Category Archives: Review

Queer Horror II: A Small Shudder Roundup

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Chasing the annual event calendar, I think I’m just barely going to slide in under the line to do a Pride Month post for June (though last week’s film did have a clear queer reading, so that’s something). I do try to mark occasions of note, and as discussed last year, I have an appreciation for “Queer Horror,” the argument easily being made that with its focus on the outsider/the abject/the other/the outré, Horror as a genre is usually fairly “queer” (both in the original sense of the word and as a self-identifier used by those who have historically been othered for their sexual/gender identity). That said, I must again admit that I am not of the LGBT+ community and come to this from without, using the term “Queer” with all intended respect in reference to a film classification, a body of theory, and an identity.

Historically, much of the canon, so to speak, consists of pieces with gay-coded characters, or from LGBT+ creators (who may or may not have been open about their sexuality) fueling queer readings of the films even when sexuality is not explicitly present, but I think in contemporary times, the work has really opened up – it’s easier to find explicit LBGT+ characters and stories, and elements of “queerness” have spread through much of popular culture (though I feel camp as an aesthetic is still pretty niche). So, briefly, this week I’d just like to go over a few films I’ve recently watched (one of which I’d seen before, but rather love and would happily watch again). Somewhat coincidentally, these are all on Shudder (I pay for this service and do try to get my money’s worth). They are, in the order of watching: Spiral (2019), Knife + Heart (2018), and Death Drop Gorgeous (2020). I rather enjoyed all of them (in sometimes very different ways), and I think they represent very different approaches to how a contemporary film might present as “queer horror.”

Spiral (2019)

On one level, this is a fairly rote supernatural thriller. Sometime in the late 90s, a couple moves, with their teenage daughter, to a small town where everyone seems quite friendly, but there is clearly a sinister plot at work under the surface. Odd, spooky things start happening which only one member of the couple is witness to. That one starts panicking that a nefarious cult is targeting their family and that they are in grave danger if they stay, but the other partner sees nothing wrong, and is even irritated at all the craziness. Finally, head swimming with conspiracies and threats, the first partner takes drastic measures, there is a revelation of occult shenanigans, and things go real south real fast, landing with a severe, downbeat ending.

This summation could surely be applied to countless films, but this one comes with one small difference – the couple are two men (crazy, right?). On paper, this choice seems like it could have come from a calculating studio exec, seeking to tap into the current moment and exploit the real life difficulties such a couple would face relocating to small town America, making easy emotional hay out of real traumas to which they might have previously been subjected thanks to their identity. And after watching the film, I read plenty of negative user reviews which said exactly something to that effect. However, I’ve got to say that for me, it really clicked.

We see in multiple flashbacks how Malik (Jeffrey Bowjer-Chapman, who’s great), the partner who sees the danger, was attacked for being gay when younger, seeing his lover murdered before him. This early trauma has shaped him in many ways: making him more of an activist than his current partner and possibly giving him an impulse to live more openly, proudly embracing his identity in defiance of those who would abuse him for it, but it has also disillusioned him of any expectation that others can be trusted, that he will ever really be safe. He knows that though some things have seemingly improved, the world is still the world and there are still people who hate him (because he’s gay, because he’s black, because he’s an outsider from the city invading their small, insular town), who would hurt him (or worse) and his family if given half the chance. His partner, Aaron (Ari Cohen), has just not had the same scarring experiences and thus plays the role of the disbelieving husband demanded by a film like this.

The supernatural-paranoia-cult movie of it all generally works fine (though I suspect some plot elements might not hold up well to scrutiny, and to harp on just one of my least favorite genre tropes, when oh when will helpful ghosts finally learn that the way to issue urgent warnings to a protagonist is not to jump scare out of the shadows, making a creepy elongated face, and shrieking? It. Is. Not. Helpful.), but the addition of the “gay” element really makes the whole film feel like so much more. Malik’s apprehension and dread is palpably grounded in the very realistic possibility that he/they are actually being targeted for being gay (and early on, he does have to deal with their living room being vandalized with homophobic graffiti). This social-emotional grounding lends weight to everything that happens, taking this straightforward cult movie and turning it into a social horror that feels like it’s “about something.”

But this doesn’t reduce the whole film to a mere drama. It is still a horror movie and Malik’s justified and understandable fear, informed by his own terrible experiences, really does make it all scarier, granting a kind of instant pathos as we feel how close these fictional creepy events could be to something all too real and terrifying, as well as giving his character realistic reasons both to trust his gut terror and to deny it, knowing that he could easily just be paranoid following his earlier trauma. Our viewpoint character, we are with Malik as he fears for his family in the face of this looming, mysterious menace, and we are also with him as he doubts his own senses, memories, and judgements – coming unmoored, ‘spiraling’ out of control. We have no better idea of what is real than he does, and his alarm is contagious.

In the end, we learn that they have in fact been targeted for being gay (though not hatefully as one would expect, so much as coldly and opportunistically), that there is actually a dark magic at work, and that Malik was both paranoid and right, and then the movie crashes to a close with a greater commitment to horror than I’d expected of it, both on the immediate, personal level and writ large.

From what I read online, I have the feeling that this one wasn’t super popular with audiences (which quite surprised me given how I’d taken to it), but I have to say it worked for me – both as a supernatural and a social horror film. Admittedly, the first half played better when I was still unsure what was going on and was quite pulled in by its emotional weight, but after growing somewhat shambolic in later scenes, in the last minutes, it stuck the landing. Also, I think this offers an interesting example of one way to do “queer horror” – a more or less by the book horror movie, following the tropes of its given sub-genre, but the central characters are gay, and that gayness is actually part of the plot and not simply incidental. This may still be a case of blatant opportunism following the success of a film like Get Out (I didn’t find much about Spiral’s development), but even if it is, I still found it quite moving, at least a bit scary, and consistently engaging.

Knife + Heart (2018)

Described as a French “neo-giallo,” this is a beautiful, erotic, brutal, confounding, hypnotic, peculiar film that is alternatingly blisteringly intense and dreamily hazy. It gets all the adjectives. Some adverbs too. Set against the backdrop of the French gay porn scene of the late 70s, we largely follow Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis), a director of low budget, but artistically ambitious, gay porn films as her actors start getting picked off one by one by a mysterious masked killer in often disturbingly sexualized fashion. It is all stylish and atmospheric as the day is long: moody scenes at night in the rain, neon lit discos, a constant play of light and shadow and color and sweat, and so, so many cigarettes.

Directed and co-written by Yann Gonzalez, this can be bit of a difficult film. Anne, and through her, we are led on a wild goose chase that takes some weird turns here and there (one key to her investigation turns on feathers found at the crime scenes that a bird psychic with a twisted claw hand identifies as being from the seemingly extinct birds of a forest out of an old legend where she then travels, wanders drunk into the woods until finding an expository graveyard, and learns the killer’s history – ok, sure, why not…) and furthermore, Anne, while magnetic on screen, is a hard protagonist to like. Much of the film revolves around her abusive, drunken, obsessive stalking of her ex-girlfriend, who still works as her editor and puts up with a lot from her. As a viewer, it’s difficult to process this often unpleasant person, so driven by want and artistic ambition, but also so clearly harmful to this woman she purportedly loves (and in one scene sexually assaults) and so coldly willing to exploit the deaths of her ‘friends’ as fuel for her filmmaking (as her co-workers are being hunted down, she begins making her new film – all about a masked killer stalking gay men, recreating the real life deaths of her employees and really upsetting some of the survivors in the process). She is a complicated person whom we spend the whole film with but who is always a bit unknowable. And she’s just not a ‘nice’ person.

Past that, as referenced above, this is a movie that in dreamy fashion is very willing to take its time. It has periodic bursts of violence and flashes of passion, but more often moves at a rich, molasses like pace. This is not to say that it is boring or poorly paced, but you have to be in the right mood to go on its particular ride (and the first time I saw it, back when it was released, I wasn’t quite there). Much of this plays out in Anne’s investigation, one feature that links this to the giallo genre – wherein so often an artist or writer finds themselves, for some reason, investigating a series of murders you might otherwise expect to be police business. In this case though, it is clear why it falls to her – the victims all gay men or trans women, porn actors and prostitutes, the police will not work this case. It’s a joke for them. And as the fear grows around her, Anne finds herself the only one who will make the journey into understanding.

All of that said though, I love it, and I’m so glad I watched it again for this post. I love any film that can so envelop me in its mood, in its setting, in its vibe – however ambivalent that might be. I love the places where it touches horror – there are some absolutely top shelf sequences and we’ll deal with them shortly. I also love a quality here that I’m having trouble putting my finger on – though it sometimes feels like a long walk to get there and some character motivations and emotions feel obtuse, somehow it really got to me and in a final coda (featuring an impossible reconciliation and a loving warmth absent from much of the preceding film) I found myself in tears and not even really understanding why. It’s as if the gestalt of the film’s play of mood and look and mystery took me on an emotional journey more powerful than that of the plot or characters.  There is an almost subconscious emotion suffusing it all that I found very affecting.

But it is in the places that horror meets queer that this movie shines. Central to the killer’s story and motivation is a mixture of repressed homosexual desire, self-hatred, and resentment for those he lusts after, those who can live in the world, as themselves, without shame. Thus, all of the kills are infused with an erotic charge and also a deep emotional weight. Every kill is exciting and scary, as is fitting of a horror/giallo, but it is also terribly sad, a tragedy that does not go unmarked. Generally in your classic slashers, everyone died before the final girl had any inkling that anything had happened. Here, a community is threatened, and they know it. Their friends are dying horribly, and there is room for mourning and dread (though not so much room that Anne can’t take advantage of the tragedy to inspire her new pornographic opus, “Homo-cidal”).

Two deaths bookend the film, making such a deep impression at the beginning and the end that I’d probably love it regardless of whatever else happened between them. Early on, we see a young man in a dark, seedy club, the music pounding, half-heartedly dancing with a couple of guys while he makes eyes with the mysterious figure across the room in a kinky leather mask. He goes with the stranger into a back room and there is a frisson of want, desire, and risk – the thrill and alluring sexiness of putting yourself in the hands of a stranger. He finds himself stripped and tied down to a table, still unaware that anything is awry, so turned on, so up for the sexual adventure. And then it all goes wrong and as he’s being savagely stabbed, the sounds of his dying bring tears to the eyes. Trust given is betrayed. Desire led to vulnerability led to death. It is rough, violent, and sexual; and it just breaks your heart.

All of the intervening deaths have a similar blend of horror and eros, need and trepidation, beauty and tragedy and it is really something special. This leads (via a long and winding road) to a final death, the dispatching of the killer in a porn theatre, where he had been stalking his next victim in a dark room in the back. Having finally unraveled the mystery of who and what and why he is, Anne identifies him and the men in the cinema close in. This is the killer who had been terrorizing their community, and knowing how the police had been so uninterested in offering protection, they move to eliminate the threat themselves. It’s not important that they understand his internalized homophobia, that they sympathize with his childhood trauma and mutilation – they have to defend themselves and each other against those who would erase them from existence – and they do. Finally, one young man, similar in build to the first victim, picks up a knife the killer had dropped, approaches him, and tentatively presses the blade into his chest, before continuing to stab and stab and stab. As he kills the killer, the young man whimpers and cries, echoing the sounds of the first victim’s death. There is tragedy not only in the dying but also in the killing, in the horror he must carry out to know that he and his community will be safe, or at least safer.

It is just freaking gorgeous. And sad. And it sings with pain. And is just so very, very cool. Not all of it feels like a horror movie per se, but the parts that do are extraordinary, and the film as a whole is really special – a rich, sad, evocative piece that worked on me in ways I can’t quite puzzle out, but which left a deep and lasting impression. Beautiful.

Death Drop Gorgeous (2020)

On some levels, this has similarities to the previous film. Again we have a story centered entirely around a queer community, with both LGBT+ victims and killer. Someone is murdering employees and visitors to a drag club in Providence, Rhode Island, and no one knows who or why. But past that, these films couldn’t be more dissimilar. Whereas Knife + Heart is highly produced, artful, and deeply earnest in its emotion and weight, Death Drop Gorgeous is totally independent, low budget, enjoyably trashy, and entirely camp, which is more or less the opposite of earnestness.

From the Providence based queer gore film collective, “Monster Makeup,” this is real indie, regional cinema. Reportedly crowd funded and filmed over a year and a half of weekends, with the writers, director, editors, sound mixers, and producers all playing leading roles, thus minimizing costs, this is clearly a labor of love – it may be a bit rough around the edges and the performances may be broad, but in many ways, they are supposed to be. Plus, the filmmaking is quite strong (really, better than the trailer had led me to expect) and the camp of it all justifies any other apparent weaknesses.

Basically, in high camp style, this is a classic whodunit slasher, though in the final act it takes a turn for the supernatural. The kills are all executed at a high level, both in filmmaking and in practical effects, and they’ve got a surprisingly realistic, visceral quality that I hadn’t expected given the deliberate unreality of much of the rest of the film, making this a stronger slasher than I’d hoped for. In many ways, the kill scenes could have come out of any conventional slasher (but some of the content therein, such as a penis being thrust into a glory hole only to graphically get mulched in a meat grinder, might not be featured in more mainstream fare).

On the mystery level, we’re presented with loads of red herrings as to who the killer might be. Is it the aging drag queen, in danger of losing her edge, who feels pushed aside by a culture and clientele obsessed with youth, beauty, and novelty? Is it the young bartender with a short temper? Is the sleazy, coke pushing club boss somehow behind it all? Could it be the aspiring, but untalented performer who faces rejection at every turn? The movie does maintain a degree of suspense for quite a while, and my only real criticism is that I wish it had waited to reveal the actual killer a bit longer as I felt diminished tension from that point on.

But once we do know the identity of the murderer, the film shifts in surprising fashion, adding a kind of Elizabeth Bathory, drag-vamp note to the final proceedings, which also includes an extended fight scene that goes much longer than one might think, bringing to mind the alley fight in They Live. And when this happens, in spite of the inherent irony of the camp, there is a depth of feeling rooting the killer’s murderous rage. In fact, the film manages to drum up some legitimate emotion all along the way among its cast of comically overplayed queens, pushers, dreamers, and club boys.

Whereas Knife + Heart felt like it was recreating a real community in a time and a place (Paris, the gay porn scene, 1979), Death Drop Gorgeous feels like it comes from a real community in a time and a place (Providence, a group of queer artists, 2020). It may not be realistic in its presentation of community, but it feels truly rooted in the lived experience of its creators. And its ‘faults’ make it all the more lovable. The presence of so many ‘non-professional actors’ (a term which, as someone who has long worked in a kind of pro-am theatre scene, kind of irks me) brings an amateur charm (by which I do not intend  ‘unprofessional’, unskilled, or untrained, but rather, following the etymology of the word, from the Latin “amator,” or ‘lover,’ from “amare,” ‘to love,’ I mean to say one who does an activity for the love of that activity as opposed to purely for a profit motive). Though charm is also brought by the surprising cameo of 80s horror mainstay, Linnea Quigley (who’s brief presence really took me by surprise).

There are also other elements that could seem like a fault, but learning more, just give the film more character. Notably, as so much of the drag performance involves lip syncing, I was puzzled at first that the sound seemed out of sync a number of times during the drag shows (and at no other times) – weird given that it makes it seem that the performers are not lip syncing particularly well – and then I read that the performers had done songs they didn’t have (and couldn’t afford) the rights to and that the filmmakers had to record new songs to match their lips as best they could – which is rather a loveable element that I enjoy more than perfectly synced lips (necessitated creativity more interesting than boring perfection). Also, there are precious few “death drops” in the film (a move from ballroom voguing involving the dancer falling back very suddenly, which should apparently more accurately be called “dips” but come on – “death drop” works better for a horror title), but the one that occurs earns its name.

In the end, this is a fun, personal, idiosyncratic movie that manages to deliver some emotional heft through the campiness. Furthermore, that camp offers value in and of itself, bringing a stylized-vulgar-comic-grotesque-fabulous and inherently queer aesthetic to the film which, regardless of how much more common LGBT+ characters have become in popular media, is still rare and characteristic. This film is all the way over the top, embracing every flaw as a feature of high art. And finally, it really does commit to the horror, going for the gore, for the intensity of the kill in a variety of inventive, gruesome, and delightfully cringe inducing ways.  It’s a good time.

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And so there – I’ve caught up with a few films from the “Queer Horror” collection on Shudder. And there are many other titles there worth the watch, some of which I’ve already discussed here, such as Daughters of Darkness and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary. I also recommend there After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (an odd French sci-fi trip), Demons of Dorothy (also French – very campy short), Hellraiser (a classic though I think mainly considered “queer horror” due to its maker), All About Evil (a fun quasi-John Waters-esque romp starring Natasha Lyonne), Tammy and The T-Rex (a surprisingly gory kids movie), and Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl (an intimate chamber piece of modern gothic). It’s a good collection and there are others I still intend to check out one of these days.

Also, I’ve managed to publish this while it’s still June – so hey, good for me. Now to figure out what I’m writing about next…

The Dreamy Allure of the Night Tide

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So, this week I’m writing from a new location. Typically, I’m based in Poland, but every May/June, I come back to the States to help my parents in Ocean City, MD as they prepare the performance they will give throughout the summer at Jolly Roger Amusement Park (they write, produce, and perform an original short pirate musical every year – with magic, and juggling, and new locations that need to be realized on the outdoor stage – this year, I made a cave). It’s just the three of us doing all the work, and thus it is always a huge undertaking (hence why there’s been more time than I would like between my last post and this), but it’s also satisfying to be able to help my folks out. I’m an only child and I happened to move very far away. Also, it’s a pleasure to spend my days doing physical work (painting/scenic carpentry/prop-building, etc.), whereas much of my labor at home revolves around the computer. It’s an exhausting, but nice, change of pace.

Ocean City is a summer resort town with all your typical features: boardwalk, beach, overpriced chintzy goods (t-shirts, flip-flops you’re gonna lose, etc.), roller-coasters, ferris-wheels, and carnival games where you can win a stuffed pig or something, and I must admit that for years I didn’t have the greatest relationship with the place. We’d moved here from New York when I was a kid, and at the time, the area was much more rural than where I’d come from – I just didn’t feel like I fit in.

But the rides and arcades were fun. And I always loved this ride through haunted house.

But that was middle school – when no one fits in – anywhere – and in the years since, Ocean City has changed, and so have I. The town underwent development of a double edged nature. On one hand, the presence of chain stores and sidewalks makes me more comfortable – it’s nice not to feel so much like some yahoo in a pickup truck is going to run you down when you’re trying to cross the road, and being able to pop into a Starbucks or Panera offers a comfortable place where I can set up with a laptop and relax a bit. On the other hand, I think it’s safe to say there has been some loss of local color. Color I didn’t always appreciate when I was eleven, but outlet malls bring less cultural specificity than something like, say, the kitschy “Shanty Town,” specializing in sea-side souvenirs, one used to pass when walking to the bridge that goes over to the beach.

But as I said, I’ve changed too. Once upon a time, my main association with this place was the natural awkwardness of middle school and the fact that we’d moved somewhere that kids hunted and fished and used racial slurs, and that really was not my scene. Now, as an ‘adult’ (I’m only 44 – am I really an adult?) my association is doing this creative and physical work for my parents, and also just the beach – the ocean – the image of the carnivalesque boardwalk at night (even if I’m not so likely to visit as I’ve rather lost my taste for crowds). And the ocean does have a draw. It’s surprisingly easy to ignore the tanning throng and let the crash of the waves wash over you. It captivates, and mystifies, and intimidates, just going on and on, so much bigger than comprehension, and only ever showing its surface. When I come in the summer, there’s little time for it, but I do value those brief moments when I can go take it in (as I did today to take some of the pictures above). And when I come in the winter, that’s the best – the town empties out and it feels like you have it all to yourself.

And so, to bring things around to the raison d’etre of this blog (in case you were wondering if I ever would), I wanted to focus this time on a bit of coastal horror, taking a look at a special little film, which I suspect is underseen, set in a locale similar to where I currently find myself.

Night Tide (1961)

Directed by Curtis Harrington, distributed by AIP, and set at a seaside boardwalk fun fair (my connection to OC – I imagine this must be similar to what things looked like here 60 years ago), Night Tide was released on a double bill with Roger Corman’s The Raven (which I may write about some day when I return to my series on Corman’s Poe films). Though not actually based on a work of Poe’s, it takes its title from his poem, ‘Annabel Lee,’ (about a lovely young woman who’s died – I know, what a twist! – but seriously, give the poem a read – it’s fun with something like the cadence of an old murder ballad) showing a fragment of the text before the closing credits begin (as one might see in a 60s Corman-Poe joint). It’s also Dennis Hopper’s first starring role and it might be my favorite thing I’ve seen him do. Often carrying a kind of bombast, here he is so understated, simple, and direct in his performance and it is quite captivating (I mean, I also love him running around like a madman with a chainsaw in each hand in Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, and this is pretty much the opposite).

As for the film, it is difficult to classify, but certainly a real treat. You could say it’s fantasy, or a psychological thriller, or a dream piece. You could even say it’s horror – kind of (and I will – I practice big-tent horror classification). On one level, it is the story of Mora (Linda Lawson), who works as a sideshow mermaid, but fears that she is a real monster (a siren), that she has killed men before, that her new beau may not be safe with her; and yet, she feels the call to be who she really is in spite of all this, to answer the call of the ocean, of nature, even if that brings darkness. That’s horror, right?

And it is the story of Johnny (Dennis Hopper), the young man who, having joined the navy to see the world, falls in love with her and goes on a surreal journey into a watery mystery, warned on all sides to cut off involvement with this fascinating young woman, told time and time again that he is in ‘grave danger,’ whether due to the police investigation concerning her dead boyfriends, the ominous implications of a tarot reading, or the old sea captain who explicitly tells Johnny that his girlfriend is literally a sea monster. That also seems like horror.

Finally, the atmosphere is just so enveloping, mysterious, and seductive, pulling you into its cinematic pleasures: the taste of sea salt, the feel of the surf splashing your cheek, the smell of cotton candy, and the janky, upbeat sound of the carrousel calliope. It is such a vibe – this dark mix of the sensory overload of the carnival and the majesty and raging power of the endless sea, all of this hinting at a dark threat born in nature, or madness, or something beyond the grasp of our limited understanding. That too seems like a horror film. And atmospheric work such as this is one of the things this genre offers better than any other, which I really love.

And yet, in spite of all this, I hesitate to call it horror outright (but again, I will). The flow of the story is just different somehow. Though there is fear, and there are stakes, and there is this encounter with an unknown and unknowable something that cannot be accepted, but also cannot be overcome, the rhythms of the story play out much more like those of a dream than a nightmare. Johnny, however much he is driven by love or fascination or fear, seems more to flow from one encounter to the next, pulled deeper and deeper into the oneiric spell, his experience sometimes bleeding over into a literal dream. The result is hypnotic and captivating, but it’s not scary – even when his lover’s arms become clammy tentacles, pinning him down, even when his life is actually in danger, or hers has ended too soon.

I think the genre category that best captures the film is probably fairy tale (though let’s hold onto horror as well so I feel justified in devoting a post to it on my horror blog). A defining element for me of many fairy tales is the evenness of their telling. It’s important that the frog found at the root of the rotten tree can only speak the truth, but it’s not particularly noteworthy that he talks (he’s a talking frog –what else would you expect him to do?). It’s not weird. In a fairy tale, there can be so many plot turns or character choices that to us seem odd, but nothing in the tale itself, for those who inhabit it, is ever weird. It just is. And then the next thing is. There can be monsters, but their existence doesn’t break the world for those that meet them. I wrote about this element when discussing another siren/mermaid movie, The Lure. It seems that these seductive watery characters of myth and legend can’t help but bring the characteristic tone of those legends with them. And beyond the flow of the narrative, the dialogue here all has a simple, unadorned quality like that in a fairy tale as well. Everyone (and especially Johnny) generally speaks in short, direct sentences. There is a stylistic flatness to their delivery – and by this I don’t mean to imply a deficiency of the performances, but just to describe a defining quality.

But it’s interesting – while the story moves in this unhurried fairy tale fashion, the drama is explicitly about the fear that this fairy tale could be true, about resisting it or denying it, about one’s comprehension of reality not being able to square with this new information. In a relatively late scene, once Johnny has been told what Mora is (or at least what she thinks herself to be), she pushes back against his disbelief, saying,

“You Americans have such a simple view of the world. You think that everything can be seen and touched and weighed and measured. You think you’ve discovered reality. But you don’t even know what it is.”

And this is, I think, the heart of the film. By the end, things have been mostly explained away. The fairy tale has been reduced to a story of petty human manipulation born of loneliness and insecurity. But there is still more than one seed of doubt. We have spent all but the last five minutes immersed in this sense of mystery, confronted with the awareness that there is magic in the world – that it is all more than we think, that we could all be more than we imagine – that the night is alive and that the sea has a call. Five minutes of psychologizing at the end cannot erase that. We are left with enough cause to disbelieve the rational explanations. There are still unanswered questions – and they will remain unanswered. Even if Mora wasn’t actually a mythical creature, there was more here than meets the eye – even if only in the depths of the psyche. We wake from the dream, reading about poor, beautiful, dead Annabel Lee, unsure of what was real and what was imagined, but sure of the spell we’d been under.

And somehow, in the final moments, it is as if Johnny also wakes up and just moves on with his life, seemingly unperturbed (the mood lingers, but only just) by what he has been through, by what he has lost (though, to be fair, perhaps having your lover try to drown you takes the bloom off the proverbial rose).

And it’s a great performance. This is a completely different Dennis Hopper than I’ve seen before. His Johnny is so small, insecure, and lonely. He’s also open and sincere and utterly lacking in guile. His behavior wouldn’t fly in today’s climate (his refusal to take no for an answer when he first meets Mora is creepy and could be experienced as quite threatening), but I can’t help but like him. I can’t help but feel for him: so alone in the world and unsure of himself – constantly fidgeting, he reminds me of a puppy that has had a growth spurt and just doesn’t know what to do with its newly large paws and gangly legs. He feels like the young boy protagonist of a tale from the Grimm brothers. Again – taken one way, Johnny does so many things wrong (disbelieving the woman he claims to love, denying her own lived experience), but he still comes across as, if not sweet, then innocent. He’s really into Mora, but he doesn’t understand her – he doesn’t have the capacity to understand (and maybe that absolves him somewhat of his faults).

I wonder about Mora’s reaction to him. When first they meet, she’s trying to listen to a jazz band in a café and he won’t stop trying to chat her up. He then proceeds to walk her home though she tells him not to. Finally, he forces a kiss on her cheek, against her wishes. And still, when he asks when he can see her next, she invites him to breakfast the next morning, leaving him dancing along the boardwalk railing in the night air as she goes upstairs. Why? Does she fall for his boyish charms? Is she really a siren and does she have some compulsion to draw young men to her rocks, even if they’re over-pushy?

From the next morning, she seems to enjoy his presence, to want him around. She also seems so much older (even ancient, or ageless) than him in spirit. There is a sadness within her. He moves through life in naïve simplicity, but she seems to carry the weight of knowing. And maybe that is his appeal for her. Pulled towards the depths by the anchor of her truth, his straightforward lightness could appear as a buoy.

At one point, Mora and Johnny come across a raucous beach party, drummers banging under torch light. One, who seems to know her, asks Mora if she will dance for them. And she does, giving such an interesting performance – her movement vacillates between organic flow and jagged lurches forward or back, up or down. She spins madly, but can also stop on a dime. It feels quite modern, but also free – without specific form. I feel the whole dance expresses her internal tension between the wild and keeping control, between her interior nature and her will. But in the end, she is overcome with the dance (and a vision of the mysterious woman – perhaps another siren- who haunts her, reminding her of her true self and where she must finally go, what she must finally do) and she collapses. The appearance of the other siren brings to mind the wedding scene in Cat People (1942), when the other Serbian woman (who one assumes is a cat person as well) recognizes Irena as her sister, calling on her to be herself, to join her.

A promotional still rather than a screen shot, but a nice pic nonetheless.

It’s probably already obvious, but as with Cat People, there is also a very strong and very obvious queer reading here (hey – June is Pride Month). I think whenever in a horror movie, a character lives in fear of giving in to their true nature and becoming the monster they know themselves to be, giving in to an alluring call that they abhor and abjure, but can’t deny, the reading is a given. And the fact that Mora reaches out, trying, like Irena in the earlier film, to establish a relationship with a man (not to mention the two dead boys before him), using him to hold her in the ‘normal’ world she’s trying not to stray from, surely does not detract from this reading. Also, apparently the director, Curtis Harrington, is considered “one of the forerunners of New Queer Cinema” (which I must admit I know nothing about – this is just what Wikipedia tells me).

And there is some comic queer coding as well, such as the scene where Mora has sent Johnny to the bath house for a steamy massage from the big, beefy, cigar chomping, towel wearing Bruno. While working out Johnny’s tension, Mora’s boss and father figure, Captain Murdock pulls a sheet aside and seems surprised to find Johnny there in the back room. Bruno looks up and asks, “Ah, Captain, you want me to pound you later?” to which the captain responds with British accented erudition, “Now, am I likely to forego a pleasure like that?” Then we go back to warning Johnny to get away while he still can, but the scene seems like a pretty big wink.

Still, it is sad that where this reading takes us, given the film’s conclusion, is that there is no possibility of living authentically (whether in terms of sexual identity or anything else) in this world. Giving in to nature does not end well for Mora or those around her. Even in a fairy tale, you may not get a happy ending. And the lack of that happy ending is not surprising here, given the degree to which the whole film leading up to is has been suffused with a dreamy melancholy. There may be real, beautiful magic in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be happy. It’s more likely to be lachrymose or simply mad. And then it might try to kill you…

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And that is Night Tide – a lovely little film that is really worth 80 minutes of your time: a bit of a dream, a bit of a fairy tale, a bit of a glimpse into the seedy beauty of this early 60s beach town. It’s even a bit of a horror film. Just not the scary kind.

First Impressions – My Week in Horror

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Sometimes, I make plans that don’t quite work out. I watch something expecting it to connect with other works in a certain way, and it doesn’t. I check out a film or a book I think I’m going to really like and have thoughts about, and it leaves me lukewarm. I choose a film I really did like and find interesting, but when I sit down to actually commit words to the page, I find myself drawing a blank, with little to say really, other than that I’d enjoyed it. And sometimes it’s just so easy to procrastinate – a nice, but also dangerous, thing about having this blog is that watching a horror movie always feels like a productive use of my time – even if I don’t choose to write about it, I’m expanding my knowledge, doing my homework – indulgence easily justified as education.

This has been one of those weeks (more like a week and a half at this point). I watched a ton of stuff (much more than usual), but while I enjoyed most of it, I’m having trouble finding, let’s say, a thesis. So, in lieu of that, maybe I’ll just run down everything I saw, as plenty of it is really worth seeking out. 

These were first time watches, and even if something didn’t exactly live up to my hopes or forever change how I look at the world, I’m glad to have seen them all. That said, these will all be rather short reviews and I’ll endeavor to keep them spoiler free.

Murder Rock: Dancing Death (1984)

Coming off a run of some of his most significant pictures, this is the last film Fulci would make before illness forced him to take a break, sapping much of his creative energies (the 2 year break was apparently really hard on him – in the preceding 10 years, he’d made 17 films). I can’t say that it’s his best picture, but it’s far from his worst, and it is a fun, stylish, sleazy little giallo in its own right. More of an 80s dance infused erotic thriller than a horror piece, I think Fulci’s eye is still evident. There is a certain flair, especially in terms of kill scenes and dream sequences, all tied up in a sweaty bundle of flesh and fear. Set at a NYC dance studio where the students are all competing for a career making break, someone is mysteriously picking them off one by one, chloroforming them before driving a long jeweled pin into their heart – all as the lights flash and the music pulses.

In classic giallo fashion, the story is twistingly plotted and I was genuinely engaged in the whodunit throughout, but also typical for gialli, the plot is subservient to just making it all as sexy and cool as possible. At the same time, its gritty 80s New York setting plays counterpoint to its slick Italian panache, resulting in a sordid vibe which is no less enticing. Some elements might be a bit ridiculous (even in the high-80s, did dance students bop into the showers naked save for their leg warmers?), but it’s all part of the charm. Somehow elements that could irritate in a contemporary film, or at the very least, make my eyes roll (such as a particularly leering camera in the dance scenes) come across as oddly lovable, encapsulating an old fashioned, sweetly naïve exploitation cinema aesthetic of sleaze (Is that a thing? I feel like that’s a thing). 

That said, for an “erotic thriller,” there’s plentiful nudity, but very little actual sexuality. The film is happy to show skin, but is far more interested in Thanatos than Eros. Nevertheless, the overall tone, the tactile excitement of the filmmaking, is sexy in its own way. The interstitial segments of dialogue and “acting” may strain credulity (a strength of Fulci’s more supernatural fare is that the surreality of the horror elements somehow justify what could otherwise be considered lapses in acting or dialogue), but when it gets cooking, it is thrilling, with a fully satisfying final act reveal.

Siege (1983)

I’m not sure why I finally pulled the trigger on this little Canadian b-movie with an uninspiring poster of people in sweaters holding guns (I guess that’s Canada for you), but I’m so glad I did. The premise is that during a police strike, a gang of militaristic right wingers show up at a gay bar to cause trouble. They’re murderous bastards and, without going into too much detail, only one guy gets away, who then proceeds to hide out in a run down apartment building with some folks who refuse to hand him over. At that point, it becomes a siege movie (hence the name) as the right wing militants try to get in and kill the guy and everyone else fights back to kill them. It’s tense and rough and kinda great.

Also, it is disturbing how much it feels totally about the world we live in now – I mean, the villains are basically proud boys, and there is a final shot that screams ACAB. I feel that there was a trend of scary-crime-in-the-city movies in the 70s and 80s that were very reactionary, and often more than a little racist, but I feel like this is the reverse of that. Maybe the scariest thing is how ‘normal’ the bad guys are – not visually intimidating “gang members” (ala a Death Wish or Police Academy movie), but just “normal” working class middle aged white guys who are sick of how “woke” everything is (in 1981, when it was filmed) and have assault rifles (it is really sadly familiar). Similarly, while the police strike raises the threat as there is no one to call for help, information revealed late in the film suggests that even if the cops were around, they might not be on the right side.

I could see how someone could object to the representation of the one gay character (everyone else is heroically fighting neo-nazis and he’s hiding in, of all things, a closet), but after what went down in the first scene, I get it. For me, it’s reminiscent of Barbara in the original Night of the Living Dead – she gets criticized as a misogynistically weak representation, but in her circumstances, I expect I’d break much like her and not rise to be some kind of hero…I think most people would. Also, on a representational level, I was surprised at how the bar at the beginning is shown. I would expect a movie like this to go for shock value, but Cruising this is not – the “gay bar” is just a normal bar with gay people in it, just trying have a normal enjoyable evening without getting shot.

Anyway, if you are up for enduring the ugly homophobia of the villains in order to have the satisfaction of seeing them all get got, I really recommend it!

The Black Phone (2022)

A hit in cinemas last fall, I was excited to see this show up for rent on a streamer I’ve got access to and I was really looking forward to finally checking it out. Unfortunately, I must say that this dose of throwback supernatural stranger danger didn’t completely do it for me, but I appreciate it being a weird little movie that really found an audience. A nice success story even if I didn’t love it.

In a small town in the late 70s, young boys have been disappearing. No one knows what’s going on, but somehow all the kids are still totally free to wander about on their own. Finally, our main character, Finney, who we see bullied at school and in fear of physical abuse at home, is abducted and thus we get a glimpse of where all the others have gone before, as well as the mysterious “grabber” (Ethan Hawke) who’s taken them. Finney finds himself trapped in a basement, held hostage by this enigmatic, masked killer who seems to toy with him, while on one wall, there is the titular black phone, periodically ringing and connecting him to the voices of the grabber’s past victims, giving advice, but also sometimes seeming to speak in riddles. At the same time, Finney’s younger sister, who has a degree of precognitive ability, is going into her dreams, trying to find and save him. Throughout, there is a pervasive sense of mystery and implications of the supernatural that may or may not pan out.

Based on a story by Joe Hill and directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister, the first Doctor Strange), this is a movie with some intriguing ideas, which was interesting to track and see how it all came together (and it does come together in a satisfying way, though I’m not convinced it would hold up to scrutiny after the fact). But it just didn’t quite click for me. Maybe part of the problem is that I’d seen a lot of hype about it being “really scary” and while I am really not one to say that a horror movie needs to scare me to succeed, I did go to this one looking for that and didn’t find it. Still, I did enjoy the period and the mean roughness of the world of the kids. And I always appreciate Ethan Hawke’s commitment to keeping a foot in genre – he could have a career exclusively in indie artsy films, so it’s nice to see him make a horror flick every couple of years.  Plus, cool mask.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

I came to this one late. I was tired, but not ready for bed, and my wife was working. I just wanted something low commitment and short and silly, so my expectations were low. But this was really a great little movie. I mean, it kinda has everything: It starts with a really intense, well-choreographed and kinetically filmed schoolyard fist fight. It’s got the campy pleasure of absolute earnestness in its dialogue concerning the volatile juvenile delinquency of the main character, Tony (a young Michael Landon, later of Highway to Heaven). It’s got an amazing song and dance scene at the teenagers’ Halloween party at the old “haunted house.” It’s got an absolutely eeevil mad scientist in the form of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Brandon, who wears a mask of rational civility, but while he is purportedly helping Tony “adjust” to social requirements, really he seeks to regress him to a more ‘pure,’ animalistic state to save humanity from the debilitating weaknesses and vices of modern civilization – you know, by making him a werewolf. And it of course has the promised teenage werewolf – his makeup might not be the best (did the designer ever actually see what teeth look like?), but the couple of sequences of stalking and killing are surprisingly effective – intense and shockingly brutal in their after-effects.

A youth-running-wild picture, filtered through a then contemporary obsession with psychology, mixed with a don’t-play-god – dangers of science run amok flick, and finally, bubbling up into a full blown monster movie, could a film be more of the 50s? Seriously, it’s a lot of fun, with high drama, real horror threat, and a solid dose of unintended humor that manages not to undercut the story’s impact. As I understand, it kicked off a whole subgenre of “I-was-a-teenage-_______” movies (AIP released two more the very same year: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula, which flipped the gender of the main character but is reportedly almost exactly the same story, beat for beat) which quickly fell into self-parody, but this first one is a peculiar little classic.

Smile (2022)

Another cinema hit from last year that I’m just now getting around to, this one is easy to put down as a jump scare filled cash grab, playing lip service to the now omnipresent notion of “trauma” while actually being little more than a shallow exercise in startling the audience.

But I thought it was great.

Is it particularly deep in its treatment of how witnessing or experiencing awful things can really mess us up inside, causing us to, in turn, perform actions that hurt others, perpetuating a cycle of psychological damage, of, shall we say, ‘trauma’? No, it is not, but who cares? It’s a solid premise to build a scary movie around, and the idea does invite scenes and contexts that lend emotional heft to the proceedings, while, yes, also making us jump. There are upsetting moments along the way that land emotionally (justice for Moustache the Cat!) and the concept is woven into a narrative that tracks consistently and makes for an intriguing mystery. And at the end of the day, this is a scary movie that is exactly what it says on the tin. I jumped. I was startled. I then laughed, cause it’s fun to get scared. That’s what I came to the movie for and it’s what I got.

The basic idea is that a therapist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), sees a first time patient who is in manic terror of an evilly grinning visage that is hounding her, telling her she’s going to die. She then proceeds to start smiling maniacally herself before slitting her own throat right in front of Rose. Then, as Rose starts seeing similarly disturbing images, she learns that the patient had seen another man kill himself only a few days earlier under similar circumstances, and that this trail of suicide-witness-suicides goes back and back and back. She therefore comes to understand that she has limited time left before the same fate befalls her…

I’ve read criticisms of how it just rehashes earlier films like Ringu/The Ring or It Follows, but that seems weird to me. I think it’s just that as an entry in a smaller sub-genre (the curse movie), some might only connect its story with a couple other similar films, but it is a concept at least as old as the 1911 M.R. James story, ‘Casting the Runes,’ enjoyably filmed as Night of the Demon (1957) (surely, it is a much older idea –that’s just the first version of it that comes to mind). Passing a curse from one person to the next is a narrative conceit that goes back a ways, and it’s solid. The claims of unoriginality could be similarly applied to any subgenre – just another ghost, just another masked killer, just another vampire – but much of the fun of following a genre is iterative – how does it play out this time?

My only criticism is that it does set up one thread that it didn’t return to. While Rose doesn’t kill herself in front of her nephew, in her terror and madness, she does rather traumatize him, and it seemed that the film was going to go somewhere with that, but never got around to returning to him. It was just a bit of a missed opportunity.  Anyway, I doubt I’ll feel drawn to revisit this over the years, but it was a good watch that delivered what it promised.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

I really did a lot of catching up on fall 2022 releases this week. While sold as a horror-comedy, I can’t say that I found this one especially comic, but it was a cool, energetic mix of an old fashioned ‘who’s the killer’ slasher with something modern, a work of social satire in an era obsessed with surfaces and social media fame.

A work of social-discomfort horror, we largely follow Bee (Maria Bakalova, who made a splash in the recent Borat movie) who is accompanying her girlfriend to a hurricane party with a group of her old, wealthy, very-hip friends. It’s immediately uncomfortable. A working class kid from an immigrant family, Bee clearly does not fit in, but past that, these so-called “friends” clearly detest each other and the notion of spending a weekend with them as the storm rages outside is not remotely appealing. Everyone is cool and pretty and rich, but the passive aggression and sniping is thick enough to cut with a knife. Once the storm starts, they play a game of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (basically identical to “Werewolf” or “Mafia”), wherein one person is secretly assigned the ‘killer’ and everyone has to puzzle out who it is. Immediately the tension of the game brings old grievances to the fore and everyone turns on each other. This is only exacerbated when people actually start dying. And almost everyone dies – it is not a fun party.

Personally, the satirical elements targeting the current “image obsessed, ‘virtue signaling,’ tik tok focused” youth culture didn’t wow me – it’s kind of obvious stuff (also, there’s a late revelation that didn’t exactly surprise, but I don’t know if it was really supposed to or just confirm suspicions with a dark laugh), but regardless, I really liked the film. The core notion of the friends who are not friends thrust into a stressful situation that brings out the worst in everyone is well realized, and the young, vibrant energy of it all is fun. Lots of the early slashers were more in this model of Ten Little Indians mystery than that of the silent masked killer, and this is a nice, contemporary spin on something like April Fool’s Day or Graduation Day.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

On one level, this Spanish-Portuguese co-production from Armando de Ossorio is a creepy, attractively filmed spookfest, working in an atmospheric, slow, nightmarish euro style (which is my jam) – as if combining Romero with Rollin and Franco, but that’s reductive… likening it to work I’d deem superior, but also eliding elements unique to this film, both good and bad.

There were aspects that I’d call great: generally everything about the Blind Dead themselves: Satanic Knights Templar who had been excommunicated and executed, hanged from trees for the birds to peck out their eyes, now haunting an abandoned medieval village that all locals know to steer clear of, ready to rise from their titular tombs, ride horses in spooooky slow motion, and hunt by sound (cause they’re, you know, blind) to devour some pretty young woman who’s made the mistake of wandering by. They have a totally different character from a standard zombie – more akin to the vengeful ghosts in The Fog than most typical shambling corpses – decrepit skeletal figures in rotting robes, moving with intention if not sight, and I rather enjoyed elements like the old train engineer being unwilling to even slow down when travelling through Blind Dead country. It all feels ominously folksy.

There are also aspects that don’t make much sense, but we accept in a movie like this. Why does the first victim we see reanimate in the morgue (these not being infectious ‘zombies,’ but rather cursed ancient knights) to attack the sadistic and seemingly necrophiliac morgue worker and then go after the protagonist’s assistant? Who knows, but it’s cool and scary. What really is the point of the characters spending the night in the abandoned village? It’s not like winning some inheritance depends on surviving the night in a haunted house or something. But if they didn’t do it, the Blind Dead couldn’t attack them; and what would we do then for the whole final act?

Finally, there are some aspects that just don’t seem to go anywhere, which are button pushy, and which at best, feel like missed opportunities. We begin the film with the revelation of a romantic, or at least sexual, history between our protagonist, Betty and her old friend, Virginia. Discomfort about that is what causes Virginia to jump off of the train near the doomed village, thus setting events in motion. We never exactly return to this relationship after Virginia dies, but it is suggested that Betty has been consistent in her sexuality and has never slept with a man. Later there is an implication that, when alive and performing their infernal blood rites, the Blind Dead went after virginal sacrifices. Does this set Betty up as a special target? Nope. Not mentioned again. Then late in the film, Betty is raped by an unsavory character she’d bafflingly chosen to go for a late night walk with to the haunted cemetery. Does this somehow bring us back to the issue of “virginity” in terms of the ghost-knight-zombies? Nope. Doesn’t come up. It feels like these three elements were written to connect somehow, but they never do, and that leaves the relationship between the two women hanging and makes the rape sequence even more unpleasant as it is not connected to anything else in the story – at all. It’s just an ugly thing to be, you know, ugly I guess.

But, it must be said that the subsequent scene of Betty fleeing the carnage and running to the train that never stops in this area, really sings. And the ending is beautifully chilling, probably worth the price of admission. So, it’s a mixed bag.

Though I’d heard of it before, it particularly got on my radar as a podcast I listen to, Gaylords of Darkness, recently did an episode singing the praises of the third installment in this series (four movies in total), and I wanted to start at the beginning. Perhaps out of a sense of completionism, if nothing else, I do plan to watch the other three, and I’ll see what they offer.

The Guest (2014)

Not a horror film per se, Adam Wingard’s (You’re Next) thriller-cum-action movie is dripping with tense horror throwback 80s vibes. Riding on a synthwave groove, I’ve seen it aptly described by a user on Letterboxd as “John Carpenter’s Rambo” – an evocative, synth infused thriller about a soldier who’s returned from war and can’t stop doing what he was trained to do. I’d heard it was cool, but wow. It really is COOL, like – I couldn’t go to sleep last night after watching it cause I was so keyed up.

The Peterson family is still deep in mourning for their soldier son, presumably killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.  So when David (Dan Stevens), a young man who says he served with and was a friend of their son, knocks on their door to relay a final message from the battlefield, they end up welcoming him in. Then, ala some kind of 90s family thriller, he proceeds to seduce everyone, one by one, while some secretive menace lurks beneath his cold, piercing blue eyes. But while he is “seductive,” it isn’t generally sexual – though the whole movie has a really sexy atmosphere – David’s seduction is more personal than that. He sits and drinks with the father who confides about his insecurities; he beats the hell out of the jock bullies who make high school so hard for the younger son and encourages him to stand up for himself; with the mother, he shares warm reminiscences and helps out around the house – hanging laundry to dry, picking the kids up from school. And suddenly, things seem to be improving for everyone. For example, the father’s boss mysteriously dies, earning him a promotion. Hmmm – terrible, but also a spot of luck…

The only one who isn’t pulled in is the daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), whose drug dealer boyfriend gets picked up by the cops after an anonymous tip. Duly suspicious, she calls an army helpline to get info on David, setting in motion the film’s more action oriented second half.

Again, this is not a horror movie, but David is horrific. His human mask can be so warm, so personable, but there are moments where we glimpse what Dr. Loomis would have called “the Devil’s eyes” – cold and empty like a shark’s. But even though we’re privy to those icy, threatening moments, he still seduces us simply by virtue of being really damn cool. There can be such a pleasure in a capable, efficient villain who does what needs doing unhampered by remorse, who when asked if he has the money to buy illicit goods, can simply smile and explain that he won’t be paying for them because he’s just going to kill everybody present. And then he does.

The action is tight. The vibe is killer. There’s tension up the wazzoo. And while again, it’s not horror, it is clearly made by one who loves the genre. The climax happens at a school gym decorated for the Halloween dance, the score really does bring to mind Carpenter, and there is even an Easter egg for Halloween III: Season of the Witch that made me laugh out loud on sighting it. What a blast! Now I need to revisit You’re Next.

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And there we have it – I’m late getting this post up, but in the last week and a half I did watch 8 movies for the first time that are at least horror adjacent and most of them were pretty great – so I am now that much more learned and experienced, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I just justified letting myself watch too much TV. Anyway, now it’s time to choose something for next week. Gotta keep that wall wet…

The Shining Compared – Book and Film

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It’s odd that two works you love can be thrust into conflict with each other. But hey, that’s a lot of the discourse that circulates online – fans of one film feel compelled to oppose those of another; liking or disliking a work of fiction mysteriously causing people to hate you to the core of their beings – and for some stupid reason, we all feel compelled to have an opinion about everything (I write on my blog). We live in strange times. Usually, I find these conflicts fruitless and frustrating (as I’ve written about before), but every once in a blue moon, there is an interesting discussion to be had. Case in point – Stephen King reportedly hated The Shining – not his own book, of course, but Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation thereof. In a clash of two creators, both of whom have put out really valuable work (both these two pieces and in their careers writ large), I think it’s fascinating to look at the differences of approach and see where each is coming from – to look at both pieces on their own terms, appreciating what they each offer, while still considering how and why they differ.

And so that’s what we’re going to do today – look at King’s 1977 novel and Kubrick’s 1980 film. Both are, in my opinion, great works of horror, and they share many surface similarities of plot, location, and character, but in some ways they couldn’t be more different. There are many reasons for this, but the claim I’d like to make is that their essential difference is in the point of reader/viewer identification – though both works shift viewpoint between Jack, Wendy, Danny, and Dick, I think Jack is the main lens through which one views the book, while his son, Danny, serves this function for the film, and this makes an essential difference.

The Novel – The Shining (1977)

It came first, so we’ll start with the book. Jack and Wendy Torrance have relocated to Colorado with Danny, their young son, after Jack lost his teaching job back east for assaulting a student. In flashbacks, we learn of Jack’s longstanding problems with drinking and anger management, but also about the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic father, as well as the emotional abuse Wendy received from her mother. Spending time behind both of their eyes, we feel how scared, and how conflicted, both of them are about the potential danger Jack poses to his wife and son, how neither wants to become their respective, problematic parent. At the start of the story, Jack’s been dry for a while (after drunkenly breaking Danny’s arm in a moment of impatience), and he is doing his best to hold it together, repair their relationships, and rebuild trust with Wendy and Danny. It is obvious that he does love them and lives in fear of failing and/or hurting them, but the anger and the resentment is still always there, roiling under the surface. Having shown some promise as a young author, he is trying to finish a play which is inspired by his experiences as a teacher, but is having trouble sorting it out, haunted by the insecurity that he may not be able to fulfill his early literary promise.

And then there is Danny – a very aware, very mature young child, who also happens to have psychic abilities – sometimes privy to knowledge he shouldn’t have, catching echoes of the future or the past, reading thoughts, or just knowing things. He loves his parents, but he also sees them more clearly than they would probably like – aware of when his father is thinking about “the bad thing” (drinking), knowing when his mother is scared or angry at Jack. These abilities warn him not to go when his parents plan to spend a winter taking care of The Overlook Hotel – a beautiful remote mountain resort, but sadly that’s not his choice to make. Of course, the hotel is haunted. Or if not haunted exactly, it is clearly a very bad place – malicious and aware, filled with the residual traces of countless murders and crimes that have taken place there, hungry to consume this young family, particularly Danny, who with his power, would make a real tasty morsel.

Thus, the lion share of the story consists of Jack being seduced by the hotel, plied with drink (which doesn’t really exist – but is no less addictive), and most importantly given his insecurities, a sense of belonging and importance – he could be “management material” – in order to turn against his wife and son and ultimately kill them, feeding the bad place, as we know a previous caretaker had done to his wife and daughters some years back.

Along the way, there’s a bunch of genuinely scary stuff. As with an early scene in It, King captures that sense of having to go down into the dark basement to get some batteries, only to scare the hell out of yourself for no reason and go running back up the stairs to the relative safety of the afternoon light. You know there was nothing down there, and you feel silly, but that makes it no less terrifying. There’s an awful scene with a wasp nest (I’m allergic so yikes!), topiary animals and fire hoses seem to spring to malicious life, a creeping unseen presence hunts after Danny in the playground, and a dead woman comes for both him and his father in the iconic Room 217.

But while we spend a great deal of time with both Danny and Wendy (not to mention Dick Hallorann, the cook who shares a sliver of Danny’s abilities and makes a heroic journey to come save the day), this is clearly Jack’s book through and through. It is his emotional struggle with his own past, with his experience of idolizing and fearing his own alcoholic father, of pitying and despising his also abused mother who failed to protect him, of struggling with his own resentment, his own self-doubt, his compulsion to dull his fears and frustrations with anything that will do the job.

He is seduced by the hotel – it plays at respecting him, at being the good bartender – listening without judgement as he voices his hidden frustration and anger towards his family. The hotel will give him what he wants – even offering up its own deeply sordid history as a fascinating new writing project which could bring him the literary acclaim he so craves – respect to prove that he is not just a flash in the pan drunk, now doomed to menial labor and a lifetime of growing smaller. It will also serve him all the martinis he likes, loosening his tongue, wearing down what resistance he still has until he’s finally willing to act on his darkest, most shameful impulses and serve his family up to the hotel’s gaping maw.

King in ’77

While material with the other characters is enjoyable and effective, it is the time we spend with Jack that feels most personal and emotionally grounded. Maybe this is a bit of projection, knowing something of King’s biography, but it really doesn’t feel like a stretch to suppose that this author, writing his third novel after some early success and still feeling a need to prove himself, who has said that around this time, he’d been drinking a case of beer a day and worried about the welfare of his wife and son, might have identified most strongly with the character of Jack – investing more of himself in his struggles and crafting a story that in addition to being scary, is ultimately a terrifying and moving tragedy – the story of Jack failing, giving into his worst self – and doing what he always feared he might – becoming his own father, and much worse. It feels deeply autobiographical – it feels meaningful. It feels. It is a book with feeling, about a father who loves his family but still tries to destroy them.

The Film – The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick’s film is very simply, a totally different beast. Whereas the book is warm and emotional, the film is icy cold and alienating. Whereas the book serves up scary sequences in a traditional horror sense, the film removes almost all of them and really doesn’t look or feel like any kind of standard ‘haunted house’ flick. And whereas the book delivers emotional and psychological horror in addition to its scares, the film elides psychology, back story, and much of the context, resulting in a masterpiece of atmospheric horror in an almost Lovecraftian “cosmic” sense – there is an overwhelming impression of sanity-rending wrongness – both weirdly fascinating (like some dangerous, beautiful insect) and deeply unsettling.

So let’s look at King’s criticisms: “The movie has no heart; there’s no center to the picture,” he said. “I wrote the book as a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each other … here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing to be lost.” As best as I can tell, this is the essence of his objections – he wrote a book that was all heart – and that heart was his, bared, fully rooted in his own personal fears, experiences, and doubts. We spend time behind the eyes, with the thoughts and intentions, of all of his characters. We know what Wendy is thinking – her calculations as she decides whether or not to stick it out with the potentially dangerous man that she loves. We see Danny’s view of his parents and even in the final moments, he and his father are allowed one loving interaction before it all comes crashing down. I can sympathize with King taking personally Kubrick’s excision of this deeply personal, heartfelt material (but to be fair, I also remember reading King propagating the old chestnut of writerly advice – “you have to murder your darlings” – but I guess it really chafes when someone else does it).

Kubrick’s film comes from a different, much colder, more inhuman space. The stunning opening helicopter shots, as the credits role, show Jack’s VW as a miniscule, insignificant object, utterly dwarfed by the surrounding mountainous landscapes, and this sense of scale, of human smallness and powerless carries through the film. Once odd, menacing things start happening at the hotel, we have no context for them – neither we nor the Torrences understand what is going on or why. Compare this with the book where between Jack’s research into the hotel’s history and the stories Dick Halloran tells Danny, we get a sense of the historical episode that is recurring whenever a character experiences something weird. The film gives up none of that, keeping many of those details but explaining none of them and thus crafting an overwhelming experience of the uncanny (which I’ve heard in German translates roughly as “un-homely” which I think is fitting – the hotel is a house – in every way it looks like a place to live and be comfortable, but it is not a “home”). Everything is somehow alien; things seeming more or less ‘normal’ but are clearly not, and the what, how, and why of it all are forever beyond our meager human capacity for comprehension.

In the book, Dick Halloran makes his long, heroic journey and really helps save Wendy and Danny. In the film, like some dark cosmic joke, he makes the same heroic journey only to find himself on the end of Jack’s axe within moments of entering the hotel. The universe does not love us and nothing and nobody is coming to help – we are on our own and it’s only getting colder.

King fairly complained that the characters lack an arc, but that is natural in something so unconcerned with character – and does every film need to be? They do have an experience, and it is an enveloping and disturbing one that we share with them, but it is more like an encounter with nature – or something beyond nature: cold, hostile, unapproachable, and cruel – than it is like a ‘story’ in a traditional sense.

Reportedly King also hated Jack Nicholson’s performance: “When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he’s crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier.” And he’s not really wrong, but I feel this is a choice rather than a failing (Kubrick was famously obsessive about every little detail in his films – it’s hard to imagine anything being an accident). And this brings me back to my main theory of where the works diverge. If Jack is the key to the novel, Danny is the key to the film.

Danny is a very young child, maybe 4 years old, growing up in the shadow of an alcoholic, rage filled, deeply resentful father, basically just a sad loser and angry about it. (Has this version of Jack ever actually written anything (we never hear about it)? Will he? Why did he lose his teaching job? Could he recover any sense of self or is he doomed to be a small, violent man forever blaming the world, and especially his family, for his own failings?) Danny’s father has hurt him at least once and very easily could again. Danny’s browbeaten mother has not been physically abused yet as far as we know, but has obviously suffered emotional trauma in this relationship, and while she does her best to protect Danny, she’s already been reduced to such a state that she is generally ineffectual in this regard (though I must disagree with King that she is misogynistically presented as weak – in fact, I’d say she does the most – The book’s Wendy was pretty tough from the beginning, but seeing Shelly Duvall’s mousy Wendy grow from this small, broken, nervous woman into someone who fights back is, for me, more moving – and  her newfound strength is all the more inspiring for how hard it is for her to claim – also, she’s been doing Jack’s damn job the whole time while he sits around going crazy – she is more than she seems).

Especially with his psychically heightened sensitivity, Danny witnesses so much more than he is ready for – and while the book makes this kind of intellectual (hearing verbal thoughts, understanding things he shouldn’t be able to understand), the film doesn’t give us such details, and we can only assume a more emotional, spiritually impressionistic experience, leading at one point to a kind of self-defense catatonia. In fact, his awareness of the emotional threat in his family unit, without being able to really understand it, is a fair parallel for our uncanny experience of the film as a whole.

Danny loves his father, but lives in terror of this mercurial, angry, sad man – and while he sees and hears and feels so much more than he should ever have to, he doesn’t understand what he’s experiencing or why his father is so angry, so dangerous. And that is the film in a nutshell – we get the generalized terror but we don’t get the understanding. We see Jack as Danny sees him – a mystery, a sword hanging by a thread ready to snap at any moment. He isn’t the sympathetic tragic figure of the novel, but rather a force of threatening nature that can’t really be communicated with – that can perhaps be escaped, but which can never really be placated. Jack is basically crazy from the beginning, but he hasn’t quite broken yet and the bad vibes of the bad place of the Overlook Hotel, along with simply being locked in with the wife and child he so resents just pushes him over the edge to which he’d already been dangerously close.

Our experience of the film as a whole parallels Danny’s relationship with his dad – we can’t really understand what is going on, but while we are drawn to keep watching, the film itself looks back at us with a sense of cold menace, as if, like Jack, like the hotel, it sees us as small irritants to crush. It is, from the first frame, a beautiful, fascinating film that you don’t want to look away from – just as Danny does love his father and wants to be close to him, to be loved by him – but both the film and the father represent truly ineffable threats. We are enraptured, but never shake the feeling of being cruelly appraised by the object of our fascination. It is all beautiful, but we are lost in its maze (like the hedge maze that doesn’t even feature in the book), just as Danny is engulfed by the hypnotic carpet.

King’s Shining is a moving, tragic, terrifying horror story about a family in what is essentially a haunted house. Kubrick’s is a unique film, so unlike most horror cinema (or any other genre as well) with its singular style and cinematic vocabulary, and yet truly horrific in a cold, Lovecraftian way, and like in Lovecraft’s writing, there is little character or narrative really. When thinking of my favorite horror films, this doesn’t always make the list, and yet every time I sit down to watch it, it blows me away again, beguiling me, enfolding me in its icy inhumanity, baffling me with things I’m not meant to understand, but which, for all that, never feel arbitrary – everything resonates, feeling horrifically real, but just beyond my ability to wrap my head around.

King wrote an excellent, scary, sad horror novel and Kubrick made an amazing, truly horrific horror film. And they could not be more different. I understand why King hated the adaptation – I can see how he could take it personally, but I think this is a case where outside of his personal, well-justified reaction, we need not choose sides, setting our house against itself – life is hard enough as it is. I’m glad to have them both. I’m grateful to both artists for their contributions. I hope that’s ok with you…