnight Meat Train has witnessed untold brutality. It has been a nightmare: one that he wakes from mutilated and traumatized, but also with a sense of newfound purpose, of service, of glory. He falls to his knees and kisses the filthy streets of the city which had so disappointed him and to which now he pledges eternal loyalty. And I don’t think we, the readers, are supposed to be horrified by this. Elements of his journey were meant to be (and were) horrific, but having ridden this train with him, we attend his beatification in the spirit that he does, and the cognitive dissonance of the dread and the awe are delicious.

I’ve long felt that this is a kind of ‘queering’ of horror.  It may have nothing to do with sexual or gender identity (though Barker, himself, is gay and does often include gay characters), but is it any less subversive to render that once deemed utterly contemptible, transcendent?

A Recent Favorite – Suspiria (2018)

In planning to write this text, I’ve revisited a number of films and watched some for the first time, and while I’ve enjoyed most, I took the greatest pleasure in re-watching one of my favorites of recent years (which I’ve briefly touched on before) through this particular lens: Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), which can be viewed as a work of queer horror in multiple ways. It never explicitly states that any of the characters are LGBT+, but it is so easy to see romantic/sexual tension in their relationships – both between Susie and Sara and between Susie and Madame Blanc (not to mention among the feminist dance collective/witch coven in general). Furthermore, once those relationships are taken as a given, the story really comes to life so much more fully and is that much more emotionally resonant (I’ve heard that in the first draft they were explicitly presented, and so, in the final cut, they are still there even if the film never directly speaks of them). Also, Tilda Swinton plays a man, so that’s something. Guadagnino, himself, is out and the fact that the last film he’d made before this was the gay coming-of-age story, Call Me By Your Name, perhaps further frames the conversation.  But for me, this also serves as an example of “queered” horror, ala Barker.

Even before I picked up on the chemistry between the characters, I loved the tactile physicality and sensuality of the film. It is a film about dancers and I believe in the dance of it. There is a relationship to gravity, to the body in space, to breath that all feels so totally of dance. And I love how the witchcraft is woven so fully through the work of that dance. The academy is not just a location where a secret cabal of witches hides behind the front of teaching dance (as it is in the 1977 original). The dance is the witchcraft. And it really is gorgeous, and dark, and the grounding of the dance makes the magic feel all the more solid and corporeal.

Into this space, so focused on the physical relationship between bodies, enters Susie Bannon, still a quiet newcomer to the academy, but no longer the delicate waif of the original (Jessica Harper was great, but it was a very different role). This Susie may giggle shyly, but she also stares back with a disarming directness, and she notably does so with two women there: her fellow dancer, Sara (who, like Susie, is also being groomed as a possible vessel for Helena Markos, the mostly unseen founder of the academy, lurking beneath the floorboards, dominating the coven and feeding on youth) and the other matriarch of the dance company (and its dominant creative presence), Madame Blanc.

The connection between Susie and Sara could easily be read as simply friendship, but there are moments that feel like more. When Susie has been having nightmares (a common occurrence in the school) and Sara runs to her and pushes her way into her bed, there is a sweet intimacy, a frankness that approaches sexuality. At a later moment, Sara returns to Susie’s room and is crestfallen to find it empty (Susie’s with Blanc at the time). Finally, in the film’s climax, after Sara has met a sad and bloody fate (having discovered something of the coven/academy’s intentions), Susie releases her from her torment with a sigh of “sweet girl” and cradles her as she goes. All of this still plays well if there is no hint of romance between them, but with it, the moment is all the more bittersweet.

On the other pairing, every scene between Susie and Madame Blanc feels like lovemaking – it’s just that no one actually has sex. But in the transmission of choreography in the dance studio, or asking and avoiding personal questions while eating a chicken wing, or staring at each other across a crowded table as all the others laugh and sing, or in the rare touch they may share, their desire and connection are palpable. At first, it seems that there is a power imbalance at work (which feels both potentially improper and as if that is part of the allure) – after all, Susie is the young, inexperienced dancer and Madame Blanc has run the company for years, but by the end, it is revealed just how much the truth is quite the opposite and how much Susie has been in control all along, tenderly leading and indulging her lover (of sorts). Again, the story tracks if there is no attraction, but I feel it’s strengthened – made more meaningful – by its presence.

But I think the piece is queerer than that, and it is here that I return to that Butler/Barker notion of ‘queered horror.’ While it takes its time, and is absolutely dense with its themes of power, abuse, responsibility, memory, guilt, and so much more, by the end, Suspiria is an absolute abattoir. Bodies have been broken (one in a bravura scene of dance, magic, and power). Viscera dangle from abdomens. Heads explode. Arterial sprays paint the walls. You might say it’s intense. But it isn’t scary. For me, I remember being in the cinema, just glowing with something like joy and melancholy. It is really a moment of beauty – sad and violent beauty, but beauty nonetheless. I danced all the way home.

And I feel that in this, Guadagnino has taken Argento’s dark fairy tale of scary witches preying on young dancers (which I love in its own right) and he has absolutely ‘queered’ it. Partly through the addition of the magnetic exchanges between these central characters, he has twisted the threat of the original film into a revelation of sensual power, and dominance, and gentleness. There is a kind of vengeance here, but also mercy.

From the very beginning, the witches are pretty much ‘out’. Susie doesn’t need to discover that the school is being run by an evil coven (she watches some instructors cackling and toying with a couple of pantsless, ensorcelled police inspectors and rather than being shocked, she titters to herself and the whole event passes without comment) – she has to instead discover who she is, and has always been, however repressed she was at home (her religious mother referring to her as “my sin. She’s what I smeared on the world”), and accept this in both its strength and its sorrow. This is the rare remake that doesn’t just go a different direction with the source material, but rather subverts it, turning it inside out to enact a totally different project of queer, female power.

The only way that it is truly similar to its precursor is in how much they are both works of excess: Argento’s being an excess of style, of sensory data, of color and sound, and glorious violence, and Guadagnino’s being an excess of ideas). They are otherwise opposite films.

So Much More

And so, this is all just to scratch the surface of the world of queer horror. There’s so much more to explore: from the haunting, tender self-discovery of Thelma to the John Waters-esque grotesque camp of All about Evil or Seed of Chucky, from the ambivalence of Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy’s Revenge (presenting a very coded young gay man as the lead – a rarity, especially at the time – but centering him in a story that presents his burgeoning sexual identity as a deadly monstrosity, his only hope of salvation being the love of a good woman) to the explicit, gay-porn themed modern giallo, Knife + Heart, from the Carmilla based, French, poetic Blood and Roses to the Carmilla based, lurid Hammer Horror, The Vampire Lovers (really, Carmilla is all over the lesbian vampires, unsurprisingly). There is a deep well. And though I still can’t claim any particular letters, I’m sure I will continue to take pleasure in these bloody parables of self-revelation, as well as others’ interpretations of the countless texts onto which queerness might be ascribed.