Released on Netflix last fall with little fanfare, this was one of the best releases of 2020 and a really impressive first feature from writer-director, Remi Weekes (officially one to watch). The initial premise is an emotionally fraught spin on a haunted house story: a Sudanese couple manage to escape civil war and make it to the UK as asylum seekers, losing their daughter to the Mediterranean. They are sent to a bleak town somewhere in England and set up in a run-down house. As refugees, they are instructed to fit in, to not ‘be a problem,’ to assimilate. They are also told that they cannot leave this house and if they do, it could be grounds for denying their asylum. Of course, the house is haunted.
We see the husband try hard to acclimate and adopt local custom and dress while the wife tries to hold on to her culture, her past, herself. The haunting serves to exacerbate the conflicts between them. And their refugee status serves to answer the question of ‘why don’t they just leave?’ All of the horror, and there is solid, grisly, gooey, unsettling horror, feels like a metaphor for the experience of being an asylum seeker, needing to do everything you can to stay in a place that does not want you there, that tries to intimidate you out, or at least, make your life hell, constantly underlining how much you don’t belong. Often stories of hauntings turn on economic stress – there is a reason this family needs this home and is unwilling to leave, however bad things get. This iteration raises the stakes to the Nth degree in a mutually beneficial fashion – the haunting increases the drama of their emotional situation and that emotion in turn feeds the haunting.
And it all builds to a hell of a third act twist as we come to understand what is really haunting them, how personal it is, and how inescapable. This is not a randomly haunted house, but they are followed by their own ghosts, by the guilt of the horrible choices they have had to make to survive, and there is a real question as to whether it is possible to move forward, to live with those ghosts, to carry the weight of their own decisions and the memories of those left behind. It is really a great, interesting, scary, and meaningful flick.
So, for me the day after Thanksgiving has always been just the most relaxing occasion. Really no responsibilities. Nothing gets scheduled. Just leftovers and hanging out at home on an often cold and grey late November day. Of course, where I live now (Poland), Thanksgiving isn’t a thing and I still have work today, but in honor of this great day of laziness, I think it’s a good day for three short movie blurbs.
The Rental (2020)
Featuring the always likeable Alison Brie, this is a capable little thriller about the potential horrors of AirBnB, though honestly these threats could exist in any rental, hotel, or home, really. Two couples (two brothers with their respective wife and girlfriend, the girlfriend of one being the business partner of the other) take a weekend away at a beach house only to be targeted by a mysterious voyeur who has rigged the house with hidden cameras to capture any misbehavior that might ensue, such as infidelities among the group or murders carried out in fits of passion.
The couples are well drawn and the dramatic tension amid the party of young professionals plays out very effectively, thanks to the solid, small cast. This is a very contained piece, with the pressures of location and situation and relationships compounding until characters snap and, in some way, reveal themselves to themselves and to each other. It can sometimes be emotionally uncomfortable, but it should be, and the tension of the potential blackmail/home invasion is taut and effectively exciting.
As mentioned, late in the film, this becomes more of a home invasion as the unseen cinematographer starts physically attacking the couples. That part has some jumps and starts, but the film really could have worked without it. I figure the point of the story is that, left to their own devices, these four would probably screw up their own lives anyway, but the situation adds fuel to an otherwise low burning fire, causing explosions that can’t be walked back from. But, the third act was still fun and took us in another direction.
Also, I suppose, the movie wants us to just feel uncomfortable staying anywhere that isn’t our own home. Jaws for the short term rental market.
It’s great when you’ve long heard the praises sung of some obscure flick and when you finally sit down to watch it, even if it’s only a low res copy of an old VHS recorded off of TV, posted on Youtube, it really delivers the goods. What a treat. This is one of those.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)
Aired on CBS as a TV movie of the week circa Halloween 1981, this really almost feels like a theatrical feature. Frank De Felitta’s film, reportedly low budget (and I suppose it has few locations or technical requirements), looks so much better than plenty of things that made it into the cinema, and certainly better than many low budget features today. And it really works. Using simple means, it has atmosphere for days. The performances from a bunch of recognizable character actors are great. There is tension and suspense, and an emotional payoff at the end of this tale of possibly supernatural vengeance.
The story feels like something out of Tales from the Crypt, or an old horror comic, but is presented very cleanly, with warmth and humanity. In a small town in the south, Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake), a developmentally disabled man, is hunted down and executed by a gang of good ol’ boys who have never liked him and in this moment believe him responsible for the death of a young girl. His mother had hid him in plain sight, disguised as a scarecrow out in a field, and when the posse finds him, he is totally defenseless. It is only after putting 21 gun shots into him that they hear on the radio that Marylee, the young girl, is alive, and that Bubba had in fact saved her life. They stick a pitchfork in his hand and claim self-defense.
The charges against them dropped, the four killers, one by one, find a scarecrow just like the one Bubba had been hiding in planted near their homes, before they are dispatched in some brutal manner (such as being ground up in farm equipment). In the end, it comes down to the ringleader, local Postman Otis Hazelrigg (Charles Durning), who terrorizes various people he suspects of being behind the Scarecrow before finally and satisfyingly receiving his comeuppance. It is in this evil-act-being-punished story arc that we really summon the old EC material. That and some solid creepy imagery.
And the environment is such a player here. In the beginning, when we see Bubba and Marylee making daisy chains in a meadow, the world feels so idyllic, at peace. But after Bubba’s murder, the wind suddenly rises to a gale, threatening to blow his killers away. We see a similar moment after the men are found not guilty and sit in a local bar, drinking and celebrating. It is as if Nature itself rages at the crime, as if the killing tears a hole in things (society, Bubba’s family, justice) and from that hole, something terrible must come.
For a simple made for TV movie, the film making is strong – dynamic and dramatic. Dutch angles and snap zooms abound, and there is some really fun, playful, over the top editing. A mother’s scream cuts to the squeal of truck tires tearing around a corner, carrying bloody minded vigilantes. A gas nozzle on a stove is intercut with a blazing fireplace, zooming in closer and closer on each until the house erupts in flame. A man hangs from a light over his brush machine, screaming for help before losing his grasp, right before a cut to a dollop of red preserves (raspberry perhaps?) being dropped onto a white plate at breakfast the next morning. While the story itself is dark and heavy, the film is fun, the film making even somewhat whimsical. A slasher aired on network TV in prime time, we see some drops of blood, but minimal gore.
But have no doubt; the story has weight and heft. There is real threat and surprising brutality. Durning’s Otis is, over the course of the story, revealed more and more to truly be monstrous. This was evident from the beginning, but Durning really goes to town as his character is overcome by paranoia, taking out his fears on his own compatriots, Bubba’s poor mother, and even young Marylee (whom Bubba’s mother had accused him of watching with ill intent).
There is a scene of note when he’s tracked the poor girl to the church’s Halloween party and corners her in a hallway to grill her about Bubba’s mother. She looks so uncomfortable in this older man’s presence and the threat that he might try to harm her is palpable. Fortunately, a security guard intervenes, pointedly telling Otis that the party is in the front room. However, it is telling that nothing more is said. This creep is chasing after a child and is obviously up to no good, but the guard says nothing about that, does nothing – meaning that Otis is free to attack her again later. Some things won’t be said, some things will be allowed – at least for certain members of society. Others will just be lynched.
Which brings us to one of the most striking aspects: For a film with no black characters, I think it’s impossible not to see race written all over it. I mean, the movie literally begins with a bunch of white guys with guns, feeling entitled to take the law into their own hands, hunting down an outsider (before there is any word of Marylee being attacked, Otis calls Bubba a ‘blight’ in the town, a ‘weed that must be ripped out,’ and it is obvious that these guys have long been harassing him and beating him for real or imagined infractions) with dogs, and then once he is tied up (with a sack over his head as if ready to be hanged), they gun him down, claiming that they’d felt threatened and were thus justified in their act. And the whole time, they’re having so much fun.
And the thing is, the court ultimately supports them and claims that there is no probable cause on which to base a trial, despite the fact that their victim was found tied to a pole and riddled with bullets. He had been holding a pitchfork (which they planted on him after the fact) and was thus sufficiently threatening to shoot twenty one times. The bias is clear, the judge admonishing the district attorney, “These men are members of the community. They’re not criminals.” Finally, after this verdict comes down, they are met by the joyous cries of the community waiting outside the court. They are welcomed back and everyone can have a laugh about it all at the bar later. Only Marylee and Mrs. Ritter, Bubba’s mother, seem to feel that Bubba’s Life Mattered.
And thus, it is so satisfying to see that somehow justice is being done, that these men who had decided to carry out this extra-judicial killing in turn have no recourse to the law and are hounded, terrorized, and finally killed themselves. In this, the film is also very successful. There is a mystery of who is doing this killing. Is it the bereaved mother? The young girl, driven mad by having her best friend slain? The district attorney, so offended by a miscarriage of justice? Is it Bubba himself, back from the dead. Or is it the wind? The pain? The absence? Just as Otis and his gang desperately try to determine who is after them, it kept me guessing as well until the very end.
This is a great little movie. Maybe it’s not the most harrowing experience ever put to celluloid, but the fear is present. In Bubba’s eyes, glimpsed through holes in the sack before he’s killed. In the four men as they are in turn hunted and killed. In Otis as he throws anyone under the bus who might be a threat to him, murders piling up on all sides. And it does all build to such a terrifically Halloween-y ending: a chase through a pumpkin patch by moonlight before a final act of much deserved vengeance is undertaken, and one last bit of spookiness is revealed.
At the same time, it is an all too familiar parable of justice denied. This week, it seems to particularly reflect real life events, but I don’t think it matters when you’re reading this. The story is sadly evergreen. Some are allowed to kill and some to be killed and scarecrows very rarely rise to see that justice is done.
So I don’t know how the weather is where you are, but here in Poland, it is officially November: cold, wet, grey, dark, and foggy. It’s a good time for comfort – for hot tea and a blanket and a movie you’ve seen a hundred times and could at least half recite. Towards that cushy end, this week, I’ve been listing my ten favorite Comfort-Food horrors. You can find the first five here.
Halloween meatloaf – yum!
Again, these may not actually be my all-time favorite horror films, but are rather those that I might wrap around myself like a warm blanky on a chilly day, and they are here in no particular order (chronological, alphabetical, favoritical, or otherwise). Here are the final five.
Dracula (1992)
Now, this really was one of my absolute favorite movies circa high school and college. I remember going to see it with one of my best friends, both of us wearing vampire fangs to the cinema because we were really cool guys, his mom having bought us the tickets as we were too young. I don’t know how I ate any popcorn. But boy, oh boy, did it make an impression. I’d never seen anything like it before. So big. So sumptuous. So over the top. Just glorious.
It was sold as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” indicating that, for the first time ever, we were going to see a version faithful to the novel, and while it does include images and scenes that hadn’t made it to screen before, it also tacked on a true-love-never-dies central motif (with Mina as the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler’s long lost love) that just captivated my little 14 year old heart. Sometimes this kind of addition can grate (I could do without it in Fright Night, for example), but in this case I think it really contributes to how grand and epic the whole thing is. The costumes, the color, the sexuality, the melodrama – everything is of a piece; everything is lush and lurid and just the right amount of classy.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Wojciech Kilar’s score. I played that thing endlessly. It is so imposing and grandiose, and it pulls everything together. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel it very cleverly references a key theme in the original score that circulated in 1922 with Murnau’s Nosferatu. Have a listen and see what you think.
Finally, the horror/monster elements are just spectacular: the giant bat creature, the werewolf ravishing Lucy, the transformation into a mound of rats, the wives melting together into a three headed spider thing, old Dracula with his weird hair, licking the razor blade or chortling evilly. What is there not to love?
The Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (1987)
Just last week, I wrote about how much I love the 1984 original, and it is honestly hard to choose a favorite between that iteration and this. While the first film features the birth of this essentially scary concept (and is probably the better film), in this one, it may reach its fruition. I think here, we hit peak-Freddy, with all of the playfulness and creativity that the character promises, but without fully tipping over into the splatstick of later entries.
Everything here is just ‘more.’ The kids-vs-monsters story is so satisfying for welcoming in a whole group of troubled teens who can discover their true power within dream and choose to stand against the blade gloved fiend. Sadly, many of them don’t make it to the final reel. The dreams are more fully realized and also more specific to each dreamer, targeting concrete, character based fears – the recovering drug addict forced to shoot up against her will, Krueger’s knife fingers becoming needles, the boy in the wheelchair chased and ultimately destroyed by this object of his figurative and literal entrapment. The sense of adventure is strong, as is the grown-ups-just-don’t-understand element of the sleep center health workers trying to force these kids to sleep, thus dooming them to their dreams.
And again, such dreams. I mean, if we only saw Philip’s death sequence, the film would probably still be a classic. A maker of marionettes and a chronic sleepwalker, he dreams that one of his puppets comes to life, slices open his arms and legs, and rips his tendons out, using them as lines with which to manipulate poor Philip. He is excruciatingly forced to walk to a window, out of which he is dangled. Across the way, the other kids see him, but what they can’t see is a massive spectral Freddy against the starlit sky who cuts the lines and sends Phillip plummeting to his apparently suicidal death. It is gross, and scary, and just awesome.
Its creativity, its sense of adventure, its likable young cast (including the return of Nancy from the first film, back as a psychology grad students to help these psych ward bound youngsters), and its emotional and horror pay offs just bring me back time and time again.
Daughters of Darkness (1971)
So this collection of comfort food movies tends to swing back and forth between character/comedy and atmosphere and this next film, a pillar of the ‘Lesbian-Vampire’ subgenre, is all atmosphere: slow and languid and hypnotic. The film seduces, as does the bloodsucker at its heart, one of the many filmic presentations of Elizabeth Báthory.
A just-married young couple, Stefan and Valerie, get stranded at an off season Belgian seaside resort and fall into the tempting orbit of an ageless, mysterious countess, styled after Marlene Dietrich and embodied by the captivating Delphine Seyrig. We have an impression from early on that the couple may not be well matched (what with him beating her, a general sense of malaise that hangs over them, and also the fact that he’s actually the kept boy of an older gay man back in England whom he calls ‘mother’ – his violence perhaps an outgrowth of his own self-hatred), and the pull towards this chic older woman is strong. By the end, the draw towards both the sanguine and the Sapphic justifyingly wins out.
The thesaurus does not have adjectives enough to describe the lavish-rich-sumptuous-luscious-misty-mesmerizing-opiate charm of this film. It is a hazy dream of fascination and blood-letting and desire. This is helped by the nigh trance inducing score by François de Roubaix. It is always gratifying to indulgently abide in this deeply textured and evocative flick. It’s also funny that a film that is so visual and sensory, rather than verbal, should inspire such rhetorical grandiloquence. And it still feels insufficient.
Scream (1996)
Another film that I clearly remember seeing in the cinema, I was surprised that it became such a hit given how much the packed audience I saw it with didn’t get it. I felt like I was the only person there who liked it, and I’m pretty sure I was the only one laughing. Everyone seemed let down that it wasn’t more of a “scary movie.”
Still, it rightly went on to find its audience and to this day, it is a nostalgically comfortable place to return, a slice of mid-90s just finished high school/just started college life in which to hang out. Of course, Wes Craven deserves his plaudits here, but I really think so much credit falls to Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter; it’s very much the characters that stay with you. Neve Campbell’s Sydney Prescott is the rare final girl who comes back for all of the sequels (usually it’s just the killer). Sure, this means that her fictional life has been rather traumatic, but it is so rare that the direct draw of a slasher is the protagonist as opposed to the masked killer, and in Scream, she is allowed to really hold the center of the frame.
And all of the other characters make similarly strong impressions. It’s really easy to like Dewy and Tatum and Gale and the rest. The relationships between them are fun and funny, and generally believable. Even the characters that can somewhat abrade are enjoyably drawn and are sometimes given great moments of comedy and pathos (“My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!”)
Also, while this is referred to as a slasher (masked killer, body count), narratively, if not in style, it is really closer to a giallo. We have a mystery and a protagonist invested in solving it. There are twists and turns and both the viewer and the protagonist are led to rule out certain suspects only to set up later revelations of murderous intent. And it all plays out in such a fun manner.
Finally, it is thanks to the inclusion of ‘Red Right Hand’ on the soundtrack that I was first introduced to the music of Nick Cave, for which I am eternally grateful.
The Old Dark House (1932)
Have a potato.
Featuring a young couple stranded on a dark rainy night, a mute, drunk beast of a man played by Karloff, a woman in a ridiculously elegant silver gown walking down dark corridors, buffeted by wind and terrorized by distorted reflections in warped mirrors, a very peculiar old chap who really wants you to shut up and eat a potato, an ancient patriarch played by a woman in drag, a young man of the lost generation, still scarred by the very real horrors of the first world war, and a pyromaniac, knife throwing madman locked in the attic, James Whale’s film (post- Frankenstein, pre- The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein) is a victory of style and comedy and atmosphere and camp. And somehow, none of these seemingly contradictory elements cancel each other out, but it’s all held in some kind of delicate balance. Having only seen this and the three other movies of his listed above, I feel that’s a kind of hallmark of his oeuvre (though I’ve never taken in any of his non-horror films, so I can’t say for sure).
I feel this one doesn’t have as high of a profile as the others, probably due to the absence of a famous horror property, but it is no less a treasure. The film making is simply beautiful, notably in the aforementioned scene in which the wife of the young couple, changing out of her wet clothes into something more comfortable – an extraordinary evening gown, is lectured on the wickedness of her white, young flesh by an absurd old woman whose face surrounds her in old, distorted looking glasses. It is, at once, creepy as all get out, funny, weird, confusing, and enticing. This is before the young woman opens the window for no good reason other than having everything dramatically blown about by the howling wind.
This is an odd duck, but a charming one, and always a treat to introduce to someone new. This is a house to which I’m always happy to return, sit by the fire, and try not to get attacked by Morgan, who’s gotten into the gin again. It’s ok if there are no beds. Give it a try. It’s on Youtube.
