Category Archives: Review

Lesbian Vampire Films – Part I

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Existing within genre cinema writ large, and often struggling with the boundary between a “genre ghetto” and “legitimate cinema,” horror is really tied up in issues of categorization. Something isn’t just a “horror movie” – it’s a ‘slasher,’ a ‘ghost movie,’ ‘body horror,’ a ‘gore flick,’ an ‘Italian cannibal movie,’ a ‘melt movie,’ a ‘werewolf movie,’ a ‘giant bugs picture,’ ‘splatterpunk,’ ‘splatstick’; the list goes on and on, with new permutations, combinations, and subdivisions constantly being birthed. But undeniably, there are some heavy hitters when it comes to the classic monsters around which the genre gets organized, and one of the biggest is “The Vampire Movie,” a set of flicks on which I’ve spent surprisingly little time (so far, I’ve only really covered one). So, I’d like to start delving into a notable sub-sub genre thereof, the “Lesbian Vampire Films.”

It seems strange that this would even be a genre – I don’t know of any strain of ‘gay-werewolf movies’ or ‘pansexual animal attack flicks,’ but there are cinematic elements that tend to run through these films, and there are lots of these films (Wikipedia lists about 60, and I suspect there are more), that seem to tie them together as a type (perhaps O negative, terrible, I know). Not every element is applicable to every film, and the exceptions probably outnumber the rules, but there are enough to make it feel like its own thing, and it constitutes a really interesting, cinematically rich, and often really gorgeous current within the larger world of horror.

Some common traits involve surprising deviations from standard vampire lore. For example, a striking number of these movies feature a lot of daytime footage and often the vampire in question is totally unbothered by sunlight and rather enjoys lounging in the pool, hanging out on the beach, or tooling through the desert in her dune buggy. Also, it’s pretty rare that anyone has fangs. Beyond that, there is a dreamy atmosphere, a seductive, languid, sometimes romantic, and sometimes tragic mood that runs through many, though certainly not all of these films.  And, while loads of these are pretty low budget operations, or are working within a vein (sorry) of cheap exploitation, so many of them are just such aesthetic pieces, putting such care and artistry into their design, into their craft, into beautifully filming beautiful people in beautiful locations, rather than simply trying to make a scary movie (and, to be fair, the films of this sub-genre are almost never actually scary – though some can be intense in other ways).

Vampirism in general often works as some kind of sexual metaphor – consumed by a physical hunger which is socially dangerous, alluring, threatening, and impossible to control, the vampire can represent the disruptive force of repressed desires, and it’s not surprising that they might cross gender lines. However, it must be said that the specific vamps after which the genre is named are almost never exactly ‘lesbians,’ so much as ‘bisexual’ at most (bi-vampire erasure is a thing, I guess) – but I guess that just didn’t have the same lurid marketing bite (sigh – what is it about vampires that makes me pun?). I suppose at the end of the day, for all vampires, regardless of sex, it should really be what’s on the inside that counts, but male vampires on film never had quite the same explicit fluidity as the ladies. 

Finally, I really shouldn’t discuss the Lesbian Vampire without at least briefly touching on J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novelette, Carmilla. Published twenty years before Dracula, it is the literary basis for a huge swath of these films (with many others referencing Erzsébet Báthori, or Elizabeth Bathory). It is also a great little book which, in addition to basically inventing this entire genre, is atmospheric, engaging, creepy, sexy, and sometimes quite funny. It’s also a quick read. Check it out here as I don’t have the space to describe it in great detail, but I do highly recommend it.

I recently fell into a bit of a rabbit hole and have watched more of these films than I can cover in one post, so this will be the beginning of a short series (probably two or three posts in total), detailing some stand-out examples of this odd, compelling collection. Today, I’ll just sink my teeth (really – that’s the last one) into what I’ve watched most recently.

Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Lambert Hillyer’s direct follow up to Dracula (it picks up the story minutes after the first film ends) is visually stylish, gothic, and cinematic, not to mention, just being a fun, exciting movie (it’s clear how much the medium had progressed from Tod Browning’s 1931 film to this, its first sequel of many). Gloria Holden stars in the titular role as Countess Marya Zaleska, feeding on both men and women and feeling really bad about it. From a modern perspective, the “lesbian” reading is a bit unfortunate as, linked as it is to her unwanted need for blood, her interest in her female victims (with looks that linger far more hungrily, more longingly than with the men) can be seen as the ‘unnatural thoughts’ from which she is desperate to be freed, but it still feels progressive for suggesting that interest at all (and this is after these elements were greatly reduced to appease the censorious Hays Code). Beyond that, this film feels like the progenitor of so many, more modern, vampire films. She is not simply a monster – she is a tragic, yet dignified, heroine. Though some advertisements implored viewers to “save the women of London from” her, she is a very human figure: remorseful, but hopeful – desperate to be free of her father’s curse, but constantly giving into her cravings.

In this, she comes off as quite modern, and the story feels like something from decades later. As opposed to Lugosi’s Dracula, she is the protagonist of her own movie, and she is a sympathetic one. She sees a psychiatrist about her condition, and after a failed experiment with what is basically addiction exposure therapy wherein she sends her servant to find a young girl to model for her, hoping to present herself with and withstand temptation (she doesn’t), she instead chooses to find a companion for eternity. It is regrettable that she chooses the rather irritating (I guess he’s supposed to be charming) male lead for this position rather than his bantering love interest, Janet, over whom she looms for a tantalizingly long time (a scene in which she slowly lowers towards Janet, maybe to kill her before the ‘hero’ arrives, was described by Ellis Hanson as “the longest kiss never filmed”). I can’t imagine how she thinks eternity with this guy is going to be pleasant, but things don’t end well for her anyway, so she never learns what a brat he can be. However, for all of her amenable traits, the film doesn’t lack a sense of threat. People are being killed and she is the one doing it.

And it all really oozes style – from the gothic horror set pieces of the cemetery carpeted with fog where she burns Dracula’s stolen body to end her affliction, to the mid-30s classy London interiors everyone inhabits, to the spooky castle, complete with giant spider web, to the statuesque charisma that Holden exudes. This flair is definitely evident in the filming, for example, the play of light in the young model’s eyes as Marya mesmerizes her before feeding or the smooth way Sandor, Marya’s jealous familiar, slides her hypnotic ring onto her finger as she dramatically poses to be dressed.  Past that, the adventurous parts are exciting and the comic relief lands without feeling out of place. It all comes together so effectively to create a moody, fun early horror classic, which I expect far too few have seen.

Blood and Roses (1960)

With this entry, originally titled Et Mourir de Plaisir (To Die of Pleasure) we move closer to the ‘house style’ of the Lesbian Vampire movie. An Italian-French coproduction, directed by Roger Vadim (And God Created Woman and Barbarella, among others), this dreamy, colorful film lays the groundwork for where the genre would later go. In fact, director Joe Dante called it the “origin of the Euro-horror film,” and I see what he means. While there had of course been horror movies made on the continent before, this is perhaps the beginning of a certain style – combining quite artfully filmed and erotically charged material with horror narratives, in this case, a spin on Carmilla. With little explicitly shown (one bared and bloodied breast), it is such a lavish, sensual, atmospheric outing.

The connection to the source material is relatively thin (which is often true). At a stylish Italian Villa, the cousins Carmilla and Leopoldo, as well as Leopoldo’s fiancé, Georgia, entertain guests in advance of their coming nuptials. Long ago, their ancestors, the Karnsteins, had been believed vampires and the locals had risen up and staked all but one, Mircalla, who could not be found and whose grave remains empty. After her disappearance, it was noted that any woman who became engaged to her former fiancé (and cousin) had a habit of dying before her wedding. Just as Mircalla seemed to have jealously guarded the affections of her cousin, so too, in the present, does Carmilla seem to yearn with unspoken and unrequited love. Though Leopold, Carmilla, and Georgia seem intimately close, Carmilla is clearly desolate due to the upcoming wedding.

Then, on the night of a grand (and beautifully filmed) masquerade ball, which Carmilla avoids, drunk in her room, before coming down dressed as her anagrammatic ancestor,  a fireworks display blows up a portion of the family crypt. Carmilla is drawn to investigate and afterwards, she isn’t quite herself. Perhaps she is killed and the vampiric Mircalla takes her place. Perhaps the spirit of Mircalla takes control of her living body. Perhaps she experiences a mental break and creates Mircalla to allow herself to act on darker impulses. It is mostly not clear (though a final shot suggests one reading).

Either way, it becomes clear that there had clearly been something between her and Leopold in the past, and he’s not really over it, as evinced in a moment when he and Georgia put an either drunk or newly vampirized Carmilla to bed – they undress her and the way he unabashedly stares at Carmilla while standing right next to his fiancé seems like it should probably concern Georgia more.  While Carmilla still seems to carry a torch for her cousin, it is now clearly Georgia for whom she really thirsts (plus, a poor servant girl turns up dead with mysterious holes in her neck). One might wonder if Mircalla had truly been killing her cousin’s brides out of jealousy, or simply out of lust. Sadly, after expressing her feelings one rainy day in the greenhouse and kissing some blood off Georgia’s lips, who doesn’t exactly reciprocate, but also doesn’t pull away, things do not go well for Carmilla/Mircalla (often a theme here), and (spoiler alert, but hey, it’s a vampire movie, this can’t be too much of a surprise) she ends up artfully staked on a tree branch in the dawn light.  

The permutations of the story take a back seat to mood and effect, but what effect – eerie and rich in its deeply saturated technicolor splendor, peppered with surreal dream sequences and breathtaking shots. There are moments of threat and suspense, but mostly this is a sad, enveloping presentation of the vampire as a powerful and free, yet doomed need, a sensual hunger. I have some trouble keeping the plot straight in my memory, but the sensory-emotional experience lingers, and the visual languor sets a roadmap for where the genre would go in the next decade or so.

The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

A fantastically rich and intriguing Spanish film, Vicente Aranda shot it late in the Franco regime and it can be rewardingly read as an allegory of life under such paternalistic fascism. A young woman, Susan, is newly married to a childhood friend, whom the credits name only as “husband,” and after a brief stop at a hotel in which she has a vision/fantasy/premonition of being raped when alone in the room, her wedding dress torn, they move on to his family home, a grand Castillo, somewhat gone to seed. That night, consummating the marriage, he rips her dress, just as in her vision, and from that point on, their new relationship is a minefield. He can be tender and considerate or violent and assaultive. But, more than anything, he is controlling and patronizing, treating her more as a child than a partner. It’s also a red flag that the portraits of all the women of the family are stowed away in the basement, and one, that of Mircala de Karstein, who killed her husband on their wedding night, has had its face cut out.

Susan has dreams of a beautiful veiled woman coming to her in the night, leading her to a dagger and imploring her to kill her husband, in one sequence, gorily castrating him. This dream woman is a dead ringer for the mysterious, naked Carmila that “husband” finds buried on the beach, breathing through a snorkel (it’s a bit odd) and brings home. There is a spark between the two women and “husband” somewhat fades to the background. By the end of the film, Susan has joined Carmila/Mircala in a sexually emancipatory ritual of blood-letting and drinking, and the two of them kill off a few local men, and attempt to run off together. As is a consistent theme here, it doesn’t go well for them.

Aranda undertakes some thought-provoking shifts of viewpoint. The beginning of the film belongs entirely to Susan: her fear and mixed feelings of attraction and revulsion. Oddly though, before the halfway point, right after she has admitted to hating her husband, the perspective moves to him for almost the remainder of the run time as he investigates strange goings on and implications of the supernatural. It isn’t until Susan has tried and failed to stab him that we return to her perspective. The viewer is pulled between two poles of identification and two different kinds of horror. Susan is in a horror film of domestic and psychological abuse, haunted by the violence of her dreams – her desire to free herself. “Husband” is in a horror film where a lesbian vampire is preying on his wife, and he must defeat this fiend. Overheard by a doctor friend of his, the words the women repeat in their blood ritual seems like what men’s rights activists think feminism is all about (if they were only so poetic): “Say it with all your heart – I hate him! – He has pierced your flesh to humiliate you – He has pierced my flesh to humiliate me – He has spat inside your body to enslave you – He has spat inside my body to enslave me.” More than a decade before Andrea Dworkin was mis-read as stating that “all heterosexual sex is rape,” this chant would seem to imply such a sentiment, and this seems to feed the husband’s fears and subsequent violence.

At this point, be warned: to describe what really makes this all work so well, I’m about to utterly spoil the ending.

At the end of the film, the two women have stopped to rest and maybe make love in Carmila’s coffin, where the husband finds them lying together, naked and serene. He shoots the coffin again and again until blood gushes out. A young girl, who had been in contact with Carmila, arrives and says the women will rise again before kneeling down before the husband. He shoots the child in the head, opens the coffin, brings a knife to a breast, and the film cuts to a newspaper headline that proclaims a man arrested after cutting out the hearts of three women. It is a brutal ending and I think its abrupt cruelty suggests the film maker’s position. The domineering, if sometimes kindly ‘lord’ may present himself as a caring, reasonable protector – he may be the one framing the story, offering the only available narrative, but that paternalism and control is a form of violence and he will not balk at ruthlessly destroying anyone who threatens the continuity of his power. It’s a shocking, chilling conclusion to a curious and provocative film, the quashed sexual revolution on screen (probably reflecting how Franco had so utterly stripped women of their rights) calling for a more complete socio-political upheaval off screen.

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975)

This is an peculiar one. Filmed in Mexico by Juan López Moctezuma, this follows some of the patterns of the Lesbian Vampire film, while also going in some other directions, notably, a serial killer film and a B-movie action/cop procedural, complete with car chases (and cars that really like to blow up). Mary is an American artist bumming around Mexico in her ramshackle van, seemingly living a free-love, artistic, vagabond lifestyle, painting, embarking on relationships with men and women, and sometimes poisoning them and stabbing them in the neck with a hairpin before ravenously lapping up their blood. Also, she’s being chased by a creepy man in black whose face is always covered by a black scarf.

I will say that this did not strike me as strongly as the other three entries today, but it is still an interesting, unique case, even if the film making didn’t rise to the greatest heights. The most notable detail is how different Mary’s character is from many of the other female vampires of the genre. Even when some version of Carmilla, for example, is fated to a lonely un-life, unhappy in love, and probably gets killed by the end, she still feels powerful, dangerous, and alluring. She feels in control – she is the gravity of the film, pulling everything to her center – lovers, death, meaning. By contrast, Mary (and in this, she echoes Marya from Dracula’s Daughter) is cursed to crave blood thanks to her parentage (it’s obvious long before it’s revealed that the creepy guy following her is her dad), she is bad at killing (there is a great scene when, even having poisoned his coffee, she really has trouble finishing off a local fisherman on the beach – it’s awkward, tense, and fumbling, but she does finally do him in), and she is so upset and scared for much of the run time – by what is happening to her, by what she, herself is doing. Somehow, she is both the monster and a powerless, terrified victim. Unlike some others, she survives her picture and goes on to travel and kill and drink – but perhaps that is the worst fate for her, so it is hardly a happy ending – things do not go well for anyone.

Along the way, there are some scares and effective moments. The presence of the mysterious man chasing her (and killing his own victims along the way) flavors this more like a ‘horror’ movie than a dreamy-Euro-sensual death trip. Her lack of overpowering strength or mesmerism when killing brings to mind Romero’s Martin, who shares this quality – and occasionally the killings carry a kind of horror as they are not clean and sensual, but rough, out of control, and always in danger of failing, thus getting her caught and arrested. Also, one death is really quite sad as she finds herself in the bath with Greta, a woman who has brought her home (in a reversal of the pattern, it is the vampire who has been seduced), and she obviously doesn’t want to poison and kill her, saying that she’s never before chosen someone she knew, someone she cared about, but she cannot stop herself – tears are in her eyes as she brings the pin to Greta’s neck.

Compared with the other films today, it is not so visually striking, but the old, grainy film stock can be really quite forgiving, and it is certainly something different and worth checking out.

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So, with that, I think we’ll wrap up this first installment of my Lesbian Vampire rundown.  While these films don’t tend to be very scary, I think they represent an interesting corner of the genre. Something I often love about horror movies is feeling ensconced in an atmosphere, however unsettling – it’s a quality I don’t associate with many other kinds of films, and these are all about atmosphere – moody and otherworldly, with the nominal monster often holding the most appeal. It’s a rich place to dwell for a while.

Also, one warning that I hate to have to give – many of these are inexpensive European movies and when venturing into that territory, it’s important to know that animals were sometimes ill-treated in the filming (no ASPCA on site). If that is something that will ruin a movie for you, you should check first. I’m not happy to end a post about some films that I really do like on this note, but I’d be remiss not to.

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.