Category Archives: Review

The American Nightmare: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Turns 50

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Golly – where do I even start with this? When approaching a film this big, this significant, it can be daunting. Books have been written about it – it has been discussed ad nauseam by academics and bloggers and youtubers and horror fans for half a century – it was banned in many countries and is in the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – what could I possibly have to add to the conversation? And yet, I know that as it’s hitting this big anniversary, countless other bloggers, podcasters, and journalists will be praising it, analyzing it, dissecting it, and discussing its importance for the genre, and possibly for the art of cinema writ large, and hey – if all of those people get to do it, I can too. I pay my hosting fees here – I can do what I please.

So yeah – this month we’re digging into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) on the advent of its 50th anniversary (which will come about two weeks from today). I wouldn’t exactly call it one of my favorite horror films, but in a strange fashion, that’s only because it is so damn good. It is disturbing and awful in all the right ways, such that it hasn’t fallen into a kind of comfort food rotation for me. I like to preserve its power with rare viewings, lest it be merely appreciated for its significant value rather than recoiled from as the nightmare it is. But that said, I do think it is one of the very best works of horror committed to celluloid – rankings are pretty futile and silly, but I can’t imagine a Top Five that didn’t include it.

One caveat here, though – besides the inevitable fact that this text will include significant spoilers (if you somehow are the kind of person who would read this blog and you haven’t seen this movie, go watch it right now – it’s a classic for a reason – it’s also a quick (if exhausting) watch and it’s streaming all over the place), as mentioned above, this is a piece that has been broadly discussed, and often by writers or presenters who have done far more original research than I (by which I mean ‘at least some’). I know that over the years, I have been exposed to so many other people’s interpretations – and I do not know from whence my own readings come. I intend no plagiarism, and will try to base my words primarily on my personal viewing experience, but I simply can’t guarantee that seeds planted during my last roughly 25 years of being a horror fan and reading about movies haven’t grown to fruition in the form of accidentally recycled notions. But hey, I’ll do my best… so here we go…

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Tobe Hooper’s second film marks the high point of his career. He went on to make plenty of other works that were enjoyable and worthwhile (at least one of which I wrote about here), but nothing could approach the queasy, awful power of this early entry. It only runs a tight 83 minutes, but feels so much longer. In most cases, that would be a harsh criticism, but I mean it as high praise. The events of its story span one full day, from dawn to dawn, taking its sole survivor on a harrowing descent into terror and madness, and I think it can feel that way for the audience as well. I remember the first time I watched it, just wanting the screaming to stop, wanting to catch my breath – it was a trial to endure – not a fun movie, but really effectively horrific.

Oddly, having just watched it twice in rapid succession for this post, I find it gets less jarring and more enjoyable on each subsequent viewing – so much of it just works so very, very well – and that is exciting and fun, when taken with a certain critical distance. Daniel Pearl’s grainy 16mm cinematography is frequently gorgeous, as well as smart and effective. The editing and discordant score likewise. It is lean and mean when it needs to be, but it will also stretch things out beyond any remnant of comfort when it chooses, yielding sickly, disturbing fruit. Its structure is perfect – easing us from something approaching real naturalistic cinema vérité at the outset, down a long dark rabbit hole of terror and insanity, surreal and maddening, over the course of its three clear acts, at some points feeling far more like a hellish, nigh abstract art film – but it does this all so unpretentiously, and therefore, all the more succesfully. It might have the best five minutes to be found in any horror film ever (which of course we’ll get into). And for something so earthbound (entirely human killers picking off some nice young people in rural Texas), it comes closer to presenting true “Lovecraftian-mind-shattering-horror-at-the-revelation-of-unbearable-reality” than any flick I’ve ever seen that features slimy tentacles (with much of the credit for that, beyond the filmmaking, going to Marilyn Burns – whose Sally really goes through Hell – and whose eyes express so much).

It is a film of contradictions that achieve a captivating internal tension: It is gritty, sweaty, disgusting, and all around unpleasant to endure – but it is also beautiful. It is truly horrific – but sometimes also genuinely funny, even if you don’t actually laugh cause it would feel wrong. It is naturalistic – but it is also surreal, absurd, and over-the-top. It feels gory and cruel and awful – but there is barely any blood or explicit violence in the whole film. As a viewer, it feels like you are not in safe hands, like the filmmakers themselves are dangerous, irresponsible, crazy – but it is also so expertly crafted at every level of production – and that is rather a joy to watch.

They, however, do not enjoy what they’re watching.

But the fact that it is growing more enjoyable as I dig into everything that works so well in it means that once I’m done writing this, I probably shouldn’t let myself watch it again for at least another ten years. It deserves to retain its shocking horror, and I fear that can be lost in familiarity…

From the very beginning, with its corpse art at sunrise, mechanical whirring sounds that could be chainsaws or cameras, John Larroquette’s clearly fraudulent ‘based on true events’ voiceover, and its opening credits in searing red and black (what is it? sunspot photography? I don’t know – but it feels ugly and hot and foreboding), before cutting to the 5 young people in a van, driving to the cemetery where Sally’s grampa was buried to make sure that his corpse hasn’t been tampered with in the recent wave of grave robberies and desecrations that local law enforcement claim are the work of elements from “outside the state,” absolutely everything is hot, sweaty, gross, and doom laden. As they head down the road, Pam reads from a horoscope book about how Saturn is having an evil influence on the world. You don’t get the sense that any of them buy into this, but it is a part of the shared mood. They are just a group of normal kids out for a trip together, and they want to have a good time, but in this sweltering heat, and given the state of things (analysis of the film often cites Watergate and Vietnam as big influences – trust in American order and even ‘goodness’ having been well eroded at the time), it’s hard to imagine that their state, their country, their world isn’t an entirely evil place, and it’s hard to relax and enjoy yourself under such conditions, though they do their best.

At the cemetery, given the ruckus raised by the grotesque reports of corpses being stolen and fashioned into macabre, decaying statuary, the place is crowded with drunk locals out to enjoy the carnival atmosphere. One old man who can’t hold his head up goes on about how he sees the things that happen around here that no one talks about, that they all laugh at him. This is not a good place, but presenting as typical “small town America,” the rot at its heart goes undiscussed. It’s hard to feel that this isn’t a stand-in for every small town across the country – just ‘normal’ folk going about their lives, being “neighborly,” but underneath it all, something is sick, wrong, menacing. Sally’s grampa’s grave may be undisturbed, but a disturbing miasma suffuses the air and poisons the land.

Just a typical small town family preparing dinner.

Not to go scene by scene, eventually Sally, her wheelchair bound brother Franklin, and their friends, Jerry, Pam, and Kirk, end up going to visit Sally’s grampa’s house, long abandoned. She and Franklin used to visit and play there as kids, and this is familiar, nostalgic territory for them. I think this is an important element. Often in this sort of horror, you get the sense that the young people are somehow trespassing in a world that is not their own – invading a rural or wooded space that they are wrong to venture into. But in this instance, when they all stop at a gas station that has no gas and the barbeque cook (hereinafter, “the Cook”) who runs the place tells them that they shouldn’t go messing around in other people’s houses (does he originate the trope of the “Harbinger”? Probably not – I expect that should go to the villagers in Nosferatu – but the Cook does embody it perfectly), Franklin can answer that his daddy owns this homestead. They’ve been away, but they are locals too.

I think this is partly key to how scary this movie feels. It turns out that it is a neighboring house to grampa’s old place that houses the family of Ed Gein inspired cannibals/artists. Franklin and Sally swam in the watering hole down past the shed as kids. Sally slept in her room decorated with zebras right across from the house where she will soon undergo untold torment. This isn’t the suburban comfort of Haddonfield, but though remote, isolated – somewhere you can run through the woods screaming all night, being chased by a madman with a live chainsaw, and no one will hear you, there is still a presumption of familiarity, of safety, of normalcy – which hides unfathomable darkness. These killers are a just a nearby family, neighbors – and they could be yours.

Grannie and her pearls.

Also, watching with 2024 eyes, following endless think pieces since 2016 about the disenfranchised, post-industrial, white, non-urban, working class rage which has metastasized in America with resoundingly destructive socio-political results, it’s hard not to see echoes of that in this family who ‘has always been in meat,’ former slaughterhouse employees put out of work and abandoned by the economy and society thanks to advances in automated meat production. This clan of insane weirdos is monstrous, terrifying, and dangerous – but in their way, they are also pitiable, lost, just barely getting by, doing their best. Back when their Grampa worked at the slaughterhouse, a veritable star with the sledgehammer, were they cannibals and madmen, or did that happen to them when the work dried up and the world moved on? I don’t know. They film doesn’t tell us, but I feel there is something there. Being lost and forgotten breeds resentment, and resentment and bitterness breed monsters.

And that sense of resentment, of things not being fair and carrying a toxic anger in response, goes beyond the killers. We saw that with the locals at the graveyard. We felt that with the guy at the gas station staring into the sun, wasting away. And we get such a strong example of it in Franklin. Sally’s brother gets a bad rap – often described as one of the most irritating characters in horror, someone that fans love to hate. But honestly, he has a really rough time of it. He’s been dragged along on this trip by his sister only to be stuck with a bunch of her friends who have no patience for him and don’t say it, but would rather not have to deal with him and his disability, not to mention his anger and trolling. He is not well cared for and frequently gets hurt – his chair rolling down into a ditch while he’s trying to pee, the Hitchhiker targeting him, being subjected to various bumps and scrapes along the way (and of course, in the end, getting eviscerated by a chainsaw – he has a really bad day).

Now, to be fair, he’s not not incredibly irritating, blowing raspberries and whining all the time, but I can also really sympathize – left behind, mocked, only nominally put up with. You can see all of that result in his bracing personality, and at the same time, there is a kind of kinship between him and the killers. When the kids pick up the Hitchhiker early on, whom we later learn to be part of the crazy family next door, Franklin alone shows a legitimate interest in his story of family history at the local slaughterhouse. Franklin doesn’t immediately look down on him and mock him – he even makes respectful conversation – until things go way too far, the guy creeps them all out and slices Franklin with a straight razor, and they kick him out of the van.

So, of course, eventually, after about 35 minutes of the vague sense that things are not going to end well for them, the kids start dying, kicked off with what I described above as one of the very best five minutes in all of horror. I am not the first to describe this scene in minute detail, but both times that I watched it for this post, I had to pause afterwards and just sit in mind-blown appreciation of its perfection. So it’s worth describing one more time. Bear with me:

Kirk and Pam, having found the promised swimming hole to have dried up (just one more way that the film allows no relief for anyone), notice a nearby house with a generator, and go over to see if they can buy some gasoline as their van is running low. Approaching the house, Kirk notices cars hidden under a camouflaged canopy – which feels like a flag, but not enough to rise to the level of concern (one can only assume these to be the vehicles of previous victims – but the couple knows nothing of any past violence – so why worry?). After some horsing around, Pam sits on a swing out in the front yard as Kirk bangs on the door, trying to get the attention of someone within.

He opens the screen door to knock and doing so causes the main door to swing inward, the shot reversing to within the house, seeing the light and the young man appearing at the beginning of a dark hallway. We reverse the shot again and see what he sees – at the end of the dimly lit corridor, beyond a doorway, there is a red wall decorated with animal skulls. There’s an odd sound from within, something like the squealing of a pig and the film cuts twice, each time getting closer and closer to the skulls, to the sound. We reverse again to see Kirk intrigued, debating entrance, calling out ‘hello’ again and again to no response, and then eventually, kind of running into the place, to get to the end of the hall and find the source of sound. Reverse shot again so we see him from behind as he jogs forward, trips a bit and suddenly the doorway is filled with a hulking figure wearing a strange mask. Closeup on Leatherface – disturbing and grotesque – his mask a dead man’s face. The figure whacks him on the head with a sledgehammer and Kirk goes down twitching.

Multiple cuts to see his body in spasm before the sledge comes down again and his body is still (exactly as deaths at the slaughterhouse were described earlier). Leatherface yanks Kirk’s body in and slams a heavy metal door shut, leaving us in a dark, silent hallway once more. From first hearing the odd noises to seeing the door slam, only 35 seconds have passed. There was no music at all, either of ominous building threat, or a stinger on the jump scare – it is absolutely shocking, and startling in its oddness, simplicity, almost silence.

But then, with Kirk locked within, a low rumble of danger begins in the score and we cut to Pam outside on the swing, calling after her boyfriend. First we see her face in closeup and consternation, and then we cut to the shot – the most famous in the film, and for good reason. (I couldn’t find a Youtube clip for the whole scene, but here, at least, is this shot.) The camera starts behind the white wooden bench swing that she’s sitting on, but as she rises to walk towards the house, the lens glides beneath the seat to follow her low from behind. We now know what she’s walking towards, and she looks so soft and fleshy – she’s wearing short shorts and a backless swimsuit, and feels uncovered, unprotected, and filmed from this angle, the house looms above her like a hungry thing. She walks forward, up the stairs and towards the door, seeming to be consumed in the frame by the building, an otherwise normal house.

These two stills don’t do justice to how effective this moment is – go watch the dang movie!

We view her from inside, her face distorted by the screen door. Low, scary tones in the soundtrack accompany her into the bad place, shots alternating between closeups on her worried face that don’t let us see what might be coming and her POV as she scans the hall ahead. Coming around a corner in the dark, she trips over something and falls into a room filled with feathers and bones. A chicken is suspended in a too-small cage, clucking. Her point of view, intercut with horrified reaction shots, slowly scans from one disturbing bone-art-installation to the next – and these are clearly human bones – femurs, jaws, rib cages. Slowly the camera pans from a skeleton’s foot, up a bit of wood, to a hand, past a shoulder blade, to a skull, and we cut to a wide view of a skeletal sofa.

After a few moments of stunned revulsion, she scrambles to get up and flee, but as she turns into the hallway again, the metal door bangs open and the massive, lumbering figure runs out to grab her – she barely makes it out the front door of the house before he catches her around the waist and pulls her back in, screaming and kicking and fighting for her life. Down the hall and into the next room.

We cut to a view within the kitchen, the camera placed behind a meathook, and we see Leatherface carry in the shrieking, struggling girl. Cut to behind Leatherface as he lifts Pam and approaches the hook. Quick cut to the hook view with her uncovered back nearing the point, and cut again to behind him as we see him give up her weight. One more cut to Pam’s face as she is pierced, her arms feebly rising to try to pull her body up and off of the hook, but it’s impossible.

We see Kirk’s body lying on the table in the foreground and Leatherface in the middle as he examines his work. He meanders slowly over to pick up a chainsaw. There is a bucket beneath Pam’s feet to catch her blood when it is drained, as one would do with a butchered pig. We have a couple of shots of Leatherface carefully, if clumsily, handling his chainsaw to go about the project of segmenting Kirk’s body as Pam screams in the background, before the film cuts outside to a weather vane spinning, backlit by the cloud obscured sun – a moment of peace after this terror, but with the faint sounds of the chainsaw running in the background. A sound that, heard from afar, would raise no alarm.

In these last five minutes, we barely saw any blood – we don’t see the meathook break the skin. We don’t see the chainsaw blades touch Kirk’s body. And much of this is accomplished with a series of pretty simple reverse shots – this side, that side, this side, that side, but ye gods is it effective – startling, terrifying, brutal, and weird and so, so real. Every choice is perfectly calibrated to shock – to tell the story, to batter us with horror, down to that spinning vane in the end. I am hard pressed to think of another scene in any other horror film so flawless. It exhausts and thrills in equal measure.

In the next 15 minutes, the rest of Sally’s friends will die, and she will be thrust into a final act that is pure, mad nightmare. But first, on those other deaths, I think there is at least one important element which I am far from the first to note. Ok – terrible things are happening to these youths, but the impression is also that Leatherface is having a terrible day. It’s even a little funny and pitiable how, after he kills his next victim, Jerry (who has come into the house looking for the others, having seen Kirk’s towel outside), he runs to the window to look outside, before collapsing into a chair in terror and frustration himself. He is wordless, but you imagine him feeling “where are they coming from? How do they keep getting in?” like he’s fighting a losing battle with some infestation.

He’s been left responsible for his home and it keeps getting invaded, and he seems out of his depths, and so upset to be failing. Sure, he is strange, off putting, and genuinely scary, but in this moment, he is both pitiful and pitiable, though we’ve just seen him, in his power, destroy these three young lives. This ordeal is happening to him too. This is also not to mention his clear developmental disabilities. He has a hard time of it.

A striking difference between this film and many slashers to follow is that, in Sally, we have a survivor – a final girl – one who goes through such torments and comes out the other side, but, unlike most from Laurie Strode onwards, Sally doesn’t really get to fight. She is a victim, one who runs and screams and escapes and lives, but she’s not a ‘hero.’ She doesn’t have enough agency for that. Things happen to her and she simply struggles to stay alive. But on the flip side of that, while Leatherface is a kind of human monster, he also lacks a kind of agency as a villain – he’s not going out hunting these kids – they come to him, invade his home, and he is just trying to get through this terrible, meaningless day as well. Thus, on both sides, everyone is stuck reacting to a world that doesn’t make sense and that doesn’t afford them choice in their own destiny. It is bleak as all get out, and in that, it is all the more chilling (if something this hot and rancid can chill – I don’t know – it chills like the chills you get from food poisoning).

And so, in the third act, we are off to the races, and the nightmare explodes around us. Sally is chased, screaming at the top of her lungs through the woods for what feels like hours (it’s only 8 minutes), Leatherface in hot pursuit, getting so close with those spinning blades. Finally, she finds momentary respite back at the gas station with the Cook, before discovering that he is also part of this demented family (and what was in that barbecue they’d eaten earlier?), and he ties her up to bring her back to the house. It’s also at this point that a wild, manic, shocking absurdity comes into the proceedings. As she struggles against her bindings on the floor of his truck, he keeps poking her with a broomstick, only barely keeping her under his control, as he laughs, saying, “I hope you’re not too uncomfortable down there.” Strangely, it even feels like he means it, and that somehow makes it worse – he can sympathize, but that doesn’t mean he won’t bring her to her doom – he says he’s never liked killing, but that doesn’t mean he’ll help her to live. People just can’t be trusted or depended on.

He picks up the Hitchhiker on the way, who, soon, back at the homestead, along with Leatherface, now in a matronly role, working in the kitchen, wearing a dress and a woman’s face and hair, carry their grandfather downstairs. Grampa is so old as to appear mummified, and at first doesn’t seem to even be alive – until Sally’s finger is cut and he is given to suck like a baby, her blood reviving him like a vampire.

Carroll’s tea party has nothing on Tobe Hooper for a scene of madness around a table. Sally awakens and starts to scream – and the men howl and laugh and bray in response. They are certainly going to murder her, but first, they are apparently playing with their food, torturing the poor girl, but not physically – rather, they abuse her with their own weirdness. It is disgusting, and disturbing, and it feels like reality has come unmoored. Along the way, the camera spends so much time with her, focusing on the moments in which her mind seems to snap – as she struggles and cries out, her eyes roll in her head and the camera gets closer than one might think possible – here a face, here an eye, here just the white of an eye, here a capillary. They are great shots, and Marilyn Burns gives so much that her shattered psyche becomes our own. We have all gone off the deep end.

It is horrific, but watched from a certain angle, it’s weirdly funny as well – which doesn’t make it any better – rather than offering comic relief, the farce only makes the grotesque scarier, more incomprehensible, more unhinged and threatening. The Cook, The Hitchhiker, Grampa, even Leatherface are all ridiculous, oafish figures – they could be laughable if they weren’t so sad, scary, and murderous. There is a pathetic, wretched comedy of errors in the boys trying to help Grampa relive his glory days at the slaughterhouse by holding Sally’s head over a bucket and trying to put the sledgehammer in his hand for him to finish her off – he can’t even support its weight and keeps dropping it. This comedy elicits few laughs, and those are uncomfortable. The zany silliness of the boys and their patriarch only serves to sap Sally’s plight of any respect – if they at least were taking this seriously, that would be one thing, but she isn’t enough of a person to them to even warrant the dignity of menace. She is, at worst, an inconvenience – in the wrong place at the wrong time – that needs to be taken care of, and at best, she is a gift to Grampa, a cow for the slaughter. But in their wild hooting and hollering, she is not a person. They even seem to be having a kind of wholesome good time together as a family. It is upsetting.

But, in the end, she struggles out of their chaotic grasp, jumps through her second window in a few hours, and escapes to the road where she manages to get into a pickup truck speeding away, covered in blood, laughing, crying, mad, and utterly broken (as the tagline on the poster famously read, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” The answer is “not much”), while Leatherhead dances with his chainsaw in impotent rage on the road behind her as the sun rises on a new terrible day. It is another beautiful shot and then, as abruptly as anything else in this non-stop nightmare, it is over. The credits roll.

It is quite the film.

And it is even a bit strange to me how great I think it is. Since its release, it has had myriad imitators, and their ilk do not represent my favorite kinds of horror movies. Gritty, gross, sweaty, depressing, hopeless – that all has a place and I can appreciate it, but it’s not exactly my go to vibe. Still, I’m sure that beyond the films that have clearly riffed on this masterpiece (e.g., The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Wrong Turn (2003), or much of Rob Zombie’s oeuvre, among many, many others), so much of the genre writ large was advanced by the new depths that Hooper et al. managed to plumb. But while much that came after Texas Chainsaw was indebted to it, I think very little could hold a candle to this wholly original piece, which at once feels as insane and sloppy as its killers and also, paradoxically, is just perfectly orchestrated, artfully crafted, exquisitely built to achieve its horrific, bleak, shocking effect. This movie is really something special – a horrid delight, a flawless abomination. It was honestly a great pleasure to re-watch it a couple of times for this post.

Now, let’s not do that again for a while.

The Lost Boys – eternal youth, actually youthful

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I have been a bit indulgent this summer – not publishing nearly as much as I’d ordinarily like, and not exactly challenging myself with particularly heady, analytical projects. Rather, it is summer, and life can be quite hard enough, thank you very much – so I’m just focusing on some comfort food that feels like summer to me. Last time, it was the camp-set and quite camp-y Sleepaway Camp, and this post, as I spent my summer working at an amusement park in a beach town (among doing other things), I’d like to hit the boardwalk for the tawdry glitz and seductive thrill of one of my favorite movies of any genre, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys.

I’m sure spoilers will abound, so I do recommend that if you haven’t seen it before, you go do so now. Reading about most plot details wouldn’t ruin your enjoyment of the flick, but there are at least one or two moments that it would be a shame to spoil. I rented it on Prime and rewatched it on Tubi, so it’s out there. Go watch it as I don’t think I’m even going to summarize the plot (a single mother and her two teen sons relocate to a beach town full of vampires – good times ensue).

The Lost Boys (1987)

There are probably few movies that I’ve watched as many times; this is one of those true comfort food flicks that I can put on in the background while doing some arts and crafts project, or I can play to cheer myself up on a crummy day. But you know, something funny about that is that I haven’t really watched it in quite some time (as I’m often doing something else simultaneously, mouthing my favorite lines or singing along with the soundtrack, one which I spin with great regularity). Thus, it was quite a pleasure to actually sit down and take it in with no other plan than to enjoy it (on subsequent viewings, I might take notes, but the first watch for the blog, I just try to watch a film on its own terms).

I am absolutely biased, but it might just be a perfect movie. It is so tight and tidy without feeling manufactured. The writing is crisp and fun and loveable (for which I understand much of the credit should go to Jeffrey Boam, who reworked the screenplay at Schumacher’s behest, but also to Janice Fischer and James Jeremias, who’d penned the original script). The performances are great across the board. I get pulled into the allure of Michael’s story (sex, blood, and rock n roll) just as I do with Sam’s adventure (help – my brother is a vampire). The relationships feel grounded and real – I buy the sometimes antagonistic love between the brothers; I really sympathize with the single mother trying to start over and hold it all together; I get such a kick out of the ornery old grampa (who gets all of the best lines); the initial attraction between Michael and Star is sexy and exciting (even if we don’t really do much with it after that initial moment); and of course the tense chemistry between Michael and the vampire David is rich as David lures him over to the dark side.

And then there are the vampires – ah the vampires. It is a movie about vampires after all. As I understand it, this was the first presentation of vampires in this young, hip, modern mode. There’s nothing of the gothic – no capes or brooding or old world ennui – no one is tortured by the existential anguish of life without end (and don’t get me wrong – I can eat that stuff up, but this is really refreshing). They are young and punky and having a blast. I watched the movie a third time this summer the other night with some friends and one commented how, with the subtitles on, the lost boys are always “hooting and laughing,” and they are. The tag line of the movie was “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” I guess it is. All abandon and freedom from responsibility, from the weight of growing up, but all while being old enough to do anything you want. Child of Lestat, parent to Spike – the teen vampire is born.

So much of the allure of vampirism is often sold as ‘eternal youth’ and yet, that so rarely seems on offer in filmic presentations. Rather, the vampire is usually a haunted, world weary figure, who has lived too long and seen too much, caught in an eternal struggle against entropy, hanging on to old loves, old lives, icons and detritus of the past. But in this case, the vampires really feel young. They are teenagers, out to raise hell and have a blast. Now, to be fair, as a teen, I don’t think I would have really enjoyed the way they spend their time: riding their motorbikes on the beach, being mouthy to security guards (and bitey), and chomping down on skulls (as mentioned last post, I was the kind of kid who preferred indoor fun) – but regardless, their simple joy in it is really infectious. If you stop and think about it too much, it can get silly, but in the moment, it feels sooo cooool.

And that youth suffuses the film – not necessarily realistically, but nonetheless effectively. Consider the early scene at the concert on the beach where Michael first catches a glimpse of Star. Look at how much fun everyone is having watching the incomparable Tim Capello, muscled and oiled, blowing on his sax. The two in the front head banging at each other behind the blazing barrel. The exuberance of the crowd. The preponderance of balloons for some reason. Capello himself, belting out how he ‘still believes.’ It’s not a realistic presentation of youth culture (Are teens ever really this unguarded and joyful? Do beach punks spend a lot of time riding the Merry Go Round or reading stolen funny comic books?), but it feels true, if not real. And it sets the stage for the immediate chemistry between the two young romantic leads.

Star seems to float through the crowd, flowing against the driving current, and Michael’s stillness pops amongst the throng, so fixed he is on her ethereal sensuality. It works. I don’t think the film does much with them after this point (I mean, they hook up, but I think the film and the viewer get more interested in other elements), but in this scene, there is a spark – it is exciting, and it is sexy – and there is an eternal promise of youth – of a physical attraction that needs no details – the body recognizes what it wants – and is recognized in turn.

Now, this had originally been planned as more of a Goonies style kids movie, with the vampires aged much younger, ala their Peter Pan namesakes, but when Schumacher came on board, he wanted to make it sexier and aged them up to older teens, opening the door to the motorbikes, smoldering looks, sexy times, and the general MTV of it all – a kind of unattainable platonic ideal of teenage wildness. But we still have the kids’ adventure in Sam and the Frog brothers – much easier to identify with both as a kid and an adult – because of course I wasn’t out there in the night causing trouble, hanging off train tracks, and flirting with the night – I was reading comic books, obsessing over the mastery of lore and endless minutia. Sam is enough of an outsider (a proud comic book geek and also quite queer coded), while also being sharp and funny, and loyal, to serve as an appealing audience surrogate for us to ride along with. He is brave enough to accompany the Frog brothers into the depths of the cave to stake a vampire to save his brother (getting coated with surprisingly glittery blood), but he’s not so cool that he won’t constantly be freaking out about the cobwebs and the insects and the gross of it all (just as I would – and I suspect most people would – few of us are as fearless as we might like to think).

With Sam and the Frog brothers, we get one of the essential 80s ‘kids-on-bikes-fighting-monsters’ movies, and I don’t know how a person could resist the thrill of the montage of them riding around town, filling their water guns with holy water, practicing archery, and bashing cloves of garlic in preparation for the coming showdown with the undead. I’m a sucker for that stuff. Again, it could be cheesy, but in its earnestness, it is never embarrassed by its own enthusiasm – it is never too cool for school, and I get to adopt the same posture as a viewer, and unabashedly enjoy myself.

The “hooting and laughing” is perhaps lacking the nuanced specificity of naturalism (Émile Zola, this is not), but it is in earnest. David’s pitch to Michael of never growing old and never dying and keeping the party going forever isn’t sustainable (you can’t just hoot and laugh forever – it would get pretty boring), but it also feels earnest; it feels true as he utters it (and Keifer Sutherland brings real charm to the part, each smirk a provocation and an invitation). Finally, the love among the family (Sam, Michael, Lucy, Grampa, and Nanook the dog) feels solid and lived in. I believe them as brothers – they have an emotional and physical intimacy – loving but also confrontational – irritating each other but still supportive.

I appreciate the sardonic warmth between Lucy and her father (what a lovably cantankerous old coot), just as I love her moving attempts to keep connecting with her sons, even as they grow apart from her. When Michael comes home in the morning, ragged after a night of vampire drama and Dianne Wiest’s Lucy asks if they’re still friends, and if so, if they can act like it, I ache for her. She really is a good mom, doing everything she can, and life is hard, and this distance hurts. Across the board, there are so many elements that could come off as a kind of dated kitsch or 80s excess, and yet, for me, it never does. My heart runneth over with joy, with glee, with love.

The teenage urge to run away into the night and be forever free has a power and a seductive allure, but so does the familial connection, the love that binds, that ties one down; that is not freedom, but it is worth it. I’ve barely published on this blog this summer because I’ve been dealing with my own adult responsibilities, and in that, there is a weight, and sometimes it would feel good to be able to run away from adulthood and duty and ‘the real world,’ but love is a thing. And it ultimately feels better to be able to fulfill those responsibilities than it would to ride around, hooting and laughing. I guess to keep breathing, a person needs at least a taste of both, and this film offers that.

Is this a scary movie? Certainly not. Is it even a horror movie? I guess, maybe? It is definitely a great vampire movie, and vampires are monsters, and monsters are in horror movies, so let’s say sure. Given its mild degrees of violence, sex, and naughty words, I don’t quite know how it earned an R rating back in the day, but that said, it doesn’t feel at all de-fanged – it isn’t a little kids’ vampire movie. It just isn’t that focused on the scares or the gross outs (though there are some cool sequences and ideas – the vamps hanging upside down by their toes like bats, implosions, explosions, the bloody plumbing, death by stereo). But it’s got the vibes, and the laughs, and the good times, and a great soundtrack and an awesome look. And on top of all that, for my money, it’s got the greatest last line in any movie, ever.

—

So that’s The Lost Boys. This was a shorter post than usual, and perhaps less detailed than I often go, but I hope that’s ok – I’ve been trying to sit down to write it for almost the last two months (I know I’ve mentioned this once or twice, but it really has been a long summer), and in the end, I just felt like praising some of the things I so enjoy in this bit of comfort food entertainment. If you’ve never seen the movie, I doubt this sufficiently described it to you. But if you’ve read the whole thing, maybe you’ll be interested to go check it out. I think you should.

Accidentally backing into positive messaging: Sleepaway Camp

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So it was June, “pride month,” (or at least it was when I sat down to start this post weeks ago – this is certainly coming late, but things last forever on the internet, so whenever you read this, imagine it’s still June), and I always try to mark that with some LGBTQ+ related content. Frequently that means checking out some good “Queer Horror” that I’ve not yet seen, but as alluded to in my last post, life is currently more than a little difficult (an understatement) and surveying a bunch of stuff I haven’t watched before in the desperate hope that some of it will be worth writing about is honestly more work than I’m currently capable of putting in.

But you know what I can do? Re-watch a flick I’ve seen again and again a couple more times, a picture that I love, a movie that could be termed a “problematic favorite,” but which I think, while it could be read as harmful and mean spirited, comes across as almost weirdly progressive and open minded – ah yes, the eternally watchable paradox that is Sleepaway Camp.

And I think this will be short. While there is so much to vibe on in this odd, endlessly sleazy, entirely lovable little gem, and there are one or two “big ideas,” mostly I’m just going to rave about it a bit and put myself to bed.

But I must issue a big spoiler warning on this one. It is literally impossible to discuss the significance of this flick without alluding to “the twist” that comes at the end. If you haven’t seen it yet – go, go, go! Watch it first and then come back here. It is more fun than you can imagine, and it’s streaming for free on Tubi (probably other places too) and I know it’s hitting Shudder in July. I probably won’t even summarize the plot – just give it a watch and come back (please come back…).

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

How is this movie so good? It doesn’t at all seem like it should be. And I don’t even mean good in terms of representational issues for its gay and trans characters – a surprisingly positive element which I really don’t feel was intentional, but no, I mean the movie itself, as a whole works. From what I’ve seen, the writer-director, Robert Hiltzik (whose only other credit, outside of producing the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th movies in the Sleepaway Camp series, is writing and directing the 5th movie, Return to Sleepaway Camp from 2008), wasn’t particularly a horror guy, so much as for his first feature, he simply wanted to do something cheap that would make money. He filled his movie to the gills with elements intended to get a rise out of people, almost all of which are, to some degree, in poor taste. While some performances are solid, plenty are, let’s say, unique. There are weird continuity issues. Some dialogue stretches credulity. So many elements seem like they should only be able to be appreciated as unintentional camp, something “so bad, it’s good.” But somehow this movie is so much better than that. Is it campy? Yes. Does it have weaknesses? Yeah – but a) they’re fun and b) who cares?

I guess she cares…

So what makes it so much fun, and beyond that even, what makes it so good? On one level, the outré nature of it all, the over-the-top willingness of Hiltzik to take things to shocking extremes, is genuinely a hoot. I love that this is one of the few camp based slashers that is really about the kids at camp, where one of them is the killer, and most of the victims are kids as well. You don’t often get that and, on a horror level, it’s striking. I don’t know that it’s ever scary, but it does “go there” shamelessly, time after time, and that feels special. I also love how terrible so many of the adults are, like Mel, the camp owner (Mike Kellin, a real treat), who covers up all the murder cause he doesn’t want parents to find out, and who is at least in his 60s and is all a flutter cause he’s going to have a date with the proudly bitchy counsellor, Meg (“M.E.G., Meg”), who’s probably 16 or something. But age inappropriate discomfort doesn’t stop there – we also have the head cook, who is a legitimately predatory pedophile and doesn’t care who knows it, openly lusting after the pre-pubescent children at the camp, all of the other adults mostly ignoring him with a shrug, and laughing it off with a “man, you sure are a creep, ha ha ha.”

And the element with the truly repellent cook brings me to the other side of this movie. While it is definitely campy as all get out and has some weird turns of performance and loads of things that are so much fun because they’re kinda silly (of special note is the cop who in his first appearance has a real mustache, but in his second, it is clearly fake because the actor got another role between shooting days that required him to shave it off), it is surprisingly grounded and weirdly believable.

This facial hair, however, is weirdly unbelievable.

The kids generally know the adults are awful – they get that the cook is dangerous and should be avoided, but they don’t talk to other untrustworthy grownups about it – what would even be the point? – they just have to navigate the dangerous world in which they live. They feel like real kids (and the native Long Islander in me gets a kick out of their accents). And one of the other things that makes the film so ‘real’ is how terrible the kids can be too. They swear a blue streak with great verve and creativity – they are cruel to each other – they bully and belittle – and then they largely get their comeuppance.

Mean girls – Judy and Meg.

And in those scenes of revenge, the movie earns its horror movie street cred – the budget was clearly not large on this one, but the kills (and/or mutilations) are really excellently staged and the practical effects read very well – and this flick has a significant body count. The movie isn’t scary per se, but its gore is solid and its suspenseful kill scenes are legitimately exciting. Scalding burns, death by bees while on the john, decapitations, water bloated bodies with snakes squirming out of their mouths, Judy’s hair curler shoved…someplace left to the imagination – the effects do not disappoint, nor their filming.

But then we get to the heart of it – the characters at the core of the story, and with them, the inclusion of this sleazy little slasher in the ‘queer horror’ canon. I said I wouldn’t really summarize, but the film centers around Angela, a young girl whom we first meet (as a young boy) in an opening scene in which her father and sister are killed in a terrible (and (unintentionally?) hilarious) boating accident. She’s taken in by her aunt Martha, a delightfully odd character (played by a woman, but who comes across as a drag queen presentation of some kind of dissociative state) who decides that though Angela is a boy at the time of adoption, she has always wanted a little girl and so that is what Angela will be (none of this is revealed until a flashback in the last couple minutes of the movie – until then, the viewer is meant to assume that Angela was the little girl at the beginning of the movie and that it had been her brother that died).

Aunt Martha, lost in, let’s call it “thought.”

By the time we meet Angela presenting as a girl in her teen years (Felissa Rose), when it’s time to go to camp for the first time with her cousin, Ricky, she is a girl – there is no sense of a “boy” passing. But she is not well – quiet, withdrawn, and painfully shy, she is a target for the cruel bullying of the worst elements of childhood. Clearly she has been damaged by the loss of her family in such brutal fashion before her eyes, and more, which I’ll come to in a bit. But that doesn’t stop her from enacting her bloody revenge throughout the film on everyone who harms her or is even a little bit mean to her.

Of course the film doesn’t come out and show her doing it – it tries to maintain suspense until the very end as to who is doing the killing, leaving at least some breadcrumbs leading to her cousin – who has a short temper, and is touchingly protective of his vulnerable younger cousin. And I kinda love him for it. He’s been coming to this camp for years. He has friends and a sense of status in the pecking order of the Lord of the Flies dynamics of kids, supervised by slightly older kids out in the middle of nowhere. He could so easily be as terrible as so many of his cohort, abandoning his delicate cousin/adopted sister to the pack of wild dogs (meaning middle-school aged monsters), or even turn on her to gain points – but time and time again, he is willing to throw down at the drop of a hat with anyone who looks at her funny. For a mean little bastard, I find him really sweet, and good. I believe he really cares about her.

But by the end, Angela’s secrets come to light as some of the older counselors (the two who seem to care the most about their young charges) find her naked on the beach, cradling the severed head of Paul (Ricky’s best friend, who’s been courting Angela all summer and finally got her to meet him on the beach after the social – he generally seemed like a sweet kid, but could also get a bit sexually pushy). After a quick flashback of Aunt Martha informing her mutilated and emotionally scarred young adoptee that they will have to change genders because “another boy in the house simply would not do,” the counselors see Angela’s penis (a local college student stripped down and put on an Angela mask for the scene) and utter the shocked line, “how can it be? My god, she’s a boy!” We zoom in on Angela’s wild, mad, iconic face (which Felissa Rose does to pose with fans at conventions to this day), the music stingers rise, we fade to green and the credits start rolling to the tune of the super groovy “Angela’s Theme (You’re Just What I’ve Been Looking For).” It is an intense, wild, really quite surprising ending to a very weird, and utterly watchable film.

So in the end, it is clear that the movie falls in with the unfortunate trope of the ‘trans killer’ (see Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, etc.), which can be seen as really quite dangerous and harmful in an age of moral panic fueling “bathroom bills,” demonizing particularly trans women as a threat to cis women in ‘women’s only spaces.’ And yes, the movie can fairly be accused of that. But upon first watching it, I really had a different vibe. As a cis-het guy, I can’t claim anything about how a trans person would read this film (but I know it is embraced by some), but I immediately and strongly felt it was (probably accidentally) quite progressive, and offered an argument for trans rights. Yes, Angela has been deeply broken, both by family trauma and by a forced gender swap, but that’s kinda the point, isn’t it? Being made to live as someone who she isn’t has irreparably damaged her. Forcing someone to present as other than themselves is deeply psychologically harmful – and it’s something that as a society, we should not do.

And at the same time, when we meet Angela as a teenager, I feel she is a girl; I don’t feel there is coercion at the moment, and then, as a trans character (and not simply someone forced to transition), she is such a sympathetic figure. Beyond gender issues, it’s hard not to side with her, though by the end, we understand she has killed or at least mutilated a lot of people, some just for the infraction of being irritating little kids. In her weird, socially awkward way, she serves as an identifiable stand in for every young person who feels on the outside, who feels uncomfortable with the other kids, who feels “queer” in any sense of the word (having to do with sexual identity or otherwise). I never went to a sleepaway camp and I can’t imagine having done so (quoting another camp movie, Wet Hot American Summer, I was one of “the indoor kids”) – but I can only think that I would have felt as awkward and uncomfortable as she seems to. In the end, we understand that she is the killer, but she has always been the protagonist, and I feel the film is rather on her side (even if it also feels like every choice was made simply for shock value – and in a weird way, that makes its progressive messaging feel more pure and affectingly effective than something that actually set out to make a ‘positive statement’ and that therefore comes across as lame and pedantic).

Furthermore, in looking at this as a movie for ‘Pride Month,’ I feel there are so many other elements that speak for its inclusion. First of all, there is the much above-referenced ‘camp’ quality of the whole film. It navigates the outrageous and the absurd and the taboo in a way that I most associate with artists who identify as queer, ala the John Waters voiced character on an episode of The Simpsons defining camp as “the tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic” – this movie does that (e.g., Aunt Martha the female drag queen, the extreme, and often fun and funny murders of small children and predatory adults, fake mustache cop, the teen girl on water skis, screaming, for what feels like forever, for the other teens to turn the boat before they run over Angela’s family, the over-the-top, nigh glorious, bitchiness of Meg and Judy, the artsy quality of Angela’s character explaining flashbacks). But past that, it almost seems that there is a kind of ‘gay male gaze’ in terms of the camera. I find it striking that in a movie that goes so far out of its way to be taboo and controversial, there is absolutely no female nudity, but you get a bunch of boys going skinny dipping together (and when they’re not naked, they are all wearing the shortest shorts and crop tops). And finally, there is Angela’s father. We learn over the course of the movie that he was gay and we see him with his lover in one flashback that I suppose is intended to show Angela and her sister being psychologically scarred by seeing their dad in such a sexual situation, but which really comes across as tender and loving and entirely positive. He is no ugly stereotype – in what little we see of him, he seems like a good dad who loves his kids and who is in a healthy, loving relationship. I think maybe this is supposed to shock, but mainly I’m just shocked that it all seems so warm and affirming.

And somehow this whole ridiculous, sordid, disreputable film feels just that way throughout – warm and affirming, while being filled with a superabundance of gory little kid murders, pedophilia, cruelty, and child abuse. It’s great. From the very first scene, seemingly after the events of the film had concluded, showing a broken down, abandoned summer camp where something terrible must have happened, overlaid with the sounds of children playing, I feel that pretty much everything just works – a creepy atmosphere is laid down, and I am ready for it – we are then treated to a cavalcade of laugh out loud moments of violence and pain, and ultimately, it all culminates in an (apparently) inadvertently positive message about allowing children to live as they are (specifically, expressing the gender they themselves feel to be accurate) – it’s better for them (and safer for us).

Mel agrees.

This really has become one of those warm blanket movies for me over the years and it has been a pleasure to spend a little time revisiting it right now. Sometimes life can really get difficult (see the fact that it’s been more than 5 weeks since my last post), and it might be hard to think you can handle it all, but if Angela can persevere and thrive (she goes on to do quite well for herself in the rest of the movies – all of which are more intentionally campy than this, but aren’t nearly as satisfying for me), so can we all.

Happy summer everybody – if you go to summer camp, don’t be mean to anyone (for that matter, if you don’t go to summer camp, don’t be mean to anyone either) – or else…

Brandon Cronenberg: flesh, mind, and loss of self in Antiviral, Possessor, and Infinity Pool

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I don’t know why I haven’t watched any of the films of Brandon Cronenberg yet. When I was first really getting into horror as a genre, his dad, David Cronenberg, was my absolute favorite director, making work so rich in concept, with gripping ideas that challenge and stretch the idea of the body, the mind, the self, and not in arsty, self-important packages, but in wild, fleshy, sexual, bloody weird rides (I also don’t know why I haven’t written about any of David Cronenberg’s films yet – one of these days). And when the younger Cronenberg hit the scene with his 2012 premiere, Antiviral, the buzz was that he was similarly invested in big concepts, but that he was also absolutely his own artist, with his own clear voice. By all counts, I should have leapt at the chance to check him out. But somehow, I never did.

Then in 2020, after some hiatus, he returned with Possessor, and I heard from voices I trusted that it was not only an interesting and accomplished work, but that it was also really exciting and intense. But, still, I didn’t watch it for some reason. Finally, most recently, about a year ago, his Infinity Pool made a splash (whoops – sorry, ugh), dividing audience opinions, but sounding absolutely intriguing, and did I rush out to the cinema to see it? No, of course not. Why? Who knows? I am a mystery even unto myself.

Anyway, this week, I just want to jump in with both feet and give my first impressions on his catalogue as it currently stands. I haven’t watched any of these movies yet, so I don’t know what I’ll think, but I sure hope I’ll like them. Either way, I’m going to try to keep this short. I usually run on longer than intended, and it means I don’t publish nearly as often as I’d like, so these will be off the cuff and to the point. If there’s something there, I reserve the right to return to it sometime in the future in depth.

And of course, there will probably be some spoilers…

Antiviral (2012)

What an interesting idea: It’s the near future and society’s obsession with celebrities has ballooned to wild new proportions. Butchers sell hunks of protein grown from the harvested cells of famous people, fans can indulge their darker impulses in computer generated interactions with their celebrity crushes wherein they can dominate, humiliate and/or torture them, and most significant for our story, there is a thriving market in viruses collected from the famous that people pay big bucks to have themselves infected with, attaining a biological intimacy with the objects of their fascination. The companies that buy and distribute these illnesses put them through a copy protection process to make them non-contagious so no one can contract some starlet’s herpes or stomach flu for free. But of course, with such a limited good, there is a thriving black market in hacked viruses.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a virus selling clinic and regularly infects himself with their wares to smuggle them out of the premises so that at home he can use a stolen machine to crack their copy protections and sell them to an illicit distributer. He is an intriguing figure, a cipher at the heart of the story. He is always terribly ill, and there is a kind of mystery that runs through it all of what exactly he gets from this. Does he need the money that badly? Is he some kind of celebrity obsessive as well? By the end of the film, it is revealed, but not understanding where he’s coming from is really surprisingly compelling. And Landry Jones is so very good in the role, exuding a weird, sickly charisma throughout. He is pale and clammy and disgusting, but also captivatingly intense in a quiet, broken way. It’s a great performance and it left me wondering what he’s been up to in recent years. I feel like he was exploding in the 2010’s, but I haven’t seen him in a while. I hope he’s ok and not infected with a terrible celebrity illness (I just checked – he’s alive and working – good).

Anyway, Syd is sent to harvest a pathogen from one particular star, and in the process, before the virus has been copy-protected, he steals some, directly injecting a bit of her blood into his veins. You might say this was a mistake as, after he wakes up from what might have been a mini-coma, he sees a news report that she’s died of a mysterious disease, and all of a sudden, he’s thrust into the twists and turns of a conspiracy/corporate espionage thriller as various figures hound and kidnap him, all seeking the valuable commodity flowing through his vascular system. Also, he’s probably going to die.

Sadly, whereas the first act had totally enraptured me and I was so taken with the initial ideas, particularly the interrogation of what celebrity even is and how it connects with other motivating works of the imaginary, more than one character likening it to a kind of faith, in the second act, I just got a bit lost in the circuities of the plot. There is rather a lot of plot. Maybe too much plot. I faded a bit… But in the end, I’d say the final act clicked into place, with Syd regaining control of his story, the concept of celebrity as a kind of cannibalistic fetishism taken to its logical conclusion and, in a private moment, Syd’s compulsive motivations are revealed. It was a satisfying ending, though it was a shame that I had drifted somewhat along the way.

But I’ve gotta say, as a first feature, wow – I’m impressed. It has a bold, confident visual style; it is full of ideas (and Brandon Cronenberg wrote it in addition to directing, so he deserves full credit for exploring those ideas); and while it is impossible not to compare it to the work of his father (there is obvious common ground between this film and other works that play in the borderlands of biology, identity, and technology such as Videodrome, Rabid, or Existenz), I also think a clear authorial voice can be heard. It’s also interesting that the first film of an artist who knows he’s working under his father’s long shadow is entirely focused on the idea of famousness. I’m super curious to watch the next couple of movies and see how he’s developed since his debut.

Possessor (2020)

I think it’s easy to read artistic growth from Antiviral to this. Though the first film impressed me, this one (also both written and directed by Cronenberg) really got under my skin. Again, we have a high concept sci-fi, near future horror-thriller premise, but whereas I felt the big ideas in the first film ended up getting somewhat sidelined by the corporate espionage plot in the second act, in this case, the central conceptual issue just metastasizes throughout the film, with a haunting and horrific payoff by the end. It was all a fascinating, intense ride that was both intellectually challenging and emotionally weighted, with moments of thrilling excitement and horrific acts of violence or violation of self. I was captivated start to finish and it left me in an odd state for a while afterwards.

This time, our protagonist, Tasya Vos (played by Andrea Riseborough, among others) is a fancy assassin whose consciousness is technologically implanted into the brains of unwitting patsies that she rides to get access to high level targets, eliminating them and then getting pulled back to her own body as she makes her host commit suicide, thus fully severing the connection. You get the impression that she is very good at her job, but that it has taken a toll on her psychologically and emotionally. Her relationships are strained at best – it’s as if when she’s in her own body with her husband and son, she is merely playing the role of “Tasya,” and it is a role for which she must prepare, practicing her lines in advance, getting her vocal inflections right for this character, this job: herself. And the job comes with her in other ways. In moments of intimacy, whether sexual or filial, she flashes on violent memories of time she’d recently spent in a host.

Similarly, when we see her do her job and enter a new person (which is not only physical – she must study that person’s life, relationships, and mannerisms to be able to slip into them for days without raising flags), there is a difficult process of adjustment, finding her new legs both metaphorically and literally. This process is not easy or obvious. No matter how much a host has been studied in advance, upon taking over, it is impossible to fully recreate their persona, and when, for example, a host’s girlfriend questions why he’s acting so strangely, it is a high stakes, deeply emotional improv game to maintain the illusion with one who knows that host so well. Similarly, there are basic corporeal elements at play, such as simply living within a new physical form, sometimes with different parts – a sex scene which she has in a male body is more than a bit of a trip – for her and for us.

And it must be said that while Riseborough is excellent when we see her, most of the film consists of Tasya in another body, that of Colin Tate, and that therefore, she is largely portrayed by Christopher Abbott, who does such a nuanced job of playing her playing him. This is a concept that lends itself to rich, subtle performances (Jennifer Jason Lee also stands out as Tasya’s handler) – a big sci-fi idea that depends not on special effects, but on special actors.

Of course, the job goes south (otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie), and the lines between Tasya and Colin begin to blur. Beyond that, the very idea that Tasya (or anyone for that matter) is a whole person, with full agency and will, is called into question. As the film goes on, we see her more and more untethered – something that may be occurring due to circumstances of the plot, but also may be the state she has been living in for some time, but is only now coming into unsettling focus.

All of this sets up the sci-fi thriller premise, but it must be said that the horror is strong here – both in an exploration of a horrific experience of losing or at least questioning one’s self, but also in shocking moments of tragic violence, as well as a disturbing presentation of the degree to which the individual is not at all inviolable, but is only ever an impermanent approximation, existing temporarily in a web of physical and social contexts.  This is largely played out in performance, but it also gets pretty trippy at times, and I must commend Cronenberg’s fascinating visual elements, mostly filmed in camera with practical effects, which is always refreshing, but here feels particularly significant. In a film this concerned with corporeality, I think an over reliance on CGI would be detrimental.

As I wrote earlier, this exploration of what it is to be a mind in a body plays out over the course of the story, but it must be said, that while the film is big in ideas, and does maintain a kind of hypnotic vibe, that doesn’t make it some kind of art film, prioritizing philosophy over narrative – interesting, but heady and sleep inducing. This is a suspenseful, emotional, and intense movie, and its conclusion, lands with a bleakly chilling gut punch.

A fascinating viewing experience, it really planted itself in my head, leaving me in an uncanny mood, feeling a bit odd in my own body for some time after the credits had rolled. I guess a film must be good if it inspires a minor fugue state, right?

Finally, I keep finding myself coming back to the question of how I might characterize Brandon Cronenberg and how his work should be distinguished from his father’s. There are a great deal of similarities so far. It’s like he’s carrying on the family business of “body horror that philosophically interrogates psychology,” and what a family business – some people just go into shoemaking or accounting or something. But still, I hesitate. It feels facile to simply note how they are thematically similar. There is clearly a mind at work here and it seems unfairly reductive to mention his dad so much when these films have been so strong. Perhaps after watching his third flick, I’ll be better prepared to put my finger on his oeuvre.

Infinity Pool (2023)

As mentioned earlier, when this came out last year, it divided audiences, so I came to it prepared for something, I don’t know, divisive. What I found was a hell of a movie. I wonder if it so split opinion because it was simply Cronenberg’s most widely released and marketed film to date (Antiviral being a first feature, Possessor being a pandemic release, and Infinity Pool starring Alexander Skarsgård, a pretty well-known actor and Mia Goth, who has been knocking it out of the park lately), thus bringing in a wider audience, not all of whom might have been up for what they got. In any case, I loved it. But before getting into it, I must say that for the first two films I was generally able to dance around the plot without really spoiling much – I feel that with this one, I’m going to have to reveal certain details, so if you think you might be interested in seeing it, go do it now. It’s available in many places, though I don’t know which version you’ll get (as with Possessor, there is an R-rated cut and an original cut with more explicit sexual and violent imagery) – I rented the uncut version from the production company’s website – and if you get geo-blocked, as I did, living in Poland, my VPN worked for it just fine.

Skarsgård plays James Foster, a novelist who published his first book seven years ago and is struggling to produce a second one. Seeking inspiration, he and his wife, Em, the daughter of his publisher, have gone on vacation to a gated resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa (shot mostly in and around the Croatian town of Šibenik – which I visited in 2022, about a year after filming). This invented country seems to have fascinating cultural practices, but all that Foster, or for that matter, we, can see are those that are cultivated for tourists, either as gift shop masks, or as economic exchange, the locals literally selling their lives for the entertainment of rich foreigners. At the start of the film, Foster is clearly lost and depressed – going to a tourist resort that offers the most superficial presentation of culture while drinking champagne with the breakfast buffet and lounging by the pool can be pleasant, but unsurprisingly stirs no creative juices – and he doubts if there is even anything within to be stirred. Having married into money, perhaps he is simply now a member of the idle rich, producing nothing of value, empty inside, living a squalid, meaningless life of luxury.

And so, he is given a jolt when they meet another couple at the resort, Alban and Gabi (Mia Goth), who says she’s a huge fan of his novel and is desperately waiting for him to publish again. He is drawn to the seductively frank Gabi, her unfiltered interest in him stroking James’s ego (while she literally strokes other things – at least in the uncut version) and inciting a dangerous risk-taking in him as he drags his wife out of the guarded resort compound for a day trip with the other two into the wilder environs of the country they’ve come to visit – which just means grilling and getting drunk on a beach down the road from their hotel. But then, driving back at night, he hits and kills a local farmer, and that is what really begins our story.

Li Tolqa is a country with a very traditional sense of justice and the local law is that in the case of such a killing, the eldest son of the victim has the right to kill the assailant. However, the country also has an interesting history of folk traditions, mixed with surprisingly modern cloning technology. Earlier in the film, we saw a taste of a local ritual with grotesque masks that revolves around a kind of doubling of character. That has developed into a modern practice of high capitalism wherein they offer Foster the option to have himself cloned, the clone implanted with all of his memories and guilt for the crime, and having that clone killed in his place.

I wonder what the practice was before cloning was perfected – was someone masked in the place of the killer and thus executed? Would that masked person volunteer and their family be compensated or were they discarded serfs without any rights? We’ll never know though as, tourists ourselves, we only know of the extraordinarily expensive service offered to Foster, one that he is willing to avail himself of.

One gets the sense that this cloned execution procedure is a key part of the local economy. We are told that Li Tolqa is a very poor country and that it is dangerous beyond the barbed wire fences of the hotel compound. We understand that tourism is vital to local GDP, and I think this is just another kind of tourism – this is the sort of place where rich westerners can come to behave extraordinarily badly and just pay a financial fee to be excused, exploiting a local population that offers themselves up for that exploitation, for abuse or even death, so profitable is the practice.

Foster is not as horrified at the sight of having himself killed as one might expect. In fact, while his wife is traumatized, he seems happy – finally free, and not just from punishment, but of himself – that schmuck who couldn’t write is dead. Good riddance. Soon he finds himself falling in with a group of terrible, wealthy tourists, pulled their by Gabi, who all embark on acts of debauchery and brutality, safe in the knowledge that they can always pay to have another clone produced and dispatched. They are just having the best time, causing all sorts of trouble for the local people, and James follows Gabi deeper and deeper into their midst, her mask being lowered so slowly that it is hard to pinpoint the truth of her from one moment to the next – it’s a really nicely navigated performance.

For one who has been so disappointed in himself, who already felt creatively and emotionally barren, there is a tempting freedom in this act of self-destruction, killing the failure he once was, now free to hedonistically indulge with no shame, with no concept of ambition or ethics or value. Once haunted by imposter syndrome, he finds that weight lifted from him by means of a literal imposter – who is also, actually, himself – but of course, it does not go well for the imposter.

Whereas in Possessor, one body was being fought over by two personas, each of whom lost something of themselves in the process, here, James instead splits himself, again and again. It is freeing, but perhaps something is erased as well. The film regularly plays with doubts as to who is “real” and who is a copy – characters directly discuss the possibility that they are actually being killed and that the clones are left in their place. That may be, but is never established one way or another, and I don’t think it’s important. I think everything is real and everything is a sham.

By the end, James seems to have been left a husk, hollowed out by this self-destructive experience, but wasn’t he already at the beginning – has this changed him for the worst, or simply revealed to him the degree to which he had already (maybe even always?) been absent? All of the other tourists seem to be having so much fun, and while he goes on this journey with them, and behaves just as badly, he is haunted and miserable. Why the difference? Are they simply gleeful monsters or does his failure to enjoy himself make him somehow worse than them? They all do terrible things, but at least they are enjoying themselves – he is just miserably trying to disappear. And aren’t we, the viewers, implicated in their entertainment: emotional tourists of horrors inflicted on others, and when all is said and done, we just go back to our normal lives, having a laugh, untouched?

I will say that the very ending didn’t blow me away as much as most of the run time had done, but that as a whole, this was quite the ride. The ideas, which still circle around many similar themes from the first two works (bodies, identity, sense and loss of self – all run through with fleshy violence and explicit sexual imagery) are thought provoking and I was emotionally involved in James’s story. Skarsgård and Goth are both great, and the visual style of the film is striking, with crisp, intriguing cinematography and experimental, hallucinatory sequences that get quite creative, and again, Cronenberg leans into practical make-up effects and in-camera visual techniques, and it is a pleasure to see something that feels so solid, even when it’s disorienting and ethereal. This seems at odds, but I think it’s true.

I loved it. The continued play with dividing and questioning the idea of the ‘self’ lands emotionally. The exploration of economic, cultural exploitation rings true – I particularly love how little we actually learn of the fictional setting – as tourists, we merely skate on the surface and are intrigued and enticed by the sense of hidden depths, but feel no need to dig deeper and actually invest thought or energy in learning something. Finally, the drama of James’s self-doubt and the lure of a total freedom from responsibility connected for me – I think it’s something many could experience, though few have the capital resources to follow through on as he does (also, the cloning technology isn’t quite there yet).

For me, I experienced a small taste of something like this during the pandemic: I, like many, can struggle with such an ‘imposter syndrome’ – am I ever doing anything truly worthwhile – artistically, in the theatre, writing this blog, in my teaching, in my interactions with others, or am I just idle, greedy, lazy, indulging in things I like for my own self-serving pleasure? I can only assume this is a commonly felt anxiety and that it’s not just me. But when we weren’t supposed to go anywhere or do anything, and the way we were asked to “help” was to essentially stay home and chill out, I felt a real kind of freedom – no need to perform, to achieve, to plan for the future, or even really imagine it – just read books, watch films, listen to music, exercise, bake bread, work online, and hangout with my wife and my cat – it was a kind of low-ambition bliss that I’d never before felt so allowed to enjoy and that was really hard to come back from. I have (I guess), but it wasn’t automatic. It took effort to get more involved in the world beyond my own four walls again (and now I’m back to feeling guiltily inadequate – that I don’t do enough – artistically, politically, intellectually).

But personal tangents aside, this was a great movie. If you haven’t watched it yet, I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you – go give it a try.

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Yeesh – I’d said I wanted this to be a short, “off the cuff” post, and now, 4,000 words later, we’re still here. But I’m glad to have finally dug into this filmmaker I’d long been interested in and somehow had not yet at all explored – a good project for a week. Which brings me, of course, back to that essential question of how I describe his work, and how I think it might be discussed in comparison to that of his father’s. So first of all, having watched these three films, I think Brandon Cronenberg is a really significant new voice in horror, whose name should come up when people discuss the Ari Asters and Robert Eggerses of the world. He is making really interesting and engaging sci-fi/horror, and really capitalizing on the promise of both halves of that sub-genre. For me, the best sci-fi need not include spaceships or robots, but simply involves positing some technologically based possibility that lets us explore an idea – for an individual, for society, etc. Horror invites us to dwell in a dark place, taking some difficult emotion and following it to its natural conclusion, allowing it to develop into something more than natural, something monstrous or mythic. Cronenberg is doing both of these things, and making exciting, intriguing, visually striking stories to boot (writing this post, I find myself overusing and unable to find enough synonyms for ‘interesting,’ ‘intriguing,’ and ‘fascinating’ – that says something about the nature of the work).

Of course, this is quite a similar sandbox to that which his father, David Cronenberg, has long played in, and there are striking overlaps of their recurring themes. In both cases, the physical body is often foregrounded – flesh is important, as is the breaching of its boundaries, which means sex and violence are front and center. And all of this focus on corporeality results in an exploration of the mind and how its sanctity, its permanence, its sense of being discrete and whole might be re-imagined, challenged, or even abandoned. Furthermore, at a higher level of abstraction, commerce often becomes involved – a meeting place of desire and physical reality, with the body and self in play. In both creators’ work there is a tension between a cerebral, philosophical exploration and a visceral emotionality. Yeah – in many ways, their work is not all that dissimilar.

And yet, their films do certainly feel different to me – and clearly have different minds behind them. One aspect of difference may simply be technical – between film stocks and the capabilities of special effects, a body horror/sci-fi piece made in the late 70s/early 80s is bound to look different than one made forty years later. But there is also a difference of mood that is difficult for me to specify. Perhaps one of these days I’ll have to return to the father in the form of some kind of filmic retrospective to see if I can put it in words, but for now, I just feel that though they both circle around similar ideas, if I were to watch a future film by one of them and not be told which had made it, I expect I’d be able to guess, so specific are their respective creative fingerprints. I fear this is a cop out of sorts, but for now, it’s the best I’ve got.

Either way though, I think I can safely say that both have earned the cost of a ticket from me for anything they make going forward.