Category Archives: Review

Cat People and their Curse – Val Lewton Pt. I

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When listing the artists most responsible for advancing the genre, one often thinks of directors – big names of the Universal Horrors like James Whale or Tod Browning, innovators of the 60s like Bava or Powell, independent voices of the 70s like Hooper or Romero, “Masters of Horror” of the 80s like Craven or Carpenter, or more recently, contemporary artistes like Aster or Eggers. But though it’s easy to view all cinema, and especially horror, with its stylistic flair, as an auteur’s medium, it is still essentially collaborative, and sometimes those responsible for bringing together the right team on the right project have made some of the biggest contributions. One of the most influential players in this regard was undoubtedly Val Lewton, the producer heading up RKO’s Horror division in the 40s, corralling a recurring band of directors, cinematographers, writers, and editors, and guiding them to create highly effective and artful work on a shoestring budget, all in his particular style and carrying his particular preoccupations. Between 1942-1946, he produced 11 films for RKO (9 of which were at least nominally horror). While not all of these could be deemed “scary” by modern standards, they really moved the genre forward, making great innovations in its filmic vocabulary (in terms of light, camerawork, sound, and editing), and I think really planting the seeds of what the field would become.

And so, on and off in the coming months, I’d like to dig into them. Some I’ve already seen and rather admire, and some I’ve never gotten around to, and I’ll have to seek out. Today, I’ll begin with Cat People (1942), his first big success, and its less horrific, but still intriguing follow up, The Curse of the Cat People (1944). Now, I don’t think the pleasure of these films can really be spoiled by knowing the plot so I will be discussing them in full, but if you haven’t seen them yet, now is a great time to check them out – they’re both available for rent on many platforms.

Cat People (1942)

Easily one of my favorite classic horror films, there have been books worth of analysis written about this one and I can’t claim that my observations are particularly novel. Still, I do love it. I mean, it is just so gorgeous for one thing, sad, and sometimes funny; and its couple of scary moments do still scare, even through modern eyes. I also feel it did so much to help invent modern horror technique.

Essentially, this is the story of Irena (Simone Simon), a Serbian woman living in NYC and working as a fashion sketch artist. After a whirlwind courtship, she marries Oliver (Kent Smith), an affable, square jawed chap, but following the folklore of her village, she’s convinced that should she ever allow her passions to run free, she would transform into a murderous feline beast, and so the marriage goes unconsummated. After attempts to cure Irena of what Oliver considers her delusions via psychotherapy (with a particularly sleazy therapist), he finally notices that he’s actually in love with his co-worker, Alice (Jane Randolph). Irena’s jealousy of Alice does what her supposed love for Oliver never did: bring out the beast within, leading her to hunt after Oliver and Alice, kill the creep psychologist, and ultimately and tragically, destroy herself.

It is a simple fairy tale of a story, but it’s also rather mature and psychological – all to do with attraction and repression; Irena’s essential fear of who she really is in her heart, in her blood. There is terror when Alice is stalked by some unseen, growling presence, but there is real horror in Irena’s refusal of self. Finally, there is tragedy as the more Irena opens herself to being who she really is, the more she approaches self-destruction. And along the way, Oliver, though motivated by love, or what he understands love to be, just cannot wrap his head around her experience, cannot open his mind to accept that she may know something he does not, and thus, in trying to help her, only makes things worse. As an encapsulation of his character, I’ve always loved an interchange with Alice wherein he explains “You know – it’s a funny thing. I’ve never been unhappy before. Things have always gone swell for me. I had a great time as a kid, lots of fun at school and here at the office.” This happy go lucky, “normal,” whitebread, American man (who seems to be fighting age, but for some reason isn’t off at the war) couldn’t possibly get where Irena is coming from, and he doesn’t really try to. The film’s story is straightforward, but its themes are rich and its treatment of big concepts like love, fear, otherness, and self is poetic and affecting.

Directed and filmed respectively by Lewton regulars, Jacques Tourneur, and cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca, it is also just beautiful to look at, an endlessly stylish cinematic treat. Blacks are inky and whites shine. Lamps take any excuse to get knocked to the floor, throwing dramatic shadows upon the wallpaper, lights skim along walls, bringing out their full texture, and characters inhabit a world constructed almost entirely of light and shadow. Tourneur and Musuraca craft a visual vocabulary that feels as expressive and visually engaging as something out of German Expressionist cinema, while setting it all in a realistic modern context, bringing a sense of evocative mystery and deep feeling to this tale of supernatural folkloric terror as a vehicle for psychological conflict. Also, their visual contributions enable Lewton’s biggest innovation for the development of the genre: situating all of the terror in that which remains wholly unseen. Unlike a werewolf film, there is no transformation, and we generally only see large cats when Irena goes to the zoo. Rather, the shadows hold the nightmares, and they wait there, ready to strike, but never actually show themselves.

This element is so essential to what became the language of horror films. Even in an explicitly gory 80s splatter fest, there will be scenes of stalking, of a character creeping along, sure that they’re being watched, followed, terrified by what might jump out at them, even if they also feel silly because there’s evidently nothing to be scared of. The fact that later films will inevitably show something “scary” doesn’t mean they aren’t still deeply indebted to what Lewton began in Cat People. And the fact that this artistic choice was largely prompted by economics (Lewton never had to spend a dime on monster effects), detracts nothing from its aesthetic value.

The first great example of this in the film may be the first occurrence in horror of a “jump scare.” It is also a perfect 2 ½ minutes of film – scary, thrilling, and meaningful, but when it’s all over, you just want to stop the show to applaud. Alice is leaving coffee with Oliver while Irena observes them from a distance. As Alice starts down the street, Irena follows. We cut back and forth between the two women, Alice walking with a slower, steady gait, and Irena more quickly, hurried, the sounds of their steps echoing through the otherwise silent night. They each move into the small pools of light beneath the streetlamps before slipping back into the darkness. We see Irena getting closer and closer though they never share a shot. We watch Alice as she stops for a moment as if she’s heard something and turns to look behind herself – the street is empty. Worried, she starts to go faster, and then she runs. Each time she returns to the light, it is as if she’s returning to safety from the danger of the shadows, but she’s getting more and more terrified. The tension rises as light and shadow alternates with a rhythm not quite matching that of her harried footsteps, resulting in an unsettling syncopation – nothing is exactly happening, but it is uncanny, it is scary. Finally, she clutches a lamppost as we hear what sounds like a rising growl and then the hiss of…a bus pulling into the stop (and there is the first jump scare – it’s a fun irony that it’s based on not having a cat enter the frame). Rattled, she boards the bus as we see the trees moving (perhaps the wind, perhaps something else). Cut to the large cats in the zoo agitated in their cages and then a zoo worker finding dead sheep beside what look like large paw prints in the dirt. We follow similar prints on the pavement as they resolve into the tracks of a pair of muddy high heels, and finally we see Irena, shaken, dabbing her mouth with a handkerchief. Chef’s kiss!

In a later scene, Alice has gone to the pool in what I assume is her apartment building (fancy). Irena asks the girl at the front desk if she can go down to see her. We see Alice in a shadowy, eerily underlit locker room (no one in this movie ever turns on the lights). She gets spooked and dives into the water. A growling begins and we cut back and forth between her, progressively more and more terror-stricken as she treads water, frantically looking all around, and shadows on the wall amidst the wavering reflection of light off the water. It really feels like we’re seeing a panther or something stalking around the room, but there’s nothing there, only shadows, until finally, as Alice is shrieking for help and workers for the building come running into the pool area, with a flick, Irena turns on the lights, standing there, innocently, but oh so threateningly. The sweeter and more benignly she behaves, the more intimidating she is. And it is a pleasure to see her strong, more herself. But we also know it’s not going to end well.

For all that the biggest stylistic influence of the film is probably its focus on the unseen, its refusal to show a “monster,” it is Irena’s story, as penned by DeWitt Bodeen – her fear of her own monstrousness, that lingers. In this, there are many layers of possible meaning, of possible readings. On the surface, in a story of supernatural/psychological horror, it is plainly awful to think that a person might never allow themselves to feel, to love, lest they become a violent killer. The next layer is one of assimilation. Irena is an immigrant in America (as was Lewton and his mother and aunt who raised him) and this can so easily be taken as a tale of a woman who has come from a far-away land, trying to deny her history, her culture, trying to become part of this new world where she doesn’t quite fit in. In a key scene, at their wedding party in a Serbian restaurant, a mysterious woman approaches Irena saying “Moja sestra” (my sister). It seems that this is another “cat person” from her village, and like recognizes like. Irena crosses herself against the woman who leaves into the cold night as the boisterous celebration resumes. Irena has denied her identity, trying to adopt another one, a modern, “American” self, free of old, embarrassing superstitions.

But of course the strongest reading here is the queer one. Irena has rushed into a marriage with this guy she barely knows and for whom we don’t see much evidence of real, strong feelings. He seems like a generally nice guy and she’s going to try to make it work. But on the night of their wedding, she explains that she can’t yet share a bed with him and begs him to be kind and patient as she desperately attempts to get over “this feeling that there’s something evil in me.” In this reading, the woman in the restaurant still recognizes a kindred spirit who is trying to hide her true self, and being thus seen threatens to out Irena – thus her fervent denial. Finally, while she is never moved to become a killer feline for love of her husband, her jealousy of Alice brings on the change. She seems more invested in following this other woman around than she is tempted by her husband sexually or romantically, and even if her relationship to Alice is only antagonistic, it is still easy to see an interest, a focus which surfaces as jealousy but evinces some depth of fascination.

Regardless of how you read it (and I feel these levels are in no way mutually exclusive), Irena’s arc is tragic. In the beginning, when we first see Irena and Oliver meet and strike up a relationship, she seems so sweet, so hopeful. She’s determined to commit to this pairing and leave behind the part of herself she fears, but she just can’t do it. It’s only after the wedding that we see her tortured by her inner impulses. When her emotions for Alice (anger and jealousy) free her true self, eliciting her animalistic side, it obviously upsets her, but she also grows more confident. I love when she’s revealed at the pool, sweet and deadly. It’s satisfying to see her coming into herself. And by the end, when the psychologist tries to push himself on her, it’s like there’s this little smile. She wants him to – because it will make her angry and release the beast, and she will take pleasure in shredding this jerk. Furthermore, she will savor this momentary freedom to be her true self. Sadly, though, this may also be a bit of a death drive – she still can’t fully accept who and what she is, and she knows this killing will bring her to her end.

All of these levels work together. One need not cancel another out. It is clearly a story of a woman worried she might be a monster, and the story of an immigrant trying to assimilate and leave behind her cultural identity is also right on the surface. The queer reading is just that, a reading. There are many elements that support it, and it’s only there for you if you see it, but I think its inclusion brings a depth to the sadness of Irena’s self-denial, self-hatred, self-refusal, and in the end, her self-destruction, which enriches the whole film; in its emotional specificity, it makes her repression all the more universal and grounded.

So, there we have it. This is just one of the best: A beautiful, sad, horrific story; top notch, low budget, high effect filmmaking, endlessly stylish, that succeeds in being really scary a couple of times while barely doing anything at all; a greatly influential work that laid the groundwork for where horror would go in the coming decades; and just a triumph of cinematic pleasure, so rich in its visual storytelling that it is a genuinely visceral joy to dwell in its space.

The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Off the bat, it must be said that this really doesn’t feel like a horror movie and it is important to go into it with that in mind. While it does continue the story of the surviving characters of the first film, the two films are wholly different beasts (see what I did there?), with little to nothing in common when it comes to their respective vibes. Furthermore, I found it regrettable that Jane Randolph’s Alice, such a brassy, bold character in the original, is so subsumed into her role as housewife and mother that she all but disappears. That said, having recently watched this for the first time, I’ve got to say that I did really like it. If you go expecting anything like Cat People, you could be disappointed, but if you are open to its particular charms, I think there are rewards to be found.

Whereas the first film is a kind of mature thriller (aggression growing out of sexual self-repression), this is a story of the loneliness and magic of childhood. But it is still all to do with repression. At least six years after the events of the first installment, we pick up with Oliver and Alice. They’ve left the dark, shadowy city for the apparent safety of a small town upstate (Tarrytown, home to Sleepy Hollow and the Headless Horseman) and are bringing up their precocious 5 year old daughter, Amy. Their domestic idyll is disrupted, however, when the dreamy Amy befriends what seems to be the ghost of Irena. Concurrently, Amy also strikes up a friendship with an odd, somewhat demented older woman, Mrs. Farren, who is cared for by her embittered adult daughter – but in her dementia, Mrs. Farren doesn’t believe that she is her daughter, but is rather some sinister imposter. Oliver cannot abide what he sees as his daughter’s dangerous fancy, seeing a reflection of the madness he feels was responsible for his first wife’s death, and treats poor Amy abysmally, essentially forcing her to lie or be punished (including physical punishment). This leads to a climax where Amy almost dies twice over before Oliver finally pays the smallest amount of lip service to her experience in order to manipulate her back to “normalcy.”

Of the two, I think Cat People is clearly the more coherent, consistent film, but Curse is certainly rich in theme and feeling, if a little shambolic at times. It has a few touches of “horror cinema” (particularly in Mrs. Farren’s spooky old house), but it really isn’t trying to be a horror film at all. Reportedly, Lewton had originally titled it Amy and her Friend, and its more sensationalistic title (and accompanying marketing campaign) was imposed by the studio. If anything, I think it shares some DNA with films like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Tideland (2005), or The Fall (2006), all stories where a young girl, in the face of real life traumas, recedes into a world of fantasy, but where the line between reality and imagination is never clear and all may be mythic or psychological or both.

In this case, Amy was born into a house already haunted. Oliver presents himself as a friendly, “normal,” all-American, middle class dad, but he has never gotten over Irena’s death, or the circumstances that led to it. He keeps her photographs lying around and their bright, airy living room is dominated by a piece she had painted (actually, a Goya, but it’s attributed to her). The easy psychological reading of the film’s events (as articulated in the final act by Amy’s teacher) is that Amy, in her typical childhood loneliness, can feel that something is off, that some sadness lingers in her parents even if they never talk about it and never told her about how Irena had died. She finds Irena’s picture in a drawer and learns her name from her mother and the next thing you know, she’s imagining her, befriending this connection to her parents which they hide away and deny. A clue that Irena is a product of her imagination is the fact that she’s dressed as a fairy princess, her gown covered with sparkling stars, and she doesn’t behave at all like the Irena we knew and loved – because she is really built from Amy’s needs and imaginings. Oliver and Alice react poorly to Amy’s connection to this dark part of their past and try to force her into the same state of repression in which they reside, one necessary to live a “normal” life. This is all mirrored (the same, but reversed) in the relationship between the kooky Mrs. Farren and her very “normal” daughter – being denied so long by her mother, never able to win her recognition has made her into a bitter, broken, possibly murderous adult. Is this what awaits Amy?

A common reading I’ve found of Val Lewton’s films, particularly the early Horror is that they are all emotionally rooted in the war. While untold real-life horrors were happening overseas, on the home front, referring to that darkness and that loss was apparently quite frowned upon. One had to ‘stay positive,’ buy war bonds, support the boys abroad, and maintain a proper, good old fashioned American optimism. But of course, for most people, some son, father, brother, friend wasn’t coming home again. Of course there was loss and pain, and those who did return had seen and done things that would stay with them for years. But we don’t talk about that sort of thing, do we?

It’s quite easy to read this socio-emotional repression into this film. In this tale of grief denied, this child senses a loss, a powerful feeling – and she meets it where the adults refuse to. There is a lovely scene on Christmas Eve when carolers have come to the house and are welcomed in to have some drinks and sing around the piano. While Oliver, Alice, and their guests all gather near the instrument singing in the warmth of hearth and home, Amy hears faintly from outside, Irena singing a very pretty French song. I don’t think the song is particularly sad, but in the context, it feels ghostly, mournful, and lonely: it feels like a sadness kept out in the cold, not allowed to surface, and Amy is drawn to it. As I understand, Irena sings in French because Simone Simon was French and this is what she could sing (she didn’t know any Serbian songs I guess), but made in the spring of 1944, the fact that this melancholic moment occurs in this particular language seems to draw a line directly across the ocean to the beaches of Normandy.

That said, for all that this psychological reading maps very cleanly upon the film, I think it does a disservice to let it reduce the story and Amy’s experience to something so knowable and schematic. The film is frankly much weirder than that, and it takes clear steps to leave open the possibility that Irena’s ghost is truly present, allowing Amy’s experience to retain at least a degree of credence, her lived mystery allowed room to breathe. As with the original film, this is largely thanks to cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca, and while it may not be as strikingly stylish, he is no less masterful in his use of light. The deep, unsettling shadows of the first outing are replaced with something subtler and more gentle, but still magical. A key setting is the backyard where Amy often meets her possibly imaginary friend. Actually a studio soundstage, Musuraca has complete control over the light and uses it to a very theatrical, lovely effect. Additionally, to helm the project, Lewton promoted Robert Wise from editor to director and he maintains a light touch throughout, allowing all possibilities to coexist (Wise would go on to have quite the career – perhaps most famous for West Side Story, he’s more known in horror circles for his 1963 Shirley Jackson adaptation, The Haunting, a film where it’s quite easy to see the legacy of Val Lewton’s tendency to imply but never quite show). Finally, DeWitt Bodeen, the screenwriter of Cat People also returned and deserves credit for the film’s successful walking of the line between fancy and reality, for the way the two fraught stories of parents and children counterbalance one another.

Twice, Oliver is in the backyard with Amy and asks if she can see her friend. The whole time, he never takes his eyes off of her, never deigns to look where she is looking, never doubting that his sense of what is real or possible could ever be false. The first time, her failure to answer as he desires leads to a beating – and while the movie really isn’t scary, this is the true horror of the piece. Amy (as her parents undoubtedly did before her) lives in a world where she is expected to be her daddy’s “good girl,” and that means behaving as the other children do and not being such a little weirdo, not dredging up feelings and stories best forgotten. It means smiling prettily and doing what she’s told, and not speaking the truth if it disrupts the agreed on stasis. It means training herself to repress her own sense of mystery and melancholy and learning to fit in, erasing her unique individuality in the process.

By the end of the film, after Amy survives almost freezing to death and being strangled, Oliver chooses to play along if it will bring her back to him, and so he once again asks if she can see her friend. When she says yes, he says he sees her too, but his eyes stay fixed upon his daughter. He still never even thinks to look, to see as Irena waves good bye and fades from view. He can somewhat pretend, but he can’t possibly open his mind enough to even just turn his head for a moment. You can understand where he’s coming from, but it is no less frustrating for it. Thus Amy feels somewhat placated and will redouble her efforts to be who he wants her to be. She will learn to be what he is and her magic will die. It is a terribly sad ending, even as it’s played for loving warmth. As with all tragedy, it stings with the sadness of destruction brought on by one seeking to do good.

—

And so that is Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People. I think that as long as one doesn’t expect the second to be like the first, they make an interesting and evocative double bill. Both circle around the tragic horror of self-repression, whether in terms of an adult woman wrestling with her sexuality and identity (and the disruptive, violent power it brings), or a young girl learning to ‘be normal.’ And they are both artful and evocative. The first is high style and its influence echoes still today, but the second is still a rewarding watch, melancholic and frustrating as it is. While they are notably different films, it is still clear that they’ve come from the same team, and are invested in the same ideas, though they present them in a different mood, almost a different genre. Notably, both films maintain a kind of plausible deniability when it comes to the supernatural, Schrodinger’s cat both alive and dead at all times, all fantastic elements both real and psychological, the box never opened, the tension unresolved.

With that, I am going to stop here for now, but I think in the coming weeks, I will periodically check in with the good Mr. Lewton and his oeuvre. I have seen a few others, but there are still many I’ve missed and I’m eager to finally fill this gap in my education. I’m looking forward to it…

Spiritual Home Invasions: A Double Feature

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So after the last couple of weeks of artistically worthy, but at best “horror-adjacent” fare, this time, I really wanted to tackle some work that was clearly and unabashedly horror. I also thought it would be nice to take in something older, something I’d heard about, but had never gotten around to – to fill some gaps in my horror education. And so I’ve chosen a double feature, which I think makes sense, of The Sentinel (1977) and The Entity (1982). Right now, I don’t know too much about either, but have heard them spoken about with both a sense of admiration and infamy. I understand both films feature a woman experiencing horrific things in her home and not being believed, and that seems sufficient to pair them in this “Spiritual Home Invasions” double feature.

I don’t know how much there will be to say about each, but I hope to find something worth digging into. Let’s find out, shall we?

The Sentinel (1977)

Hmmm. What do you do with a film like The Sentinel? I mean Michael Winner’s film has a lot going for it – some scary sequences with high creep factor, a tremendous cast, a sense of mystery, paranoia, and intrigue, a chilling, downbeat ending, and it is just so very, very, very strange, with quirky inclusions that make it an easy film to love. It’s also derivative, plodding, steeped in a vein of religious horror that’s a turn off for me, and at one point feels quite mean in how a certain scene is cast. It also has some weird sexual hang ups that feel oddly regressive (and hence unpleasant), but at the same time, the way they surface are so gloriously bizarre as to elevate the whole film. It feels at once like a respectable, big studio horror picture and like a down and dirty bit of enjoyable trash that is just pulling out all the stops to shock and disturb. I loved it. I was bored. I rolled my eyes. I got unsettled. I enjoyed some jumpscare thrills. I put up with some distasteful religiosity. I clapped my hands with glee. I both appreciated and was bummed out by where it ended up. It was a peculiar 92 minutes.

Following the success of Ira Levinson’s tremendous work of Satanic paranoia and social horror, Rosemary’s Baby, and Polanski’s subsequent, pitch perfect adaptation (I don’t think I could oversell the value of either work), there was a boom through the 70s of novels, films, and novels adapted into films seeking to capitalize on a resurgent American terror of all things Devilish, often with a specifically Catholic bent (interestingly, Levinson, an Atheist, reportedly deeply regretted kicking off this trend citing how it often felt like an advertisement for the Church). Based on Jeffery Konvitz’s 1974 novel of the same name, The Sentinel is clearly one of these.

Model, Alison Parker (Christina Raines), wanting a more independent life for herself, moves out of the apartment she shares with her seemingly pretty nice, albeit warmly domineering lawyer boyfriend, Michael, and gets her own place in a beautiful, ivy covered Brooklyn brownstone. We learn of the difficult relationship she’d had with her father and the abuse and neglect her mother had suffered at his hands, and we understand how important it is for Alison to have her own space, her own career, her own life, separate from Michael, even if it means staying in a flat that might be haunted, where creepy banging sounds keep her up at night, overly friendly neighbors (who might not exist, might be dead, and might be evil) don’t respect her personal space, and the ghost of her father lurches out of shadows in the night.

Through all of this, Alison struggles with issues of trust between herself and Michael (who the police suspect had his first wife murdered), her history of suicide attempts, and a lapsed faith that she finds herself compelled to return to. Behind it all, a secretive cult within the Catholic Church, tasked with guarding the gates of Hell on earth, is trying to manipulate Alison into a responsibility and a burden she couldn’t possibly foresee, and which she doesn’t have the mental wherewithal to consciously agree to (oddly, this cult uses a bit of “Paradise Lost” as their mantra, despite the fact that Milton was a Protestant who was no friend to the Church). She has scary visions. She starts to lose her strength and collapse in public. She relives horrifying scenes from her childhood. She seems haunted at night, and maybe even kills someone, but nothing is quite clear. By its conclusion, all is revealed and resolved, but you’d be hard pressed to call the ending happy.

It’s a bit of a hard work to read. In many ways, it presents itself as a mainstream, reputable occult thriller. There are forces of good and forces of evil. We follow this struggle and empathize with this woman caught up in the middle of it all. When looking at the film wearing this mask, it all feels kind of reactionary. It’s when this woman strikes out to establish her independence that she is set upon by these terrors and when she is brought under the wing of the Church, safety and stasis reassert themselves. Furthermore, the horrors she encounters are often tied up in a presentation of sex and sexuality as something grotesque or threatening. A flashback to her childhood features a discovery of her father in a shocking sexual tryst, and one of the off-putting interactions with her new neighbors, a lesbian couple on the first floor, rests on their seemingly aggressive displays of sexuality in her presence. Beyond all that, as with much of the religious horror of the time, there is a meta-message inherent in showing these infernal horrors and understanding how the Church and faith are all that stand between them and our endangered souls.

But on the other hand, when viewed as an exploitation flick, cheaply ripping off other successful works to crank out popular entertainment, and those tropes of its particular subgenre are elided, in its commitment to the scare, to titillation, to gross out moments, and to absolute weirdness, this film rather sings and it feels easy somehow to look past the problematic politics of its form. Michael Winner, the director of, among other things, Death Wish I, II, and III, was no stranger to sensationalism, and boy does he bring that to this picture.

All of the scenes of hauntings/night time disturbances really succeed in being spooky, and at one point, surprisingly gory. A door opens and a shadowy figure appears behind it. It’s her decrepit, nigh skeletal dead father, his greying skin hanging off his bones. He attacks her and she lashes out, stabbing his side, slicing open an eye, and roughly hewing off his nose. Later, no one can find a body, but there’s blood on her clothes and when she returns to the room where it happened, it seems the carpet’s been changed and the furniture’s been moved. Who would do that, and why? Is she going mad? Is any of this happening? The paranoia and confusion land soundly.

The movie’s also helped by a rather impressive cast. There are lots of big names and faces of an earlier era of Hollywood stardom: Ava Gardner, John Carradine, Burgess Meredith (who is a hoot in this role), William Hickey (a treat as always), and many others. But it also features early performances from lots of recognizable up and comers: Jeff Goldblum, Beverly D’Angelo (who steals the show in her featured scene), Chris Sarandon (who plays Michael), Christopher Walken, and Jerry Orbach all make appearances. They aren’t all given that much to do exactly, but it is one of those movies where you’re constantly going, “hey – I didn’t know he was in this!”

But where the movie is really special is in its much referenced peculiarities. And they are both myriad and spectacular. Attending her father’s funeral, Alison relives a horrifying event from her childhood where she inadvertently walked in on her bony father having a threesome with two larger older women while they all eat cake, naked, in bed with their hands. If it were just the sex, that would be one thing – she found her dad openly fooling around in a way that her mom just had to know about and be shamed by. But the cake? It’s such a specific, fetishistic element to bring in that suddenly makes it jaw droppingly odd and grotesque. And then, to top it off, her father reacts to the intrusion by being infuriated to see Alison wearing a crucifix so he hits her and rips it off.

There is of course the scene where she is trying to get to know her neighbors and visits Gerde and Sandra (Silvia Miles and Beverly D’Angelo, respectively) who are both dressed in dance leotards. Not an odd question, Alison asks if they do Ballet, and when they don’t really respond, what they do for work.  Gerde responds that they “fondle each other” for a living and then leaves to make coffee. While she’s gone, Sandra, who seems mute, stares Alison down as she ferociously masturbates in front of her through her leotard. Alison sits there uncomfortably before finally passing on the coffee, extracting herself, and offending Gerde. It is, to say the least, a very strange sequence.

There is a climactic scene where demonic presences are closing in on Alison, and rather than any horns or bat wings, Winner just cast a crowd of people with real life physical deformities, mostly sourced from freak shows. He didn’t put any makeup on them or somehow dress them devilishly, so much as just strip them down to their shorts and send them shambling after her. On one level, it is a well-filmed scary sequence that avoids obvious, clichéd, overused infernal imagery. On another level, even though these are all adults, cognizant of what they were doing and paid for their services, it feels exploitative and not in a fun way. It feels gross having these real people with real physical issues displayed for their monstrousness to shock and horrify. I guess if they were all working in sideshows at the time, this is no different from their day jobs and probably gave them a good pay day, but with contemporary eyes, it doesn’t feel good.

But for my money, the most delightful weirdness of the whole film is when Alison’s neighbor, Charles invites her in for a surprise birthday party for his cat. It’s wearing a little hat and everything. And everyone in the building is there for this absurd, slightly eerie celebration. It’s all just on the other side of believable, but feels concrete at the time. And somehow, whenever we cut to the cat, it feels like it’s supposed to feel wrong, even evil somehow. But it’s just a cat wearing a party hat, and probably not so happy about the fact.

Many things about this film didn’t click for me – but there were also so many moments where I just sat in puzzled wonder, genuinely surprised by what I was looking at, and those little weird morsels of specificity all supported the horror, helped establish a very real sense of wrongness, of unreality, all of which really does pay off in a sad, disquieting ending where “good” wins, but it still feels like a loss. I don’t think I’m going to watch it every Christmas or anything, but I’m glad to have finally seen it.

The Entity (1982)

Wow. Off the bat, I‘ve got to say this was great – one of the best “new” films I’ve seen in a good while. I’ve also got to say it is not for everyone. The obvious content warning here is that the entire premise of the movie is a woman being tormented, assaulted, and raped by an unseen presence; hence if you just cannot bear to watch depictions of sexual violence, skip this one. If that isn’t an immediate deal breaker, seek it out because it is a great, worthy, scary, and I would venture, significant piece of work.

While not in any way explicitly demonic, I feel this grew out of a similar moment as the first film today as it was adapted from a novel that would seem to have been riding the coat tails of The Exorcist. Both this and Blatty’s novel claim to have been based on documented paranormal occurrences.  Both feature single mothers. Both center on a question of scientific analysis vs lived experience. But other than those superficial characteristics, this is entirely its own film. And what a film! Also, whereas The Exorcist is the poster child of religious horror pedaling faith rooted in the terror of radical evil, The Entity is a scathing, depressing, feminist excoriation of the banal ubiquity of gender-based violence in modern life. (Spoiler warning: I don’t think this is a piece that can be ruined by reading about the plot, so I will be discussing it in detail – but if you’d like to avoid that, go find it – I guess it streams on Starz in the States.)

Barbara Hershey delivers a powerful turn as Carla Moran, a single mother of a teenage boy and two young girls, who is systematically assaulted and abused over the course of the film by an unseen, but undeniably male, presence. It attacks her repeatedly in her home; it crashes her car while she’s driving; it wrecks the apartment of her friend, Cindy, in whose home she seeks asylum. Her psychiatrist is sympathetic but his certainty in the psychological, interior root of her experience contributes to a kind of gaslighting cruelty – as he tries so hard to help her, he only succeeds in making her feel like she’s going mad – denying what she knows she has experienced, telling those who have witnessed her attacks to stop playing along and enabling her delusions. Her masculine, older boyfriend, who is always travelling for work, can’t handle the reality of what’s happening to her (when he finally experiences it, he runs away and we never see him again). A team of Parapsychologists do believe her, but they are more excited at the prospect of their own legitimization than they are invested in ensuring her welfare. Her kids have seen horrible things (and her teenage son is injured by the entity while trying to rescue his mother) but no one believes them, and Carla needs to take whatever steps she can to see to their safety, and shelter them from witnessing more horrors.

Early on, after the first evening’s attacks prompt Carla to take her kids and flee her home, taking shelter with her friend Cindy, it is clear that Cindy’s husband isn’t going to accept visitors for more than one evening (he’s a gem) and thus stranded, Carla finds herself parking at the beach all day with her children. She clearly has nowhere else to go. Family isn’t an option (we learn later of abuse, possibly sexual, that she endured growing up). She doesn’t seem to have any more of a support network. Finally, the sun setting, her little girls baffled by the events of the last 24 hours, and her teenage son frustrated at being kept in the dark, she gives in and takes them home. She doesn’t seem to have any other options. And when the next day the mysterious force takes control of her vehicle while she’s driving and crashes her car, it is evident that she can’t just move, leave the house, and start over. This trauma, this violation will follow her unless she can somehow resolve it. And like a more run of the mill abuser, it will try to separate her from her friends, restrict her ability to move, try to isolate her, and break her spirit.

This is a great, compelling horror movie, but it is not what you might call a fun watch. Though no one is killed throughout the whole piece, the scenes of assault are truly horrific and incredibly heavy (that weight only slightly lessened by cinematic appreciation for the technical prowess with which it’s all executed – stellar acting, in camera effects, and a bravura practical gimmick involving Hershey’s head on a mannequin of Carla’s body with suction cups inside to give the impression of invisible hands pressing on her assaulted flesh). Furthermore, there is a growing dread that there may be no solution, that this is just the world that Carla is stuck in, that no one is willing to, or even can, help her, and that she is totally alone in suffering through this recurrent nightmare. It is bleak and shocking and it has stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

On those scenes though, I do think they are very well handled. On one level, they are very direct – there is no skirting around the issue or sugar coating what is going on. This is a film about rape, about abuse, and it starts in the first ten minutes. At the same time, I feel it is all filmed in a non-exploitative manner. The camera never leers. You never feel that there is a sleazy interest in titillation (which can be found in, for example, many “rape-revenge” movies of the 1970s). Even when clearly displaying assaults on her naked form (such as the above mentioned mannequin effect), I personally don’t feel she is objectified, or that her suffering is exploited for cheap thrills. It all feels awful, but also serious minded, and the camera always takes Carla’s perspective, is on her side. This is her experience, and we are with her throughout it.

And that experience is absolutely one of horror. Sure – on one level, there’s well done spooky haunted house stuff. There is a really scary sense of the malevolence and violent power of this unseen and unknowable presence. The horror movie of it all works great and the filmmaking is propulsive – there isn’t an angle that can’t be Dutched – focus that can’t be deep – and Charles Bernstein’s score is abrasive and compelling. But beyond that, it really deals with Horror with a capital H. (This will rather get into spoiler territory if you want to avoid that sort of thing.)

Worse than the brutality of any given assault on screen is the sense of inescapability. The person trying the hardest to help her is her therapist (Ron Silver brilliantly walks a line between help and harm), but he is really only making things worse. Fueled by knowledge of her abusive childhood, he is blinkered by a Freudian reading of her current experience, and though he is desperate to help her heal, he consistently does everything in his power to rob her of agency, to break her. The team of parapsychologists don’t deny her experience, but they happily risk her life to further their careers, while still failing to contain the threat. The only person who gives any real comfort is her friend Cindy when she witnesses an attack and confirms Carla’s sanity.

But by the end, it is really clear that there is no way to bust this ghost, to cleanse this house, to rid herself of this assailant. She can’t run from it. It won’t let her drive away. Science is helpless in fighting it. This, this sexual violence, this demeaning, masculinized brutality, is just what the world is, and there is no way out if she plans to keep drawing breath. Herein lies the true horror – the revelation of and reckoning with an unbearable truth. It is exhausting and grim and infuriating, but it is. And thus, the only solution available to her is to choose survival and endurance, because the alternative is unacceptable.

Two striking, significant moments come quite late in the film. First, working with the parapsychologists to trap the entity, Carla serves as bait in a simulation of her home which they have rigged to protect her in a safe chamber while trying to freeze the spirit with liquid helium. It doesn’t work, and as their plans are falling all around them, the presence corners Carla, forcing her against a wall, and she finds the power within to defy this thing, and to live. With recourse to nothing but her own will, she stares down her invisible assailant and has a few short but powerful lines:

All right. All right, bastard. I’ve finished running. So do what you want.
Take your time, buddy. Take your time. Really, I’m thankful for the rest.
I’m so tired of being scared. So it’s all right, it really is. It’s all right.
You can do anything you want to me. You can torture me, kill me, anything.
But you can’t have me.
You cannot touch me.
That’s mine.

Then, in the final scene, we see her return to her now empty house, taking one last look before leaving to try to build a better life elsewhere. The door slams shut and the entity utters its sole, crude, assaultive line of the whole film, “Welcome home, cunt.” With a small, resigned smile, she opens the door and leaves. We then read that after moving, the attacks continued, but lessened over time.

It’s a bit of Nancy Thompson turning her back on Freddy and taking back whatever power the fear she’d felt had granted him. It’s a bit of Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum, as used in The Handmaid’s Tale a few years later. Sometimes the horror just is – the world is not just – the worst things happen to people without cause. Sometimes things can be changed. And sometimes they can’t. In the face of that absolute and insurmountable wrongness, one can be destroyed or one can find a way to keep going. Carla continues, and chisels out for herself a modicum of freedom, of life. It is a chilling, depressing, and yet, in its way, empowering conclusion to a difficult, moving, significant film.

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So in the end, these were not particularly similar movies, though they do have some overlap: not being believed, an invasion of the home, a kind of victory which still feels terrible. Of the two though, The Entity really impressed me – I think it deserves far more acclaim as a kind of classic – but I suppose the extent to which it’s a difficult watch keeps it off many people’s lists. The Sentinel, on the other hand, isn’t exactly a great film, but it is rather a hoot – more of a trashy, spooky good time, somewhat soured by religiosity and exploitative stunt casting.  But while my ‘double feature’ may not have quite clicked, I’m happy to have finally seen them both.

Black Female Horror Directors – Part II

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Last week, given February being Black History Month in the States and having also been until recently Women in Horror Month, I started seeking out horror films directed by Black women. I will say though, there are slim pickings – really very few to choose from, and though I’ve appreciated all that I’ve watched, there has consistently been a certain distance from the horror genre. Still, it has been an interesting project for me to target films thus and probably end up sampling some things I may not have otherwise chosen.

So, let’s keep moving forward and check out another two films this week. Again, these are first time watches and I don’t know how much there will be to say about them, so these may be shorter reviews and I will endeavor to avoid spoiling anything.

Nanny (2022)

As with the two films covered last week, this is also a feature debut for writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, and I think it is a lovely movie – warm, deeply felt, utterly culturally and personally specific, and really quite moving. However, given that this is a horror blog, I must say I don’t think it’s much of a “Horror” movie and I suspect it is ill served by the label. Still, on Prime (where it streams exclusively), it is listed as “horror-drama-suspense” and IMDB lists it as Drama – Horror, so we will dig into it here. I myself would have labeled it a Folklore Infused Magical Realist Drama (as if that’s a common genre on a streamer like Prime), and I think it is quite a good one. However, I fear that being marketed as a Horror film, from Blumhouse Studios no less (which releases a wide slate of popular horror every year), means that it will mostly be clicked on by people looking for, you know, a horror movie, who may be very disappointed, while an audience that could be more appreciative might not come across it. But hey, I found it this way, and if it hadn’t been listed as “Horror” I wouldn’t have watched it, so maybe I’m wrong.

We follow Aisha, a young woman from Senegal, working in New York City as a Nanny for a well-to-do couple. The work relationship initially feels good – respectful, warm, and considerate, but it isn’t long before they are expecting more from her than is reasonable, the husband is hitting on her, and on top of it all, they are stiffing her on her pay (and threatening her with legal trouble – given her undocumented status – when she complains). Somehow this clearly wealthy family (she is some kind of corporate executive who complains of how unfair her work situation is in the ‘boy’s club’ of the company to the Nanny she’s underpaying and he is a globe-trotting photographer who spends a lot of time in Africa and seems initially quite supportive, but there is a strong whiff of exploitation to his photos of African revolt, hardship, and poverty) is having what they perceive as hard times financially and are cutting corners where they know they can get away with it.  But these are all minor irritations she’s willing to put up with if she can actually get her salary, send it home, and finally buy a ticket for her son (whom she hasn’t seen in a year) to join her in the States.

Aisha is wracked by emotions – guilt for having left her own child behind and instead giving so much attention to this rich couple’s little girl, discomfort with having so displaced herself and apprehension about doing the same to her son, hope that she’s actually building the two of them a better future, and the constant stress of trying to hold it all together. Mostly, she just keeps her nose down and pushes ahead, choosing rock solid self-confidence out of pure necessity, but you can see how it all wears on her, eating away at her resolve.

Perhaps this stress and guilt metastasizes into disturbing hallucinatory visions. Perhaps she is haunted by the folkloric spirits of Western Africa for her abandonment of her cultural home. Perhaps her strength of emotions have summoned these forces to help her. Perhaps she externalizes her inner turmoil through these folkloric figures of her childhood. Either way, strange things begin to happen while she’s at work. The shower seems to keep turning itself on. At the child’s swimming lesson, she’s pulled under by a kind of mermaid, Mami Wata. Sleeping in the room allotted for her, shadows of spider legs climb the walls and it’s implied that Anansi the Spider is involved in some wicked child-endangerment trickery. Her reflection is not her own. Many of these sequences could have existed inside a horror film (and I suppose on the strength of them, it is marketed as one), and I must admit that it did earn two genuine gasps from me (much to the entertainment of my wife who was working on the other side of the room while I watched this with my headphones on). But at the end of the day, I think they exist totally in service to the larger drama – which primarily feels tender and sad and gentle – more than adding up to a larger horrific feeling (though by the film’s conclusion, there are tragic revelations).

With heavy reliance on CGI effects, these sequences don’t always look their best, but the film in general is often beautifully filmed. Its particular color palette and saturation is striking and effective – often contrasting the warm, rich colors of Aisha’s wardrobe, home, and neighborhood, with the grey, modern sterility of the upscale apartment she works in. The film is very textural, building a story out of glass and stone and skin and fabric. And the sound design and scoring is rich and watery and fascinating – sometimes bringing an ominous sense to scenes in which nothing bad seems to have happened – yet – and keeping me watching the credits to the very end because I appreciated dwelling a bit longer in this space and letting the feelings of the film wash over me.

And there is a lot of feeling and a lot of nuance. There are so many small, well-observed moments: Aisha at a friend’s kid’s birthday party, struggling to relax and enjoy herself and flashing on visions of her own child having his next birthday without her, moments of kindness and loving solidarity with the woman at the money transfer office who’s so invested in her role in helping Aisha bring her son over, the hesitance with which Aisha allows herself to open up to Malik, the handsome and charming doorman at the building where she works, but also how uncomfortable she is about opening up in any way at all – like she can’t afford to relax, even for a moment – and if she does, if she lets herself be happy, maybe it feels like a betrayal of her son – leaving him behind to enjoy a new life without him. Many of these moments are small – it is a film that best thrives in the little, lived-in details – but as a whole, the film is rich in them, as it is also rich in its folkloric influences, drawing on figures like Anansi or Mami Wata without feeling the need to excessively explain them – they can just be there. Or not. Nothing is certain and the film isn’t interested in resolving those questions.

As with last week’s features, I feel that while anyone could have told this story with this nuance and this care, possibly no one else would have chosen to, and searching out films by a particular population has brought me characters and situations I wouldn’t have otherwise met. To be fair, Jusu is not an undocumented immigrant and this is not her story – she’s from Atlanta, though I’ve read her parents are from Sierra Leone. I don’t know what her childhood was or how it may or may not have informed this work, but I imagine her background feeds into it more than, for example, mine would have.

I really did like this film. I just wouldn’t generally call it “Horror.” But casting the widest possible net, “Horror” sometimes comes to include any contemporarily set story that features the supernatural, psychological turmoil, and/or the tragic, and something I love about the genre is that it can make room for such things that don’t really have another genre home, so I should probably stop harping on its classification and just be happy that such an interesting little picture has a place in the world.

Atlantics (2019)

So when I set out on this project last week, I hadn’t realized one other element that would tie together the films I’m watching. The fourth in a row now, this is another first time feature of a writer-director, and it is a confident, patient, unique little masterpiece. Again, I wouldn’t exactly call it a Horror film, but it does feature horror elements (ghosts, possession, something akin to zombies), and at least in this case, it isn’t actually marketed as one so much as a supernatural-romance-drama. But it first came on my radar praised by Elric Kane of the Colors of the Dark horror podcast, and based on that glowing recommendation, I feel justified including it here.

The other surprising through line I’ve stumbled into is Senegal. In Nanny, Aisha has emigrated from Senegal, leaving behind her son. In Atlantics, French-Senegalesewriter-director Mati Diop focuses on a group of women in Dakar, Senegal left behind when their boyfriends leave on a small boat, attempting to emigrate to Spain (also, just a few weeks ago, I wrote about Saloum, a Senegalese co-production – Senegal is apparently having a moment on this blog). I think it’s interesting how these are both tales of emigration (about the leaving) more than immigration (so typical in the American context), but whereas in Nanny, the one who left is haunted by who she’s left behind, in Atlantics, it is those left behind who find themselves haunted by the loss of these young men.

Specifically, we follow a young woman, Ada, whose lover, Souleiman, is among the group of guys who take the perilous ocean voyage after giving up on ever getting paid for a fancy hotel construction job (their boss owes them four months back wages and you don’t have the impression that he ever intends to pay). Working in the shadow of a modern skyscraper, these young men inhabit a totally different world. It feels crushingly unfair, but there is also a kind of solidarity between them as they demand their wages together, as they cram into the back of a pickup, singing songs on the road home to see their families and loved ones. Souleiman seems so weighed down, defeated, no song in his heart, and it is lovely seeing his friends patting him, rubbing his head, trying to lift him up into the group spirit. Not having seen each other for days because he’s been working, the two lovers meet up for an afternoon rendezvous by the sea, but Souleiman seems distracted, his eyes drawn to the waves. There’s a plan to meet up later that night, but when Ada and all of her girlfriends get to the club, they discover that all of the boys have left, and the bottom just drops out. The music is turned off as the young women process their grief.

This leaves Ada with little recourse but to follow through on her appointed marriage to an affluent man whom she does not love, Omar. Diop’s film never explains how she got connected to Omar, but it is clear that there is no love between them, and though her friends are all impressed with the wealth he offers, Ada keeps him at a distance. It feels like she had always been assuming she would be able to get out of it and make a life with Souleiman, but now that he’s gone, she’s stuck, and at her lively, colorful wedding ceremony, she seems to be going through the motions in a kind of a daze. At least until her marriage bed is mysteriously set ablaze, kicking off the more ghostly portion of the film.

Without going into too much detail, it does seem that the spirits of the boys have returned with a vengeance – to hound their former boss into handing over back pay to their families, and in Ada’s case, to sabotage this supposedly (but not really) joyful occasion and, to whatever degree it is possible, be with her again. In this, there are nice elements of ghostliness, of the mysterious. It isn’t filmed in a way to ‘be scary,’ but there is an emotional, unsettling quality to it all – it is literally ‘haunting’. When the boss is confronted in his home by a pack of white eyed women, all ridden by their former lovers to demand their due, it is threatening and uncanny. They are direct. They are unyielding. If horror involves the revelation of unbearable truth, this man’s responsibility for their loss surely qualifies. And their anger is all the more powerful for being so quiet, yet constant.

A detail I loved in the performance of Mama Beneta Sane (who plays Ada) is how steady and almost detached she is from her whole familial obligation to Omar. There is a sense in the film of the really unpleasant socio-political situation these women inhabit. Omar has a proprietary attitude towards her, and I doubt that’s uncommon. But she just doesn’t care. Not even a little bit. Her mother and grandmother criticize her for not speaking more sweetly to him, for not giving him a smile and keeping him happy, but she was out of this marriage before it ever happened. If she needs to just walk away, leave him, leave her family, get a job, crash with a friend, she will. And it’s all without drama, totally lacking in histrionics, because none of it matters. The one thing that she had loved is gone, and the degree to which she no longer gives a damn makes her surprisingly free, strong, independent. For a film that is so sad, she ends on a surprisingly liberated note.

Relatedly, the film strikes an interesting balance of tones and feelings. I will say, this is no action movie. You might even call it slow. There are no horror jump scares on offer. Not much happens and the dominant mood is one of waiting. We are waiting with the characters. Living on this coast, in a dusty world of unpaid salaries, unloving marriages, a police force that protects a rich developer but turns a blind eye to how he rips off his workers, and shiny new buildings to be inhabited by total strangers, they wait: for money they’ve earned, for the boys to come home from work (or to ever come home from sea), to sneak out of the house and go be young for an evening, and possibly to leave and not come back. And washing over it all is the static-like roar of the ocean. There are few moments in the film when we don’t hear it. At once that ocean feels like a way to the wide open world out there beyond all this, but also like a wall holding them where they are – impenetrable, dangerous, swallowing up their young men who attempt a life abroad. Only once, for a brief moment at the end, after a taste of romantic resolution, does it feel like a natural force that gives and supports life.

Living in Europe, the last ten years have featured plenty of discussion of ‘the Migrant Crisis,’ as so many, particularly from Northern Africa and the Middle East have been taking their lives into their hands and boarding small crafts, such as the one the boys take here, hoping to find better lives in a new context. There have been a lot of responses to this, some more welcoming than others (and some quite cold and racist); but even the most open and supportive generally frame this as a problem for European countries to deal with. Insofar as I’ve chosen these films to encounter different perspectives, it is refreshing to see people presented as individuals, not problems to be solved, and to have a glimpse of what they are leaving, why they would do so, and how those left behind are affected. And still, this is not just a social realist drama, presenting a difficult real-world situation. It is more than that. Mythic, tragic, languorous, romantic, and rich in ambivalence, Diop’s film is a deeply personal and therefore universal meditation on love and hope and loss and resilience. If you’re reading this blog looking for scary movies, it isn’t that. But if you’re looking for something really haunting and special, I do recommend this one – it’s currently streaming on Netflix.

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So this was another interesting pairing: both award winning films (Nanny at Sundance and Atlantics at Cannes) from first time writer-directors (both Black women with African parents) and both dealing with emigration in a very personal and emotional fashion. Both films draw on elements of folk belief and intimations of the supernatural, but neither really feels quite like horror. Rather, I would say that both feel more like a kind of Magical Realism – supernatural things happen – there are ghosts, or possessions, or spirits, or gods, and it can threaten, but it feels natural. It feels of the world of the characters, not merely an element of allegory to heighten the emotion of their stories, and certainly not there to terrify the viewer. And both films were very moving for me in different ways.

They may not exactly be “Horror,” but I wouldn’t have seen them if I hadn’t been seeking out “Horror” films from Black Female directors, and thus, I’m happy to call this little project a success. In these last two weeks, I watched things I wouldn’t have otherwise. I got to look through some different eyes. I saw four very interesting and worthwhile films that at least bear some relationship to my chosen genre even if they are far from textbook examples of it. I really appreciate how Horror, in its unique way, can help open up perspectives like this.

But it all does lead to an intriguing question of why there is so little to choose from (beyond the fact that there are comparatively few films directed by Black women in general – which seems obviously rooted in certain socioeconomic inequities). Few horror films at all, and so many of them low on the “horror.” To be fair, I didn’t give any attention to Nia DaCosta’s Candyman sequel/reboot (which is absolutely a horror film, though one that clearly has things to say about race in America) – to some extent because I’d already seen it and I wanted to focus on first time watches, and to some extent because I feel it’s so tied up in a nexus of elements besides the self-expression of the filmmaker – commercial pressures of being a sequel/reboot, deep love for the original film, and a kind of meta-commentary inherent in reclaiming a “Black” narrative which had originally been put on screen by a White British guy (whose idea it had been to move it to a Black American neighborhood in the first place – in the original short story, Candyman was White, it took place in London, and it dealt rather with British class issues). But maybe that all deserves its own post someday. For now, I’m quite satisfied with the four Horror-adjacent films that I got.

Still, next week, I’m gonna try to find something scary. 🙂

Black Female Horror Directors – Part I

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Representation is important, in front of and behind the camera. While I’m not one to say that films should never be made about certain communities by those who are not from those communities (a White, British guy can make a great movie centered on an African American neighborhood – see Candyman (1992)), I do think it is important that people be given the opportunity to tell their own stories. This isn’t only a matter of parity, of the fairness of self-representation; it’s good for the art. When members of under-represented groups tell their own tales, there may be different points of focus, new perspectives, the camera may be pointed in places someone from without may not have thought to point it, and we all benefit from a wider range of life experience being committed to film.

With that in mind, February is “Black History Month” (at least in America, where I’m from) and until quite recently, it was also “Women in Horror Month” (though as of 2022, the organizers have opted for a more year-long approach). Therefore, I thought it might be a good project to try some horror films, all new for me, made by Black female directors. I will say though, as sometimes occurs when seeking to fill a representational gap, an initial search has not turned up so many to choose from (echoes of the other week when I had trouble finding a “Lesbian Vampire film” made by an LGBT+, female identifying director, or a vampire for that matter). But I have found some, so let’s check a couple out.

As I haven’t seen these before and don’t know how much there will be to discuss, it’s possible that these will be shorter reviews and therefore, I’ll endeavor to keep them spoiler free.

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

Right off the bat, before any reader objects – ok, I do have some trouble counting this as a horror film. It’s got rich, steamy Louisiana atmosphere. It’s got some death. Psychic elements. Maybe ghosts. Hoodoo death curses. But the mood is overwhelmingly that of a period drama rather than horror – it feels like an adaptation of some worthy historical novel. Still, it was listed as “horror” on IMDB and I remember it being discussed in the excellent Horror Noir (2019) documentary, detailing Black representation in Horror films, so here it is; and I do think it has value worth discussing, even if it’s a stretch to include it in the genre.

While her feature directorial debut may only tangentially relate to horror, as an actor, Kasi Lemmons had already held key roles in the genre (fulfilling the trope of Black best friend to the White female lead in Silence of the Lambs and Candyman). Just a few years later, she wrote and directed this deeply personal film which Roger Ebert (not always a friend to Horror) named the best of the year (it was also the most profitable independent film of 1997).

A 60s period piece set in the small town of Eve’s Bayou, outside of New Orleans, the film centers on a ten year old girl named Eve, whom we know from the opening narration by the end of the summer will kill her father, that threat of violence hanging over the rest of the proceedings. Eve’s father is a successful doctor and their family is local royalty of sorts, descended from a Famous French general and the freed slave woman to whom he’d dedicated the town. Her father, Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson), is also a notorious philanderer and this is the source of no small amount of family drama. Jackson brings so much easy charm to the role, and you can see how women would be drawn to him, as well as how easily he could manipulate his wife and family. It’s refreshing to see him play a character with so little bluster, so much warmth, and such deep dysfunction under the surface. It’s no wonder that he came on the project as a producer – it’s a great part.

Eve’s aunt (Louis’s sister) has psychic premonitions, which it seems Eve shares, and works as a kind of spiritual therapist, assisting townspeople with their own traumas, while suffering greatly herself, cursed as she is to always outlive her husbands (so far, she’s been through three). And rounding out the spiritual cast, there is the local Hoodoo woman who tells fortunes that aren’t always so nice and has no qualms about dealing with darker magics if the price is right. Otherwise, the film focuses on the relationships between Eve, her mother, her older sister, and her younger brother, as they navigate the personal betrayals, the hazy visions of something tragic looming in their future, and the crazy-making emotions and impulses of childhood and adolescence. Much of the film is borne by the young performers and while they may not hit every beat, they do an admirable job of carrying a great deal of emotional weight.

I can’t say that I was totally captivated at every turn by the story (though there were surely strong moments and elements), but I did appreciate the representational project. Inspired by family trips to Louisiana in her childhood, Lemmons gives so much attention to small details of this community, its people, its spirituality and superstitions, and its aspirations – and it is noteworthy that this is a different kind of small, rural, southern Black populace than is usually portrayed on film. This is a fairly well-to-do middle class society, in which the Batistes stand out for their money and position. This isn’t a story about poverty, the ghosts of slavery, or the struggle for Civil Rights – this is a thriving population full of its own characters and stories and dramas, with no need to look further afield for greater significance. Notably, there doesn’t seem to be a single White person in the cast (plenty of films might feature an all-White cast without drawing notice). The story is self-contained – about Eve and her family and their troubles – we look through their eyes and not those of some outside perspective intended to purportedly help a mainstream White audience connect.

By the end of the film, her father is indeed dead – but did she actually kill him? That is in doubt. There have been dark revelations, but those revelations have also been cast into doubt. All is subjective and nothing is very certain. To paraphrase the closing narration, the past and the future can both be seen, but both change depending on the light. Lemmons succeeded in bringing a similarly personal emotionality to it all, focusing her lens on a time and a place, on nuances of character and society that another filmmaker might not have been so drawn to. I still have trouble calling it “Horror” per se, but it is a work of value and I’m glad to have given it a chance.

Master (2022)

Mariama Diallo’s directorial feature debut, which she also wrote, does clearly situate itself more firmly in the genre, though by the end it’s thrown into question whether anything has actually been supernatural or if this has all really been more of a psycho-social, allegorical drama. Regardless, it does feel like a horror movie, particularly through its first two acts, and that’s enough for me. Past that, it is a very different piece than the preceding film. Whereas Eve’s Bayou stood out for its focus on the nuances of life within its geographically and culturally specific Louisiana Black community, Master directly sets its crosshairs on the current experience of being Black in America writ large, particularly when navigating contexts historically dominated by rich White people, in this case, Academia.

 I will say, before going into full detail, that the film is really rich in ideas, lived experiences, and an entirely unsettling, oppressive sense of dread and discomfort. That said, sometimes there is just so much going on in terms of a possible ghost story, the echoes of a witch hanging, the specter of slavery and/or Black servitude, and the contemporary ‘micro-aggressions’ and mendacity both encountered and perpetrated by our protagonists that I have difficulty pulling the threads together. Are these the failings of an over-ambitiously messy first feature, or is the intention to make an evocative, disturbing mélange of a film rather than telling a totally straightforward story? If the former, it is still such an overall success that it’s easy to forgive the ways it doesn’t quite gel by the end. If the latter, it is quite effective in its goal, though it does suffer somewhat for having created initial expectations of, let’s say, typical genre-based narrative coherence which it seems to lose interest in during the final stretch.

We follow two Black women at a prestigious New England University which is notably homogeneous. Jasmine, a freshman housed in a dorm room which may be haunted, in which the school’s first Black student had hanged herself years ago, is one of perhaps 8 or 9 Black students on campus. Gail is one of the only Black members of the faculty, and has just been made the “Master” of the students’ house that Jasmine lives in. Being a Master is prestigious and Gail is the first Black professor to hold such a position. Almost immediately, both of them begin to experience spooky stuff. Portraits of the school’s founder suddenly appear skeletal, maggots seem to spontaneously generate in surprising places, dreams are haunted by ghostly premonitions, spindly clawed hands reach out from beneath beds, and mysterious cloaked figures loom in the night.

All of these typical Horror trappings are seamlessly interwoven with similarly discomforting socio-racial dynamics. Jasmine sees an older Black cafeteria worker warmly coddling all of the White students only to get the cold shoulder when she approaches. Gail finds countless racist artifacts in her new “Master” chambers, such as a “Mammy” cookie jar or remnants of Black servants’ quarters. Jasmine tries to fit in with her roommate’s rich friends, but they all (barely) subtly treat her more like the help than like a peer. Gail suspects that her rise in status is thanks more to optics than respect, and that her colleagues mainly want her in the position to clean up the school’s historical image. And most dramatically, Jasmine suffers direct harassment, with racist images and nooses hung on her dorm room door.

It is the primary strength of the film that all of these elements seem to carry equal weight as the intimations of supernatural threat. I think this is mutually beneficial – the horror movie tropes are given greater emotional weight by being linked with the real world issues and the examination of socio-racial discomfort benefits from being accurately framed as “horror.” All of it is dreadful. All of it is scary. All of it communicates the message that “you are not welcome here – you are not wanted – leave while you can,” and at the same time, both women are justified in wanting to stick it out, to not give up, to not let it all get to them. They want to be stronger than that and not be defeated by this ugliness. Ultimately though, the ugly, the danger, the ghosts of the past are really quite a force to be reckoned with.

The clawed figure that haunts Jasmine’s dreams and pushes her towards the window from which past students have jumped is scary, but is it scarier than when she finds herself the only Black person at a party, surrounded by White students aggressively shouting along to a rap song, gleefully screaming the N-word at her and making gorilla sounds? This is filmed as a horror scene, and rightly so. Gail is largely aware of what Jasmine is going through, having been there before herself, but she can’t look through her eyes, can’t always be there to push back against the social weight. And she is pulled in other directions, navigating her own issues in the school, particularly the racial overtones surrounding the possible advancement of the school’s only other Black, female professor. There’s only so much she can do.

By the end, the supernatural element fades to the background or is even consciously abandoned – either it was always metaphoric, or it just can’t compete with the human social forces that make life for the two of them at this school, which they’ve both worked so hard to get to, so very unbearable. Shortly before this, perhaps putting a cap on the possible ghost story, Gail tells Jasmine, “It’s not ghosts. It’s not supernatural. It’s America, and it’s everywhere.” It’s a bleak turn – it would be so much easier if there was just a scary ghost to appease, or even if that weren’t possible, to know that it could only haunt so many, only hurt so many. But nope – Gail knows that what Jasmine’s experiencing can’t be run away from; it is just the world that they inhabit.

In the end, though, both characters do leave the university in their ways, but as Gail walks off campus for the last time (after being stopped by campus security and asked to show her faculty ID), we see the night alive with service workers – garbage men, landscapers – all of them Black, just doing their jobs – maintaining a beautiful environment for (primarily) privileged White kids. She may leave, but nothing has changed. Perhaps nothing will change. And really, where is there to go? As I said, it’s a dark ending.

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From one angle, these are two totally disparate films – one only tangentially connected to the supernatural and one steeped in horror conventions – one entirely set within a Black community and one focused on the tension of being Black in a “White space” – one a cohesive family drama and one a thematically broad hodgepodge of racism, literal hauntings, and social anxiety. However, the similarities are just as striking. Both were first feature films written and directed by a Black woman, and both clearly shed light on specific experiences of being a Black woman in America in a concrete time and place – these are not generalizations, but feel distinct and individualized. What a pleasure and what a value.

Sadly however, these will be the only films considered for now. This is a busy week for me outside of the blog, so this is as far as I’m going today. But February isn’t over yet and I plan to continue in this vein next time.