Category Archives: Review

Finally Braving A Demanding Classic: Possession

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

Today’s film is one of these.  

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

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

Possession (1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Queering Horror

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

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

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

Queer

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

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

Reading a Film

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

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

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

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

A Question of Representation

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

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

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

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

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

Queer as a Verb

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

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

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

Clive Barker – Midnight Meat Train 7, 2007

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

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

A Recent Favorite – Suspiria (2018)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Much More

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

The Eyes Have It

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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.

Bon apetit…

Roots of a Genre – and Questioning Genre

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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?