So, I missed a week there. Sometimes life gets busy and it is simply not possible to keep up with my self-imposed weekly schedule. But it was for a cool (though entirely non-horror related) reason. The cabaret I work with in Kraków, Poland had an opportunity to give a few performances in Lyon, France last weekend, which was intense, exhausting, rewarding and more than a little time consuming (17 hours of driving each way to transport costumes and some small scenic elements). And so, I thought I would honor my little French sojourn by rewatching something French, Georges Franju’s stunning, poetic, and shockingly gory for 1960, Les yeux sans visage, A.K.A., Eyes Without a Face.
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
But here’s the thing. I really loved this movie when I first watched it a few years back, but three days after returning from France, I hopped on a plane to the States to come help my family prepare their summer show, and so I ended up revisiting Eyes Without a Face on my phone on the plane, exhausted, with limited cognitive abilities. It was far from an ideal viewing situation. And now, I find myself jet lagged and struggling to come up with anything particularly incisive to write about it. So I’ll keep this short.
Apparently, Franju, who had won acclaim as a documentarian and puzzled/disappointed French critics with this transition to a genre film, had to navigate some choppy seas to appease various censors in adapting the novel by Jean Redon. To satisfy the French, the gore had to be curtailed. To satisfy the English, scenes of experiments on animals had to be greatly reduced, and oddly, to satisfy the Germans, the key element of a “mad doctor” had to be softened. One solution Franju struck upon was to center the film more on Christiane, the daughter whose face had been so disfigured in an accident rather than her father, Dr. Génessier, a surgeon obsessed with perfecting the skin graft that will allow him to give her a new one, stolen from one of the girls he and his assistant periodically kidnap and murder. In focusing on Christiane, the film adopts a haunted, sorrowful tone, dwelling more on her lonely, doomed life as a caged bird, than on the extremities of her controlling father, so driven to fix her, to perfect her, who after afixing a stolen face, instructs her to “Smile. Smile! Not too much…”
The result is a sometimes jarring, often wistful, haunting little masterpiece, which reportedly shocked audiences upon release. While the most gory elements may have been omitted, the surgery scene in which a girl’s face is cut off is rather effectively gross, multiple scenes of Dr. Génessier’s assistant, Louise luring some girl to her doom are quite disturbing, and some sequences, such as a girl awakening to find herself strapped to a table, prepped for unwilling surgery (not to mention the other girl who awakens to find herself faceless and wrapped in gauze), or the father being eaten by the dogs on which he had been testing his new skin graft techniques, are respectively terrifying and brutal.
The cinematography is gorgeous, the music is odd, and unsettling (notably the mad, circus like soundscape that accompanies Louise when she’s hunting for a new girl or disposing of a body), and the imagery is truly indelible. Throughout most of the film (except for when a new face has been grafted on, which will inevitably go necrotic and have to be removed, the graft technique not yet perfected), Christiane wears a featureless mask, granting her a seeming gentle peacefulness so unlike the sorrow that fills her. The mask itself, in its simplicity, is striking and was even apparently an inspiration for the original Michael Meyers mask in Halloween. It is beautiful in its way, but it is also a cruel imposition, denying her own identity, her own experience and pain.
Frequently, she removes it, only to be told time and time again that she must develop the habit of wearing it always. She is not allowed to feel her sadness. She is not allowed to be her disfigured self (perhaps because her father was responsible for her state, as he had been driving and caused the accident with his recklessness – if her deformity is unseen, he has done no wrong), and her father’s attempts to heal her would actually result in her ultimate disappearance; another girl has been buried in her place – she is dead to the world – if the surgery is finally successful, she would have another person’s face, would have to accept a new name, would have to take on a new identity, merely the creation of her father, her own self lost to the process.
In the end, faced with yet another poor girl strapped to a table, Christiane opts to free her, herself, and all the animals her father keeps as pets/decorations/experimental subjects. The dogs escape and tear him apart and, adorned with white doves and faceless, Christiane slips off into the night, finally free and alone, and herself. It is lovely, and sad, and it lingers in the memory. And yet, for all its poetic beauty, the film was derided across Europe and particularly in France. I can’t imagine it was all that well received in the States, where, among other things, the key facial removal scene was excised, and yet it was marketed under the B-movie title, The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and packaged as a double feature with a two-headed creature feature called The Manster. French critics were appalled at the crass horror of it all, and I imagine that American audiences who went to the drive in for some schlocky fun were nonplussed by the tender, artful misery on display – for lack of a better word, its Frenchness.
But it really is something special. My brain is running low at this point, so I don’t know that I have anything more illuminating to add, but if you haven’t seen this, I recommend giving it a chance. Eat some cheese, drink some wine, and watch the classiest face stealing movie you’re ever likely to come across.
Happy Friday the 13th! (At least, that’s the date as I sit down to start writing – we’ll see what day I actually post – ok, now it’s Sunday) Whether or not one is a fan of that particular series, this always seems like a little horror holiday, worthy of some manner of observation. Furthermore, these days summer is coming on, everything is in bloom, and there is this atmosphere redolent of the end of school, of vacation, of coming freedom. And so, I think it is appropriate to take a filmic holiday to a beautiful wooded hideaway, next to a serene body of water, where thirteen people happen to get skewered, hanged, speared, decapitated, burned, and just generally knocked off in all manner of gruesome ways. But today we’re not actually going to Crystal Lake (I’ve already covered my favorite of the F13 movies, part II); let’s take a little trip to Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood. Warning – there are many twists that could be spoiled, so enter with care.
I imagine that this will also be a jumping off point for a few other things I’ve been thinking about, so please bear with me.
A Bay of Blood (1971)
Bava’s film was also released as Carnage, Ecology of Crime, Chain Reaction, Blood Bath, The New House on the Left, and the most excellently titled Twitch of the Death Nerve. Quite shocking at its time, I think its violence holds up pretty well today and can still elicit some real gasps from a viewer. Solidly within the giallo tradition, it also went on to deeply influence what would become the American slasher, most notably the first two Friday the 13th movies (which draw on its location and atmosphere, and even directly recreate a couple of its kills), and subsequently, their imitators. There had certainly been juxtapositions of the beauty of nature with human violence before, and I can’t say for sure that it’s the first “body count film,” but Bava does it so well here as to effectively codify many of what would go on to become the slasher tropes, just as Carpenter would further do seven years later with Halloween.
But it is a bit of an odd duck. At only 84 minutes, it is a tight little thriller that races along at a clip, but it’s also sometimes languid and pastoral. It is quite bare bones, more interested in setting up murder set pieces than fleshing out any of its characters, but it is also surprisingly complex, requiring the viewer to really pay close attention (there are at least six different killers, each working separately and at cross purposes). It relishes in mutilation and gore, but it is also beautifully filmed and artfully composed. The acting is stilted, the writing is strange, the dubbing is terrible (typical for Italian films of the era), but it is also captivating and exciting, and it still somehow comes off as a kind of masterpiece, superior to many of the copycats that would follow in its bloody wake.
The story, while riddled with double crosses, reversals, and shocking revelations, focuses on a simple MacGuffin: the property around a bay which could be developed at a profit, or preserved in its natural beauty (an interesting note on the nature – the filming location had only a couple of trees and they needed a forest, so Bava reportedly just bought some branches at a garden store and had them held in front of and behind the actors – and it’s totally effective – you’d never know it from what’s on screen). The film starts with the old woman, the owner of the land in question, being killed and her suicide faked, and then it’s off to the races with everybody and their surprise step brother killing each other to acquire the inheritance. In fact, as soon as this matriarch is dead, the film delivers its first big twist. You might expect that, having seen the black gloved hands leave the fake note, that killer would slink back into the shadows so we might wonder at his or her identity for the rest of the film. You’d be wrong. We pan up, see his face, and then immediately see him stabbed in the back. All apparent rules are out the window – anything can happen – anyone can die, and almost all of them (13 out of the 15 people that appear on screen) do.
While story is decentered, the rest of the filmmaking is creative, propulsive, and endlessly stylish, circling a visual theme of pristine nature balanced against avaricious humanity, corrupt and murderous. People don’t come off well here at all. If they aren’t egoistic killers, they are generally ineffectual, shrill, greedy specimens who will go wholly unmourned, the only exception being some young people who have the misfortune of happening upon the property and getting killed on the off chance that they might stumble onto some kind of evidence (but even there, just the two girls seem kinda decent – the guys, not so much). This pessimistic view of humanity is nicely encapsulated in a dialogue between Paolo, who collects and studies insects and Simon, who criticizes his hobby:
Simon: I don’t kill as a hobby like you do.
Paolo: Good lord, Simon. You make me feel like a murderer.
Simon: I’m not saying that, Mr. Fossati, but if you kill for killing’s sake, you become a monster.
Paolo: But, man isn’t an insect, my dear Simon. We have centuries of civilization behind us, you know.
Simon: No, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
In all fairness though, I’m pretty sure that Paolo kills no human beings in the film and Simon is responsible for at least 5 deaths (maybe 6), so his moral superiority comes with a grain of salt. Regardless, neither of them are particularly nice guys. It is to Bava’s credit that the film can hold attention so well in spite of being peopled almost exclusively with unpleasant characters.
Perhaps this is the origin of horror films filling their dramatis personae with irritating, disposable youngsters who only exist to satisfyingly die (a trait I’m rarely a fan of – I rather appreciate when they avoid this very thing, but it works here). An effect of this is that the murders don’t horrify so much as thrill – they startle, they impress with their ingenuity, they attain a visceral quality, but it’s all in good fun and there is a streak of black humor running through the whole affair up to, and particularly including, the very last moment before the credits roll.
This is but one of the many links between this influential giallo and what would later become the slasher. We also have the degree to which it structures itself specifically around the kills, then showcasing the gore to the best of the effects artist’s abilities (sometimes with more success than others). Bava even has a group of young people with absolutely no connection to the plot show up just so that someone will go skinny dipping and the body count will be that much higher (and it’s their deaths that get directly borrowed in the first two Friday movies, notably the couple speared together while in flagrante). We even have the scene in the final act when a girl walks into a room only to find all of the people who had been murdered earlier horrifically arranged. This is all extremely familiar but is housed within the work of a giallo director working in high cinematic style.
For a fan of the genre, it’s really worth giving it a view. So much is clearly in its debt.
A Crisis of Genre
This preoccupation with genre (horror – thriller – giallo – slasher) brings me to a topic that’s been on my mind of late. I haven’t personally had a chance yet to see the new Dr. Strange movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but I would like to. I enjoyed the first one and hey, Sam Raimi is directing (of Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Darkman, The Gift, and the first three Spider-Man movies, among many others). In the lead up to its release, it was promoted in some circles as being Marvel’s first foray into horror. Tellingly, in other circles, it was not. And now that it’s out, it is being met with a) mixed reviews (too bad, but not what I’m interested in here), and b) a small crisis of genre classification.
I’ve seen a fair amount of headlines questioning whether it is horror or not and whether it’s too scary. Not having actually seen it, I don’t exactly have an opinion of my own, but I think the debate is interesting in terms of who makes which case and what their stake is in the matter. I think Disney is trying to both have and eat cake here. Before release, this was going to be a horror movie – the novelty was a selling point; after release, and being criticized, of course this isn’t a horror movie – you can bring your kids, fun for the whole family! There are plenty in the horror sphere making the distinction of ‘containing horror elements, but not being classifiable as a horror movie.’ Possibly when I finally see it, I may fall in this camp, but in such things, I always hesitate for fear of falling into a kind of snooty gatekeeping. Personally, Silence of the Lambs, a movie I really like and respect, doesn’t really feel like horror to me (as I wrote about here), but who am I to tell someone who considers it their favorite horror movie that they’re doing it wrong?
Most tellingly for me, a kid that I teach (English as a foreign language) saw it a few days ago and was fuming to me about it afterwards, during our class. He did not appreciate the horror of it. He had gone to a comic book movie and was angry at having been scared. He didn’t want to watch a horror flick and was offended at the intrusion of a genre he doesn’t like into “a cartoon for kids.” I’m not going to venture into whether it’s too scary or not (again – haven’t seen it) and I remember plenty of pretty horrific stuff from PG movies that I loved when I was little and really not into horror (the face melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first ghost in the library in Ghostbusters, all of Gremlins, a movie that I LOVED). But it seems to me that if he and other young viewers receive it as horror, that’s what it is. Dismissing their experience seems inexcusably presumptuous. In a similar vein, a podcast I follow, Horror Queers, just did an episode on Who Framed Roger Rabbit – when I first saw that, I was puzzled, but both hosts remembered being disturbed by it when they were little in a way that felt just like a horror film – both by the rather intense and gruesome content of its climax (when the judge is slowly crushed by a steam roller, screaming till the end) and its simple, inherently uncanny mix of animation and live action.
Horror is a tricky thing to pin down. Is it about a set of featured tropes? Which tropes? How many? The net will inevitably be cast too wide or too narrow. Is it just about being horrified? That doesn’t work – a holocaust drama probably shouldn’t be thus classified. To be a comedy, it’s easy; a movie just has to make you laugh. With horror, we might not be able to do better than Justice Stewart’s definition of obscenity (“I know it when I see it”).
To a large extent, genre is just a marketing tool allowing producers to target sales of a product to the consumers who will most want to buy it. For academics, it can be an important tool for focusing a subject of inquiry, contextualizing it in terms of the history and features of similar works. For the rest of us, why is it at all important how we classify Doctor Strange or Silence of the Lambs or anything else? Are we just hungry for categorization? Is it an aspect of how we form our identity? I am the kind of person who likes these things and doesn’t like those things. I am different than the person who likes those and doesn’t like these. If I don’t know what kind of thing this is, if it can’t be clearly labeled, how can I use it to understand and thus, enact the kind of thing that I am?
This may be overreaching – I doubt that loads of people are thrust into existential crisis because they don’t know if Marvel just released a horror movie or not, but the fact that there is any controversy at all over something so seemingly trivial seems to reveal an investment in the matter that may speak to deeper significance.
But people are somehow still arguing about which two colors that dress was – so who knows?
So, starting this blog, it wasn’t my intention to be a ‘journalist,’ staying abreast of and giving my opinions on the most current developments in the genre, and thus I’ve focused on older movies which I’ve found interesting, or which I’ve felt deserve some more attention. But today, for the first time, I’d like to write about something relatively new, something still in cinemas (it actually just opened a week ago where I live), something I just got to see and loved: Ti West’s X. Now, I’m aware that I’m late to the party – it opened about 6 weeks ago in the States and a lot of ink has already been spilled on it, but I really liked it and I’ve successfully avoided reading any reviews so I could give my thoughts untainted by other opinions. I can’t promise, therefore, that those thoughts are novel, but if its characters can be so insistent on getting what they want, I can excuse myself for devoting some bandwidth to this today.
X (2022)
Especially given the fact that this is still a new release, be forewarned that herein lie spoilers.
In short, the film follows a group of young, aspiring pornographers into rural Texas circa 1979, where unbeknownst to the elderly couple from whom they’re renting a farmhouse, they plan to make a “really good dirty movie,” thus kicking off their respective futures of wealth, comfort, indie cinema, and fame. However, of course, this being a horror movie, they’ve come to the wrong farmhouse, and said elderly couple, driven by a resentment of the young flaunting what they feel age has unfairly stripped away, set upon them in pretty brutal fashion. It is a playful, gory, sexy, and surprisingly emotional outing, and it is also a satisfyingly cohesive piece, held together by the confluence of hopes, dreams, and flesh.
I think comparisons to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Boogie Nights are inevitable, justified, and limiting. It’s probably impossible to hack up young people in such gorgeous southern heat without bringing Hooper’s film to mind (and at least one sequence, in which Maxine is filmed looking through the screen door of the house from deep down the dark interior hallway before tentatively venturing inside, seems to be a direct visual nod to Pam in Chainsaw doing the same). That said, X has a totally different character than the earlier film. Whereas Tobe Hooper’s classic presents America as a pessimistic nightmare, West offers, in spite of the plentiful blood and guts, a disarmingly hopeful tone. This is a film explicitly about the American dream, and it is peopled with dreamers, chasing their own respective stars. Some have been soured by dreams that didn’t come true, and have thus, bitterly, turned to violent cruelty, but the film as a whole retains a rare and sincere optimism. And even the villains of the piece, who do some awful things, are sympathetic in their way.
This essentially humanist take on a group of young people, enjoying their own and each other’s bodies, unconcerned with society’s judgment, chasing success, does bring to mind Anderson’s opus of the porn industry at the turn of the 70s and the 80s, particularly in terms of both films’ central characters’ pursuit of stardom and their tendency to tell themselves in the mirror just how much of a star they are. But Boogie Nights doesn’t feature any eyes being stabbed out, nails through unshod feet, heads being chomped by swamp gators, arterial spurts (though it doesn’t lack blood – anytime a character is wearing all white, it just seems like something bad is destined to happen), pitchforkings, axings, or crushed heads, so that’s something different. Still, another similarity of the two films is their bravura cinematic style and their use of an ill-respected genre (adult film) to lovingly showcase independent filmmaking behind the scenes.
In further contrast to Chainsaw, which moves from a place of sinking dread to a point of sustained, shrill insanity, truly horrific to endure, X is perhaps closer to an 80s slasher, full of sex and violence, but ultimately made to entertain in a way Chainsaw seems unconcerned with. X can startle sometimes with some fun jump scares, builds suspense well and is playful with setting up and denying expectations, has great gory practical effect work, and is exciting, engaging, and even occasionally scary, but while it has thrills aplenty, it doesn’t exactly horrify (and I don’t think this is a failing – like the filmmakers within the movie, I think West really just wants to show you a good time). But neither, really, (in my opinion) did any of the Friday the 13th movies and that doesn’t mean they aren’t a hoot. Also, like an 80s slasher, it is preoccupied with sex, even featuring killers hunting the young explicitly for their sexuality (an easy read of many Reagan era “bodycount films”) but here there is a significant difference.
While films such as Pieces (1982), Blood Rage (1987), or Nail Gun Massacre (1985) may feature gratuitous nudity and a killer somehow obsessed with or haunted by sex (and can be fun in their unapologetically exploitative fashion – I certainly don’t mean to disparage them by comparison), X is actually about sex in a way they are not and, therefore, nothing here is gratuitous. Rather, it is essential to the story, to the thematic, to the emotional arcs of the characters. It is certainly at the core of The Farmer’s Daughters, the film within a film that has brought them to this ill-fated farm.
As experienced sexual performers, Maxine (Mia Goth) and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), both of whom presumably have been working as strippers for some time but have never made a film before, are defiant in their sexuality, in embracing and enjoying it and the work they do, unashamedly and proudly. Jackson (Kid Cudi), having filmed his first scene, feels he’s found his calling, standing before the window, naked and beaming. Finally, Lorraine (Jenny Ortega), the sound technician and girlfriend of RJ (Owen Campbell), the director of the Farmer’s Daughters, initially uncomfortable in this company, finds herself called to participate, allured by the inspiring sexual freedom, the infectious positivity, and the sense that they are, in fact, making something good that she wants to be a part of. This leads to a telling point of conflict with RJ, who does not want her in the movie, casting doubt on the possibility of actually being so free of hang ups as the group claims.
On the other side of things, Pearl (also Mia Goth, in heavy old-age makeup) and Howard (Stephen Ure), the old couple who are unknowingly providing the setting for this on-location shoot, have their own sexual hang ups to wrestle with. Their relationship is loving, but physically distant, and that distance takes a heavy toll on Pearl. Due to his heart condition, Howard is unwilling to approach intimacy, though he is apparently willing to occasionally chain up attractive young drifters in the basement to satisfy Pearl’s needs, or blow interlopers away with his shotgun. Pearl is pitiable in her physical loneliness, frail and desperate for affection, for touch, to be seen and wanted. It is creepy and invasive when she takes an opportunity to brush against Maxine’s uncovered ribs, even more so, when she strips down and climbs into bed with her as she sleeps; and the whole naked dead guy locked up in the cellar is certainly not ok – but she is really not unsympathetic and the film does not demonize her or present her as horrific merely by virtue of her age or the fact that she still has sexual desire.
The whole film turns on Maxine’s determination to parley her youth and beauty and sex into the life she dreams of and Pearl’s assurance that, “It’ll all be taken from you. Just like it was from me.” There is a bitterness turned violent in Pearl’s assertions, but also a wistful sadness that seems rooted in a life hard lived, in countless tragedies, failures, and disappointments that have atrophied the spirit. There is really nothing left for Pearl to lose and if she can find some satisfaction in the visceral execution of the young, in the physical satisfaction of bloodlust, if, covered in blood, she can finally dance again, following the ever present TV preacher, why should she accept a life she does not deserve?
Maxine (who, in a coda, we learn has a strong tie to said preacher), delivers the same line. She is young now, and strong, certain in the righteousness of her desire, the drive of her body. When she makes it through the night, doing what she has to do to survive, ultimately ruthless in overcoming her octogenarian assailants, her bloody victory inspires. Two dreams clashed and in the end, the one that has not yet gone sour triumphs. Maxine driving off into a glorious sunrise, followed by the comic epilogue of police investigating the blood drenched scene the next day, cements the hopefulness of the ending. For a very, very bloody flick, featuring killer alligators, broken dreams, and, one assumes, sex crimes in the basement, it is a really upbeat note to end on.
And past that, the whole film is just fun. Good editing is often invisible, but West fills his film with really showy cuts and absolutely beautiful shots, relishing the vibrancy of youth, nature, sun, sweat, and enticing danger (an overhead shot of an alligator effortlessly floating towards an unsuspecting skinny dipper typifies the balance of beauty and threat on display here – such a balance bringing us right back to Chainsaw – it’s really hard to escape).
From moment to moment, the film delivers. The comedy lands. The scenes filmed for the Farmer’s Daughters, though they play on a stereotype of cheesy porn dialogue, are coyly seductive with a real, tactile sensuality. And it does have some scares that work, all adding up to a tremendously satisfying, entertaining, and even touching bit of horror cinema. At the end of the day, it is a fun body count film, but one not without heart, and not without a mind at work.
A core image of Jhonen Vasquez’s hilarious, disturbing, endlessly creative comic book, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac has always stayed with me. At one point, an intrepid surveyor is uncomfortably interviewing Johnny (or just “Nny” for short) about some local murders and notes that the police suspect a girl may have been killed by a vampire, having been totally drained of blood. This doesn’t end well for this interlocutor as Nny homicidally ejects him from his home, shouting how he never drank the blood, but he has to “keep the wall wet.” See, there’s this wall, inky black in the monochromatic comic, that he continually has to coat with fresh blood as the color changes when it dries and that just won’t do to keep the Lovecraftian, tentacled horror contained within. Eventually, with Nny incapacitated, said beastie does in fact escape, wreaking havoc, but that turn of events wasn’t what’s kept it in my mind all these years. Rather, it always somehow felt like a metaphor about art, about the creative drive: the obsessive impulse to create, to produce, to perform – to satisfy a cruel, exhausting necessity. Sometimes, even when you’re totally burned out, when you lack inspiration, when you don’t even want to, you just have to keep the wall wet.
Which brings me to today’s post. I try to really put some degree of thought into what I’m going to discuss each week, but it can occasionally be difficult to settle on a topic to delve into. But in the interest of not letting that wall get dry, today, I’d just like to run through the horror content I’ve consumed this week. In a strange way, I‘m almost embarrassed that there isn’t more to report – I’m on a few horror groups on Facebook where some fans seem to watch at least one horror flick a day, and sometimes three or four – that’s a schedule I just can’t keep up with (life is pretty busy), but hey, I’ve got a few things here worth mentioning. These will all be first impressions, and some may be fairly short, but I hope to light upon some interesting thoughts along the way. Let’s see if I do.
100 Best Horror Blogs
First off – here’s a cool development. I’ve been listed on Feedspot’s 100 Best Horror Blogs and Websites (in the 69th position). I don’t know how the determination was made, but I’m honored to be in some great company, along plenty of sites that I occasionally visit. With any luck, that might bring a few new people to these pages. Here’s hoping.
Two Short Films
Another first this week – I was contacted through the blog by a filmmaker who wanted to share her horror short, Mary, available currently on Vimeo. I can’t promise to promote everything that I ever get sent, but I was honored to have someone reach out. Sometimes I feel like I’m throwing words out into a void every week and I’m happy that someone might find my output and want to share their own with me.
Mary (2022)
So, Jo Rou and Dan Riodan’s short presents an insurance agent, Rich, visiting an elderly woman (sharing the name of his mother, who recently passed) to discuss features of her plan. Taking place on the first anniversary of his mother’s death, this visit stirs up his deep feelings of guilt and, in turn, frustrated defensiveness and resentment. I think the emotional core of the piece lands – both his self-recrimination at having abandoned her to a home, and the way he felt boxed in by the burden of responsibility. This meeting with an alternatingly sweet/creepy elderly woman veers into a nightmarish mode wherein he is tormented by her saccharine assurances that he must have treated his mother very well and is taunted by her accusations of his failings.
Is this Mary some kind of Greek fury, haunting him for the blood crime of matricidal neglect? Is this all in his mind, this episode only triggered by the reminders of his mother which seem omnipresent in Mary’s home? This narrative question remains unanswered as this is more of a mood piece. I would say that some of this really worked for me (the simple, frustrating, guilt-ridden drama of the situation), and some elements (the more directly ‘horror’ based) didn’t quite click (there was an exaggerated stylization that occasionally distanced), but as a whole, I think it’s an effective, sad little film. And it’s only 13 minutes long, so maybe check it out.
The Strange Thing about the Johnsons (2011)
This second short, Ari Aster’s (of Hereditary and Midsommar) film school thesis, was recommended following my post last week on creepy kid movies. Promoting that blog entry, I’d asked about people’s favorite creepy children and one person responded with Isaiah, the son from this film. To be fair, this takes a different spin on ‘child’ as it is not about youth, but rather being-a-child-of-a-parent (a feature shared with Mary above). It’s on Youtube, so I gave it look.
Whooo-boy – this is one difficult watch. It takes a turn for “horror” late in its run time as there are some direct acts of violence, but throughout, there is a weight of dread, of being trapped – both by an abusive family member and by one’s own feeling of complicity with that abuse – the guilt and horror of what one has done, mixed with the terror of not being able to escape. This could be the material for a standard drama of familial abuse, but it distinguishes itself by reversing the players, presenting an adult son who sexually, physically, and emotionally abuses his father. Cringingly uncomfortable from the very beginning, like something out of a Todd Solondz film (Happiness, Welcome to the Dollhouse, etc.), Aster’s short builds to awful crescendos of brutality, terror, and grief. It’s a hard film to recommend, but it is interesting to see a talented filmmaker’s early work, and however unpleasant to watch, I think it’s doing what it set out to do.
Aster said that the impetus to make it was a discussion between himself and friends about the most taboo topics they could put into a film: “We were talking about topics that are too taboo to be explored, and so we arrived at taboos that weren’t even taboos because they were so unfathomable, and the most popular was that of a son molesting his father.” It is an oddly effective choice – perhaps by reframing the abuse in a dynamic that seems so unlikely, such a reversal, in which the victim is an adult, with full agency, who at least at the beginning of this abuse could have physically resisted his assailant – perhaps all of this makes the abuse freshly shocking, while casting its mechanisms into a starker contrast.
But perhaps it is also just a bit of what we now think of as ‘trolling’… I think these days, there is a little exhaustion with doing something just to irritate, just to get a rise out of someone, just to be as offensive, as shocking as possible. And in this case, Aster may be guilty of just that. Apparently, there was also some criticism at the time of release around Aster, a white Jewish filmmaker, centering this film on a black family—did he just do this just to intentionally stir more controversy, knowing that people can be pretty sensitive about who tells whose story, or was there a true artistic impulse behind it? For my part, I feel that while the story really has nothing to do with race, the demographics of the cast did feel surprising – which speaks to larger problems of representation – and the performances are painfully good, such that it would have been a shame if these actors weren’t playing these parts. And on the question of “trolling,” I don’t know – I’m less interested these days in giving a lot of attention and hence, reinforcement, to that impulse, but at the same time, I think it can really be a necessary one in horror. Sometimes it is the absence of that mean drive to really bother the audience that causes a work of horror to underwhelm. How can you horrify if you balk at merely upsetting?
Three Full Length Films
I also managed to check out a few features that had been on my list for a while: a bit of small and indie, a bit of cheesy 80s, and a bit of classic French thriller. In short:
Caveat (2020)
The setup of Damian Mc Carthy’s debut feature is intriguing and peculiar: an amnesiac, Isaac, following some accident, is hired by a supposed friend to ‘babysit’ his mentally ill niece in a derelict house on an isolated island. She’s scared of strangers so he’ll have to wear a harness and chain which will prevent him from entering her room (also, as he later discovers, he can’t even reach the toilet). He hadn’t initially agreed to any of these conditions, but he is pressured to accept each new bad idea as it is revealed. Then over the course of one night, really creepy, ghostly, things go down, ultimately revealing details of the sordid history of this house, this family, and Isaac himself.
I must say I wasn’t quite taken with the direction of the narrative. Some elements didn’t track for me (Why does this creepy rabbit doll work as some kind of P.K.E. meter whenever something spooky’s about—it’s cool and creepy, sure, but why is it there? In what order did who kill whom and why?), and the way they didn’t track felt more like something was missing than a mystery by design. However, the unsettling atmosphere and the essential concept were strong. It is evocatively filmed and has a real momentum. And it does play out as a classic ghost story, the psychological and the otherworldly feeding into each other in enigmatic ways – sometimes satisfyingly and sometimes frustratingly. It is far from perfect, but the elements that work (particularly the first act discomfort and mystery) are great. It’s a solid first outing, and I’ll be happy to see what Mc Carthy does next.
Black Roses (1988)
Ok, this was just a ton of fun. John Fasano’s “heavy metal” horror is a delightfully cheesy outing, full of rubbery monsters, campy performances, and mixed messaging which packs all the nuance and entertainment of a 40s hygiene film or something like Reefer Madness. Made during the heady days of “Satanic Panic,” when parents groups lashed out at Dungeons and Dragons and Heavy Metal records, terrified at their corruptive, demonic influence, this film exploits the groundwork laid by these hysterical moralists with the story of a Metal band that comes to a small town and hypnotizes the local youth with their evil tunes (which are, in all honesty, about as tame as can be), causing them to run wild in the streets, kill their parents, and sometimes turn into voracious, fleshy, horny monsters.
A guy is sucked into a stereo speaker by a weird giant centipede thing, mesmerized teens turn into gummy skeletal puppets, and Damian, the lead singer of the purportedly Hellish band, shocks everyone by…pulling off his wig and laughing maniacally (I guess the point was he was about to transform into his poorly articulated, demonic true form and he didn’t want to damage his expensive wig, but it sure looks like his evil revelation was baldness). Finally, the put upon English teacher, who just wants to have roundtable discussions about the American Transcendentalists between beers, saves the day by burning down the concert venue.
It’s certainly a B-movie (or lower), but it’s also genuinely fun, even if it does imply that the concerned parents of America were right to hate and fear this music. Honestly, I don’t think it has a position – this was just something people were talking about that they thought would make for a good, goopy, sensationalistic horror flick. And, distanced from that particular historical, censorious moment (as opposed to our current one), it does.
Diabolique (1955)
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s thriller is a captivating tale of calculated murder. An abusive schoolmaster (and I could not do justice to just how much of an unpleasant character he is) is murdered by his young, abused wife and his lover, whom he flaunts, but also beats. Much of the film is quite procedural, following step by step in their plan to carry out the perfect crime, thoroughly covering all of their bases, and it is fascinating and deeply emotional from start to finish (that focus on process is intriguingly reflected in a sequence in which some morgue workers prepare a body for viewing). The wife, Christina, is very religious, having been raised in a convent, and is tormented by the sin they are contemplating and finally executing. The lover, Simone, a tough gal of a lower station, has to push and pull her along to carry out the plot, but in the end, she is finally successful.
And then, without going into any detail, one key thing goes wrong and we’re off to the races, until it all culminates in a chilling final sequence that is nothing if not horror. The film is frequently taut, sometimes funny, occasionally scary, and always totally engaging. The web of dynamics between the three main characters is ever shifting – for example, these two women have no reason to like each other, and yet here they are, planning a murder of someone they do both have reason to hate; they have been set against one another as the husband, Paul, has made no secret of his dalliances, and yet there seems to be a strange affinity between them, which had me wondering occasionally if they shared a bed as well (I don’t think so, but an attraction seems to linger); Paul abuses them both and yet, for whatever reason, they have both been drawn to him. It is a rich and complex place to dwell, and in the end, it really does offer a solid, disturbing scare.
I had long heard of this as a classic to rival Hitchcock and I think it really lives up to its hype.
Three Short Stories
I’m currently working my way through a 2 tome omnibus of the 6 volumes of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. He played a significant role in my becoming a horror fan way back when and these short stories were a huge part of that. I’m planning on discussing his oeuvre in detail when I’m done with the re-read, so I’ll just barely touch on three stories I read this week. The first was Hell’s Event, following a runner doing a charity event who finds himself at the center of a recurring contest between the forces of light and darkness to set the course of humanity for years to come. Demonic forces hound the human runners to ensure the victory of their infernal ringer, but this gory spin on the rabbit and the hare has the best laid plans of devils and dirty politicians foiled by the obliviousness of basic human mediocrity. The second, Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament, is a particularly Barker-ian tale of flesh reformed, identity transcended, and the intertwining of sex, torment, and worship. It follows a bored housewife who discovers her power to literally turn men inside out, and essentially becomes a goddess. It’s a trip. Finally, The Skins of the Fathers is a hot, dusty tale of dark god-monsters rising out of the desert for a kind of celebratory-destructive birthday party/auto de fé, ultimately seeking to make men better.
I love the scale at which he writes, but also the way he revolves around certain ideas and images and obsessions: the body, transformation, permeability, the drive to story, etc. I’m moving through these tomes slowly as I mostly just have time for reading in bed, am often tired, and don’t get too far in one sitting (or lying as the case may be), but I’m really enjoying the journey and once I come out the other end, I’ll certainly write at length about my take on Barker’s work.
So, that’s been my week in horror. I remember I’d initially felt some degree of imposter syndrome, feeling like maybe I don’t consume enough horror material for anyone to care what I think about it, but now I look at my two shorts, three films, and three stories and I’m struck that I found so much time in the week, after all.
