Category Archives: Uncategorized

Top Ten New To Me in 23

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I’m about two and a half years into this blogsperiment? Blogventure? Bloject? (Ugh – I think these are just getting worse and were never necessary to begin with) And in that time, I’ve had good runs (last January – April, I managed a new post every week) and I’ve had drier spells (lately, I’ve averaged a post every two weeks). The blog has given me opportunity and impetus to finally check out loads of work I’ve been meaning to get around to, but just never had, and it’s also given me the excuse to devote some regular time to thought – what am I going to discuss this week? What did I think about this work? What, quality notwithstanding, did I find interesting in it? Why did (or didn’t) I enjoy a given moment of awfulness? What bigger topics do I have thoughts about or do I want to think about? There’s a lot of thinking about thinking about thinking. Sometimes there’s more of that than writing…

And so, at the turn of the year, as everyone is making best of lists, looking back at the year that’s passed or looking forward to the future to come, it has become my tradition (of only two and a half years – stop fiddling on my roof) to do a list as well – but it’s tricky. I can’t in good conscience do a “best of” list for 2023 releases because I’m terrible at keeping up with new stuff (out of the 123 horror movies I watched in 2023, only 11 were new releases). Past that, choosing the ten best to write about is rough because most of the best horror content I’ve watched this year, I’ve already done posts on (83 movies in 2023) – so in a way, these are all leftovers: The Ten Best Things I’ve Watched This Year That I Hadn’t Seen Before And Haven’t Written About Yet. It’s a mouthful. Also not a catchy title. Ah well…

In case you’re wondering, Silent Night, Deadly Night IV isn’t on the list (I wrote about it last time). But I figure she’s holding up TEN fingers in a form that is NEW for her, so there you go…

Some of these I’d watched planning to do a full post about them but for whatever reason I just didn’t make it happen. In that case, I hereby reserve the right to return to any and all of these in the future for longer analysis (I don’t know who I’m submitting this claim to, but it is thus declared). Some of these I really enjoyed, but just didn’t feel the urge to commit three thousand words to them, and so here I can briefly sing their praises without the burden of deeper consideration.  So yeah – these will be short (in some cases, I watched them once almost a year ago and we’ll see what’s stayed with me). Also, this isn’t a countdown – these are in no particular order – just that in which I think of them.

But that’s probably enough set up. Let’s get to it, shall we? For a change, as these will all be short texts, I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but I’m not exactly making any promises.

Curtains (1983)

What an absolute blast! This Canadian slasher with a troubled production history (directors coming and going and taking their names off the project – resulting in wildly divergent tones and, shall we say, odd plotting) has a bit of everything: creepy dolls; that scene on the ice with the hag masked killer, the sickle, and the slow motion skating; a head in a toilet; the total defiance of physics (how can you get knocked out of an upstairs window only to crash into the downstairs window?); some legitimately suspenseful sequences, better acting than it probably deserved (Samantha Eggar is great, John Vernon, most recently mentioned in my write up of Killer Klowns from Outer Space, has to be one of the all-time greatest portrayers of cinematic bastards, and I was so happy to see Lynne Griffin, Clare from Black Christmas), and a twist ending that for my money, really lands. And for all that it is more than a little stylistically messy, it even has strong contemporary resonance – a #MeToo movie thirty years ahead of its time.

We follow Samantha, a famous actress researching her next big role which will require her to play “crazy” so her director, Jonathan Stryker, a real prince of a guy, has her committed to an institution to “research” the role. He then abandons her there and invites a group of young ingénues to his remote house to “audition” them instead, and by audition, of course I mean psychologically torment them and try to get into their pants. What he’s looking for in the part is a bit of a mystery as the women are professionally, respectively, an actress, an ice skater, a stand-up comedian, a ballet dancer, and a musician. But maybe he’s not even casting, and he just wants a group of attractive women to sleep with and belittle while doing acting exercises. Like I said, a real prince.

Of course, everyone starts dying (I’m pretty sure only one person makes it to the end), and there is a reasonably enjoyable whodunit in puzzling out who’s actually behind all this slashing, as well as a turn at the end that took me by surprise, but I think this is a movie most enjoyed for its idiosyncratic little details rather than the big picture. Really – it’s a hoot.

Sante Sangre (1989)

I was so impressed with this one and really intended to write a full post on it and somehow failed to (I think it just felt so big and worthy that I needed to invest more thought and take the time for another couple of viewings, and that week, I just wasn’t up to the task). One day, I hope I circle back and do so because it is tremendous. In short, it’s about a young man, Fenix, who grew up in a circus where he witnessed his knife throwing father cut off his religious-cult-leading mother’s arms as revenge for her acid-poured-on-crotch revenge on his infidelity with the tattooed lady. After escaping from an asylum, Fenix becomes his mother’s new arms and is compelled by her to carry out a series of murders. In terms of plot, it’s relatively straightforward (relatively), but Alejandro Jodorowski’s carnivalesque, manic, utterly gorgeous and disturbed arthouse horror is anything but.

There is such an overwhelming sense of ritual, of devotion (religious, familial, romantic, sexual, psychotic), of the cruel compulsion to serve what and whom must be served and the nearly completely crushed spirit of an individual trying to assert itself, trying to live its own life, free from the oppression of the holy, of beauty, of family. Heady stuff – but it’s also just so full of life – weird and wild and bloody and baffling. No matter how lofty the ideas at play, this film is never ponderous or weighed down, but is rather a rollercoaster of passion and murder and absurdity and art and lived-in details. I absolutely loved it – easily one of the best films I saw last year, horror or otherwise.

The Ring (1998)

It is embarrassing that it took me so long to finally get around to watching the Japanese original, but I’m so very glad I did. I’d seen the American remake on release (on video, at home, and the moment my roommate and I finished watching, the phone rang…it was only his mom, but still creepy as all get out) and had always heard how good this was, but somehow never before pulled the trigger on it.

Wow. It’s always nice when something lives up to the hype – this really worked for me, even though the remake had been faithful enough that there weren’t too many surprises to be had – but yeah, it still creeped me out. And what’s more, it really lingered with me for a couple of days afterwards – not in the sense of being scared of video tapes (not many of those around these days), but in the mood, the feeling.

I won’t go into the plot much because a) I feel like everyone already knows the basic idea whether they’ve seen it or not (watch a cursed video and die in seven days) and also b) if you haven’t seen it, there are some twists and turns in the final act that really surprised me when I first saw the remake and still land dramatically on finally watching the original. But I will say that the film does something so interesting in combining elements that feel so richly folk horror – urban folklore, old curse, angry ghost, kids creeping each other out with scary stories – combining all that with modernity, with technology, with elements that feel utterly of the “modern world.” Although all of the tech at play here – video tapes, film cameras, and landline telephones have gone the way of the dodo, the idea of viral concepts self-perpetuating through the technology that dominates our lives, the space in which we really live, and haunting us, changing us, dooming us – that idea is as current as could be. It really holds up.

Hellraiser (2022)

This is another one that I mean to write about at greater length. I’d waited for it for quite a while as it took more than a year to finally be rentable on a streaming service where I live (Poland) and I wanted to be a good boy and pay for it. I can’t say that it’s a perfect movie and when I finally go into more detail, I’ll discuss why, but at least the first half felt so much like a Clive Barker story and it really scratched an itch for me, sending me down a rabbit hole of rewatching the first two Hellraiser movies (the only ones that really had Clive’s involvement) and re-reading “The Hellbound Heart” (the novella on which the first film was based).

The intersection of addiction and the compulsion to work the puzzle box, to keep going even if it hurts and is clearly self-destructive, really felt like something out of an early Barker short story, specifically putting me in mind of “The Inhuman Condition,” (the one with the knots) and I liked Riley as a flawed, but compelling protagonist. Furthermore, Roland Voight, the villain of the piece, is such an absolutely Barkerian figure – the hedonistic, amoral playboy art collector seeking out experience beyond limit, and I really liked the visualization of the cenobites, no longer just S&M leather demons (though that is an iconic look and really worked in its own way, bringing a fetishistic sexuality to the first and all subsequent films), but remade into monstrous puzzle boxes themselves, their bodies and souls perpetually held in extremis.

While it’s true that the story somewhat lost me in the second half once they’re all trapped in the house getting picked off one by one, on the whole, it had the right flavor. It gave me a taste of the author who first brought me to the genre, and that was more than worth the watch and the wait.

Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985)

Sometimes you just have to be in the right mood to appreciate a given film. I’d heard of this years back as a “famously bad,” “so-bad-it’s-good” B-movie, striking for being so terrible even though it’s the first sequel to a bit of a modern classic (I mean once you get to Part III: The Marsupials, you already have lowered expectations – though, to be fair, I haven’t seen that one yet). So, long ago, I gave it a try with a terrible copy available on Youtube and quickly gave up, deeming it not worth my efforts. But then sometime this year it showed up on Shudder and I’m so glad I gave it a second chance cause I absolutely ate it up!

What’s it about? Unsurprisingly, this guy discovers that his dead sister (Karen, the protagonist of the first film) was a werewolf (wouldn’t have guessed that from the title) and therefore has to travel to Transylvania to fight Stirba, the immortal werewolf queen before she can take over the world. Along the way, eyes get popped out, there’s a werewolf orgy, there’s a telepathic mind battle, and surprisingly little stuff that feels like a traditional werewolf story – but who cares? It is brash and fun and so lovably shameless in its sleazy immaturity (infamously, a moment when Stirba tears her shirt off is repeated seventeen times over the closing credits as the theme song plays one last time).

Is it actually a good movie? Maybe not, but who’s to say? Is it frequently laugh out loud absurd in surprising, delightful, cheeky ways? Absolutely! Does the soundtrack basically just feature one song that it plays on repeat constantly? Yeah – but (as I wrote about recently) it’s a banger! Has it got Christopher Lee wearing the most 80s sunglasses imaginable and uttering ridiculous expository dialogue with great, silky voiced gravitas? Oh yeah! And somehow, in spite (and because) of all of its weirdness, is it actually kind of a cool, folksy, rockin’ werewolf (though they kind of seem more like vampires sometimes) flick that, if you’re open to it, is just a party and a half? I really think it is.

Talk to Me (2023)

Hey! A new movie – look at that! I know that this Australian feature already got a lot of buzz this year, but I’ll add to it. A group of teenagers start playing a party game with this weird mummy hand that’s being passed around – you hold the hand and suddenly find yourself face to face with a dead person. It’s creepy and weird as party games go, but it’s also thrilling and wild. The plot kicks in as a girl still in mourning for her mother who’d OD’d two years earlier comes into contact with this addictively sinister item and goes down an unsurprisingly dark path.

Now, I will say that where the story ultimately went didn’t exactly blow me away, but I loved the energy of the early scenes with all of the kids basically getting high on this new party drug (of summoning the dead). As an addiction narrative, it put me in mind of the bit in Trainspotting when Renton narrates, justifying his heroin habit, “What (people) forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. After all, we’re not fucking stupid.”

The play with this mysterious object feels like such a dangerous game – and no one understands it. We get no real lore. No exposition (so refreshing). Different kids tell different stories about its origins, but it’s obvious that no one knows anything, and there is an essential mystery which is enticing and cool and scary, and I love that the filmmakers commit to it and don’t ruin things by explaining everything (or really, explaining anything at all). As a viewer, you feel how wrong it is and at the same time how awesome it is too. In the second half, the story took some predictable turns, but the early vibes were eerie and cool enough to earn it a place on this list.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

This is another “wow” movie that I think I watched a second time the very next day. Jodie Foster (maybe 13 at the time of filming) is captivating in her portrayal of Rynn, a precocious teenage girl, living alone in a big house, who seems beset on all sides by adult threats to her life, her freedom, and her autonomy, and who also just might be a sociopath. But even if she is, that’s no matter – I think it’s impossible not to root for her independence and self-assurance.

One could certainly quibble about the genre classification here (maybe it’s a thriller, maybe it’s a mystery, maybe it’s a drama), but there is enough of the unsettling, and the threatening, enough looming doom, for me to happily count this a horror film. Plus, it features a young Martin Sheen as the local child molester, which the town takes as a kind of open secret and does nothing about, who comes to prey on Rynn, and he feels so dangerous and scary – it gets pretty uncomfortable and he’s great in the role.

The whole film is intriguing and unnerving, as Rynn both takes on and is subjected to adult situations and dangers (the treatment of age and sexuality is more than a little disquieting and it’s hard to imagine this being made in quite this way today – but it’s also, I would argue, absolutely central to the character, to the story, to the admittedly controversial idea at the center of the film – that Rynn alone has the right to her own decisions, financial independence, and sexual agency, and that any attempt on the part of “grown-ups” to protect her amounts to a unacceptable violation of her liberty). And the whole time, while I always felt on her side, there was also a mystery at the heart of her character – there is a depth under the surface we can never see. Her clear eyed understanding of the world around her is a kind of power, as is her unbothered willingness to do what she needs to do to assert her right to self-determination. But this power is also dangerous in its way, and she is able to carry out consequential acts without moral compunctions. Still, these same qualities are magnetic; separating her from others in the ‘killer kid’ canon who might be seen as monstrous. On the contrary, she always feels like the most reasonable, mature, qualified figure in the narrative, and any threats she feels the need to dispatch, I wouldn’t begrudge her right to do so. It is a really interesting little movie.

Alligator (1980)

What “right” does any film have to be good? That’s an odd judgment to make. Nevertheless, on watching this giant-alligator-in-the-sewers movie, I immediately felt that it was so much better than it had any right to be, or perhaps simply any need to be. I mean, to be successful, so many elements could have been lacking – if there’s a big alligator eating people, that’s really enough. But this Jaws-esque romp gave me so much more.

Penned by John Sayles, and starring Robert Forster, there is a surprising depth of character and feeling in this otherwise silly but entertaining story of an alligator, brought as a baby from a vacation in Florida home to Chicago where it’s flushed down the toilet and lives in the sewer, feeding on test animals from a lab, which causes it to grow extra large and extra hungry, eventually going on a rampage wherein it eventually consumes the evil scientists inadvertently responsible for its creation as well as the corrupt politicians whose turning a blind eye to corporate malfeasance has made this all possible.

But along the way, we are treated to Forester’s genuinely grounded performance as a world weary cop whose partners keep dying in the line of duty – and who thus carries a great weight of guilt, grief, and exhaustion (we see at least one get got by the gator and it actually lands with real, effective horror notes), a hesitant, tentative romance, alternatingly tender and combative, that develops between him and Marissa, the local herpetologist, and any number of little moments of life and specificity – Marissa’s mother who just won’t stop talking and is somehow both irritating and charming, a delightful short scene in which the cocky big game hunter brought in to take down the gator is being interviewed by an attractive female reporter and flirts with her by performing alligator mating and/or distress calls (sexy, huh?), and Forster’s quiet, gently sad disdain for the scientists he talks to early in the film who are experimenting on cute dogs before furtively discarding their remains in the sewer for giant reptiles to eat.

We also get loads of big puppet work (which is pretty much ok), a small real alligator on miniature sets (which is fun), and wild shifts of tone, like when we cut between the central romance and a kids birthday party where some little boys dressed as pirates make another kid walk the plank before pushing him into a pool where he is brutally and bloodily devoured by the titular creature, or the wedding party filled with rich jerks, where the alligator invades and causes glorious, ridiculous havoc. What fun!

Scream VI (2023)

And we have one more new movie on the list. I’d enjoyed the previous year’s jumpstarting of the dormant franchise, but this entry felt more like its own thing. Sure Gale Weathers is still on the scene, but the story otherwise belongs to the new young cast, and particularly Melissa Barrera’s Sam, and her struggle with her own useful, but nonetheless concerning capability for violence, which she fears may be an inherited trait. This internal conflict has developed over the course of these last two movies and it’s a compelling story (which, sadly, may never be resolved as the next film seems to have been scuppered after Barrera was fired for social media posts about Gaza – Ortega left immediately after, as did Christopher Landon, the director of the upcoming entry).

I think the Scream movies are pretty consistent in their quality (sure, there are ups and downs, but on the whole, they’re pretty solid) and in maintaining the mystery of the identity of the killer (or, more often, killers) each time, and this is no exception (I didn’t exactly love the why this time, but the reveal of who was satisfying). Also, they allow certain characters to make it from one film to the next, such that we can become invested in their survival (of course, characters frequently die, but the others we do get to know and come to like spending time with). I think it was always a strength of the series that the final girl was the star, returning time after time, targeted by new killers, rather than “ghostface,” the voice modulated psycho of the week wearing a store bought Halloween costume. Though the mantel of final girl has changed in this new cycle, this film continues that trend, giving us more time with the new “core four,” all of whom are likeable kids that I’m not hoping to see offed.

But the highlights are clearly a few action/suspense/horror set pieces of great tension and excitement. The series of kills in the cold open kick the mystery off in a refreshing way, the final conflict in the movie theatre/shrine has its thrills and viscerally satisfying brutality, Gale’s fight is high paced and really feels like it could go either way and this could be the last we see of her, and of course, the ladder scene shines as, under attack from the masked killer, all of the kids seek egress from their apartment terrifyingly high in the air. It is tense and scary and just fun. I think the co-directing team of Radio Silence really shined in the last film and in this one with some stand out suspense scenes. It’s a shame they’re not continuing with the series (but after recent developments, one wonders if the series will even continue with itself, or maybe lie dormant for another ten years, before doing another soft-reboot in which they may actually be willing to pay Neve Campbell’s asking price for some 40th anniversary return to the endless trials and tribulations of Sydney Prescott). But whatever (if anything) comes in the future, this was a good night at the cinema and I’m glad I got to see it on the big screen.

Chucky Seasons 1 (2021) & 2 (2022)

And, finally, this one isn’t even a movie. For a while I’d been hearing how good the Chucky show is, but it just wasn’t playing anywhere I had access to, and then finally, over the course of this year, the first two seasons showed up on Shudder (who knows how long I’ll have to wait for the third, currently airing), and it kinda blew me away.

I’ve long respected Don Mancini’s Child’s Play/Chucky movie franchise. The first is a modern classic – really well made, fresh and scary. Then there is such a strong sense of continuity that runs through the rest of the movies, even as they’ve adopted wildly different tones, from straight horror to high camp and back to horror again, with many characters returning over the years, and furthermore, showing evidence of growth and change. And also, it feels special to have such a strong authorial voice that runs through it all. Mancini has only directed the last three films, but he wrote all seven of them and creatively leads the show (though both writing and directing responsibilities are shared with a team as is common on television).

And what a show – I think it manages moments that are properly scary, and it regularly surprised me or even shocked me with brutal turns. You know nobody is safe, but all the same, my jaw fell open more than once at just how willing the show was to let horrible things happen to characters you would expect, following the patterns of pop-culture entertainment, to be inviolable. And then the story really hooked me – in many ways, it follows the sort of tropes one expects of a teen coming-of-age drama: bullying, feeling isolated and weird, romance, in this case between two boys, one of whom has to deal with a homophobic home life, growing up and asserting independence from family – normal teen drama stuff…but…add a killer doll to the mix, add a real sense of constant danger, add wild turns of character carried by top notch actors (the work Jennifer Tilly gets to do in this series is really special – the same goes for Lachlan Watson, who plays Glen and Glenda, Fiona Dourif, and of course, Brad Dourif, whose been voicing Chucky since the beginning), and you get something totally new and exciting. It’s also nice how open and warm hearted the show is towards its young characters’ gender and sexuality at the same time as it can be so harsh and brutal when it feels like it – there’s a tension of tone that strengthens the whole. I also love that all of Chucky’s movement is actual puppetry – apparently digital effects are only used to remove strings or other remnants of the puppeteers from shots, but everything is done by hand – how rare and special – and it’s really well done.

Finally, I just got fully invested in the directions the story would take – it all happens against a backdrop of heartfelt teen romance and angst, but as the antagonist driving the story forward (which can be genuinely affecting), Chucky gets up to surprising plots and ploys and the show consistently kept me guessing. Really, these two seasons are the most fun I’ve had watching a TV show for a long time (it even got me listening to music from the soundtrack which hadn’t happened since I got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I laughed, I cried, I got startled, I got shocked, I had a great time. I can’t wait to see the third season someday.

—

And there we have it, my ten favorite things of the year that I hadn’t yet written about. I imagine a bunch of these I might return to at greater length – lots of them deserve extra consideration. But either way, these last couple of days, I’ve had fun remembering them all – these might not have made the cut for a full post back during the year, but that is not due to any lack of affection for them on my part. There’s nothing on this list I wasn’t utterly enthusiastic about, both on first viewing and this reconsideration.

And so, that’s enough looking back. Let’s go forward and see what’s to be found in 2024.

For Easter – Jean Rollin Zombies: Grapes of Death and Living Dead Girl

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

It’s always nice to do something seasonal. Christmas has endless options of festive horror to choose from. We’ve had plenty of Leprechaun movies, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, The Wicker Man for May Day, Jaws for the 4th of July, Blood Rage for Thanksgiving, and who knows how many countless movies that take place on Halloween (all of this merely scratching the surface of holiday themed horror). But for Easter, nothing’s all that prominent. I know there are some killer Easter Bunny flicks out there, but none have a high profile, so I thought that it could be fitting to mark the celebration of a fellow rising from the dead with a couple of zombie films (while somewhat thematically following on from last week’s I Walked with a Zombie). And while I’ve written about one of his films before, and have watched a couple others, I still feel woefully uneducated when it comes to the work of Jean Rollin; therefore, this seems a perfect time to check out his two (reportedly good) zombie flicks: The Grapes of Death (1978) and The Living Dead Girl (1982) (from all that I’ve read, I doubt we need to examine Zombie Lake (1981)).

I’ll be discussing them in detail, so if you’d like to see them first and avoid spoilers, I watched them on Kino Cult. They’ve got a great collection of Rollin’s films (among others) and you can watch them free with commercials.  ***Also, as a side note, if you’re looking for a good Passover movie, how about The Abominable Dr. Phibes? Not many explicitly Jewish characters, but it does feature Vincent Price carrying out an excellent series of murders inspired by the Ten Plagues.***

The Grapes of Death (1978)

Released in France as Les Raisins de la Mort, this is regarded as France’s first “gore” film. While the makeup work is a little ropey by today’s standards, it is still effective enough, and even if every application might not come across perfectly realistically, the film is not shy about going for the gross-out (I’ve read that it was so cold at night that the latex was hardening and falling off the actors – which gives you a vicarious shiver for Brigitte Lahaie during her outdoor nude scene). I understand this was a departure from Rollin’s typical lyrical-symbolic style, given the degree to which it really delivers the horror, as opposed to being more of an art-house meditation on eroticism and the death drive. And I must say, it is scary – much more so than other works of his that I’ve thus far seen. One of his biggest commercial successes, he referred to it, perhaps disparagingly, as “conventional,” with its financial returns breathing fresh life into his film career and helping him to move beyond the pornographic films he’d been making at the time to get by.

However, while it may be more “conventional” than many of his other works, and is certainly an effective, scary horror film, I think it is no less artistic, oneiric, or unique. This is a gorgeous and disturbing nightmare that flows with the slow but inevitable momentum of a terrible dream, its straightforward narrative actually contributing to its surreal power. Drenched in melancholy, paranoia, and a deep, sustained dread, this isn’t as superficially ‘weird’ as much of Rollin’s other output, but it is absolutely obvious that it came from the same creator, rich as it is with his recurring preoccupations, and filmed with a characteristic beauty.

Before anyone can object, I will admit that these aren’t exactly “zombies” as we generally understand them, so much as a kind of ‘infected’ – people exposed to a substance which makes them alternatingly placid and murderous as their still living bodies begin to rot. But hey – close enough. I’m happy to embrace a big-tent zombieism – from Voodoo to shambling corpses to rage infected Londoners to leprous, rural, Gallic killers – I don’t feel that splitting hairs in this case enriches the conversation. Do we have a mass of rotting, generally dead-eyed killers and a vibe of the inescapability of creeping death? Yup. Good enough. Zombie movie.

The story is uncharacteristically direct. A young woman, Élizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), is travelling to visit her fiancé, the manager of a remote French winery. Having befriended another girl on the train, they accompany each other to the bathroom to freshen up before arriving at their respective locations, noticing along the way that they seem to now be the only passengers. This mysterious emptiness and their sudden realization of their isolation immediately unsettles, but they continue to chat excitedly about where they are going and who they will meet. Once she’s brushed her teeth, Élizabeth returns to her compartment, leaving her friend to get ready. It takes longer than expected and soon, a new passenger takes a seat and begins staring her down, a young man with a bit of a skin condition – that is rapidly growing worse – that bulges, bleeds through, and bursts. She runs for the exit, where she finds her compatriot dead in the bathroom, but he follows. She pulls the emergency brake and disembarks, finding herself stranded in the middle of nowhere. Finally, she runs off into the surrounding greenery, not noticing that the killer just sits down on the tracks, looking exhausted and broken, not giving chase.

Over the course of the rest of the film, Élizabeth will constantly run from one terrifying situation to the next, no location actually safe, no person able to fully be trusted. There’s the remote farmhouse where the father, his sanity decomposing to match his flesh, impales his also infected daughter with a pitchfork before she and Élizabeth can escape. There’s the man with the putrescent forehead who rubs his yellow pus all over the window of Élizabeth’s stalled car, smashes his head against it repeatedly, and shatters it before she shoots him. There’s the blind girl Élizabeth encounters and walks home across a desolate expanse, who refuses to stay indoors and is subsequently crucified and beheaded by her lover.

And there’s the offputtingly overfriendly blonde woman (Brigitte Lahaie in her first “mainstream” role – she’d previously been in one of Rollin’s pornographic features and would continue working with him, notably in his striking Fascination (1979)), who conceals her bloodlust beneath a mask of sanity and gleefully tries to hand Élizabeth over to the crowd before blowing herself up, her calm composure and the intensity of her happiness, in the face of such horrific events,  ironically suggesting the madness beneath.

It reads like a wild list of disparate events, but like a bad dream, every step leads inexorably to the next. We’re on a train that won’t stop, and we have no emergency brake. There’s plenty of dialogue along the way, but it almost feels non-verbal, like Élizabeth is running through a nightmarish haze, narrowly evading one terrible, logic defying threat, only to encounter the next. Surprisingly straightforward, the film more or less follows the Aristotelian unities: there is really one central action – discovery of, running from, and uncovering the awful truth behind the infected; there is this one stretch of rural countryside, though she moves throughout it; and the events basically unfold over the course of one day – we move into night as things get progressively worse, then must survive that darkness, and in the new light of day, make new, terrible discoveries. Set in bucolic farmland, it’s ‘daylight horror’ at its best.

And also like a dream, nothing actually feels weird when we encounter it. Each moment is true to its own necessity, and what could play as absurd, instead just feels scary, the whole piece suffused with inescapable dread. And sadness. There is a tragic, mournful vibe running through it all.

The infected are not mindless, but seem still aware of themselves and their actions. The farmer pitchforking his daughter looks down at her bloody corpse, asks “What’s happening to me? What have I done?” and calls on Élizabeth to kill him. The lover (and murderer) of the blind girl, who’d stripped her, nailed her to a door and chopped off her head, carries that head everywhere he goes for hours before finally kissing it sensually on its dead, bloody lips, and cradling it, lying down to die himself. And, ultimately, Élizabeth’s fiancé, the one it turns out was responsible for all this (thanks to a new pesticide he’d developed for the grapes, exposing his unprotected immigrant workforce, as well as anyone who tastes the new wine, to infection), knows what he now is and what he has done – he tries to send her away, but she refuses and he dies in her arms. The final shot of the film, with almost everyone else dead or dying, is of Élizabeth, infected herself, looking up at his now lifeless form as his blood drips onto her face – an image of mourning and love and physical need.

The whole film is similarly striking. While it is quite scary, consistently unsettling, and run through with sadness, it is never less than beautiful. The locations, the light, the sense of texture and the presence in the eyes of the actors – every moment is captivating. While it’s still assembled with Rollin’s trademark lack of interest in the traditional rules of a ‘well-made-film’ (notably, in terms of the lack of continuity in editing – at one point, a character walks around a corner and her costume changes – that sort of thing), Claude Becogné’s cinematography is just jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There is a tactile quality to it all, every moment compels you not to turn away, and again, there is a unique quality to the performances. Pascal and Lahaei both stand out in this regard – the former the trembling heart that holds it all together, and the latter a spellbinding emblem of the uncanny.

It’s really a little masterpiece. If you have the patience for its shaky effects, gloomy dreaminess, and inconsistent editing, it is both emotionally and artistically rewarding, as well as legitimately scary and haunting.

The Living Dead Girl (1982)

Released in France under the superior title, La Morte Vivante (simply “the living dead” but with feminine endings), it feels that we’ve come quite a long way stylistically from Rollin’s early, surreal vampire films. If he’d considered our first film today “conventional,” this is actually much more so, unfolding like a “standard” horror film, or even an dramatic art film. With an air of tragic romance and far more realistic gore work than Grapes of Death, this could pass as a straight horror-drama. But don’t let that fool you. While this might not be so dream-like or overtly symbolic, The Living Dead Girl taps into Rollin’s recurring preoccupations with the intersection of the erotic and death, exploring the spectrum between all the consuming need of life-sex-hunger-love-possession and the cessation of all of those things in the peaceful stillness and complacency of mortality.

And in an odd way, in sublimating his ongoing artistic impulses into something so, for lack of a better word, “normal,” Rollin crafts what might be a more moving and disturbing meditation on those themes than in some of his his earlier, more poetic and abstract (and also, to be fair, more fun) work. Unlike “Grapes,” it’s never exactly scary, but the Horror is strong in this one.

When some factory workers/grave-robbers store chemical waste in the crypts below an abandoned chateau, where the 2 years dead Catherine (Françoise Blanchard) is interred, she is revived, and they are summarily consumed. No decomposing corpse, she rises from the grave in the full bloom of youthful beauty, though her mind has clearly not recovered. With arresting impassivity, she goes upstairs and, with her long fingernails which presumably continued growing after death, pierces the throats of a young estate agent and her boyfriend who are using the chateau for a tryst, leaving their naked, rent bodies littering the premises, after stopping at an old photograph of two young girls which sends her into a reverie.

In flashback, we see Catherine and her best friend, Hélène (Marina Pierro), in the passion of childhood, declaring their eternal love for one another, cutting their palms to mix their blood, and swearing to follow one another even to the grave. In the present, though unable to speak, and barely able to order her thoughts, Catherine manages to dial the number of her old friend, opening a music box Hélène had given her as a child. Hearing the music, Hélène knows her friend must not actually be dead and comes running. She washes away the blood from Catherine’s flesh, gently puts her to bed, and hides the ravaged bodies.

Over time, Hélène nurses Catherine back to a greater semblance of life, feeding her new victims to sustain her. Finally, Catherine is aware enough to be horrified of her state and her actions and begs Hélène to let her die, to kill her if necessary. This Hélène cannot do and she practically force feeds her friend, the newly dead piling up in the crypt below, until finally Hélène feeds herself to the object of her affection. The final moments of the film are of Catherine devouring her friend, her captor, her tormentor, her sister, her lover, unable not to, howling and screaming in horror and grief as she does so.

It’s pretty heavy stuff, by turns, tragic and horrific. Hélène fights to do right by her friend, to help her, to love her unconditionally, to follow through on her solemn, if naïve, vow. But in doing so, she traps Catherine in her monstrous state, forcing her to harm innocent people. I had the impression that when Hélène was first called by the recently risen Catherine, she was struck by guilt. Her childhood  love had died two years earlier and she hadn’t followed her – she still lived, and it seems may have not even attended the funeral. Perhaps she just couldn’t face the grief. Or perhaps over the years, the two had just drifted apart, and now that she’s back in her life, Hélène has a second chance to do what she’d sworn.

Catherine, however, only seems to suffer more as she’s brought further back to the world of the living. At first, she is distant, quizzical to find herself breathing, puzzled by her new-found life. It’s as if she doesn’t understand life yet, or herself, and certainly not what she is. The more self-aware she becomes, the more she knows that she does not want this. But Hélène won’t let her go. Late in the film, Catherine tries drowning herself, but Hélène pulls her back, reviving her with her own flesh and blood. It all feels like a parable of the necessity of letting things pass, letting death be. Nothing lasts forever; nor should it. Extending life thus is not only unnecessary, but a kind of evil, a form of cruelty.

Though it begins in a death-like stillness, Catherine’s experience grows only more horrific until she is pressed to destroy her only friend, descending into madness as she does. In the end, she’s left alive, cursed to continue, to carry on as this now animalistic monster – so emotionally and mentally broken by what she’s just done that it’s hard to imagine she might recover. Hélène has sacrificed herself only to doom her paramour to an eternity of hunger, violence, and misery. She only ever acts out of love and loyalty and in so doing, only causes pain.

This was a fascinating film. Considerably more of a traditional narrative than other Rollin works I’ve seen, but uniquely haunting in the way its themes play out, death hangs over it all in both its threat and its lure. And there is a deeply erotic undercurrent, although there’s rather little that’s actually explicitly sexual. Admittedly, there is rather a lot of naked flesh, but it rarely feels sexualized. Rather Eros suffuses the obsession, the devotion, the sense of being in the physical presence of the lover, but not physically acting on that love – all this juxtaposed with the frisson of danger that comes from one’s lover being a bloodthirsty ghoul.

Interestingly, Catherine and Hélène never so much as kiss (not counting a chaste peck on the cheek when putting Catherine to bed). We see them declare a child’s love for one another, and as adults, a romantic attraction is evident, but until the end, they only ever share the physical intimacy of a caretaker and an invalid or a child. Perhaps the sense is that this desire has always been repressed, that Hélène had to keep herself away, and now that Catherine has returned, she has the opportunity to see her desire fulfilled. In the end, she experiences the most complete expression of love and lust imaginable as she is literally consumed by her lover. For her, the promise of passion is met. Sadly, her drive towards romantic-erotic-tragic satisfaction is actually an expression of total greed which only does harm to the one she purportedly “loves.” Revived by chemical waste, you could call this a toxic relationship.

And along the way, of course the film is a visual pleasure, rich in atmosphere (even when things don’t quite make sense – like how are there always torches burning in the crypt – how long do those things last?), and endlessly evocative. Images exist in a more naturalistic vein than Rollin’s earlier work has led me to expect, but they still press themselves into the subconscious, languorous and melancholic, if not feverishly burning, crying out for relief. Sure, there are still some odd edits and a subplot with an American couple that didn’t do much for me, but if you are in the mood for its unhurried pace, artistic aspirations, and characteristic idiosyncrasies, this is a really striking, moving, disturbing work of horror.

—

And so there is a bit of Rollin for you. It had been kind of a joke to choose a couple zombie movies for Easter, but these two, set in this rustic, verdant French countryside do feel appropriate for spring, for a time when nature brings fresh life. Neither of these are actually to do with such a natural and positive return, mind you. But their sad beauty still feels fitting in this often dark, rainy season as trees begin to bud with color, and the air feels fresh in its dampness (when we aren’t getting unseasonable snow from a winter threatening never to leave). I’m still no expert in his oeuvre, but in my limited experience, Rollin consistently delivers such a heady mix of beauty and sadness, touching something so full of life, but therefore also feeling it move towards death. I’m so glad to finally be working through his catalogue and I’m sure I’ll write about him again before too long.

Post-Colonial Post-Life: I Walked with a Zombie (Val Lewton Pt. II)

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Last week I started digging into Val Lewton’s cycle of beautifully produced, artistic B-movie horrors for RKO in the early 40s with Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People, and this week, I’d like to keep going with that exploration. I’d previously seen about half of these films and it is a treat to both revisit those I know and to finally check out the ones I’ve missed. I have a few things going on right now, so I’m only writing about one film this time, but it’s a doozy. So without further ado, let’s look at the second collaboration between Lewton and Tourneur, 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie.

Typical warning: given the prominence of atmosphere, emotion, and theme over plot in this piece, I will be discussing it in its entirety, so there will be spoilers aplenty. I feel they probably wouldn’t really ruin one’s enjoyment, but if in doubt, check it out first. It’s available for rent in all the usual places.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Moody, atmospheric, and chillingly bleak, this entry from the Lewton team centers around emptiness, a lack. Set on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Sebastian (which seems to stand in for Hispaniola), its eponymous “Zombie” is not your modern brain muncher, but rather a traditional folk figure growing out of Haitian Vodou. Rather than a corpse risen from the dead, it refers to a person whose life, whose spirit has been taken from them; and yet they walk. Still the “living dead,” these are not cadavers returned to life, but living people who have already died (a nuanced but significant difference). As I understand, this would traditionally be done to subjugate one to your will – to hollow them out, leaving only a shell, an uncomplaining servant.

I have cited before the old chestnut, “where there’s a monster, there’s a metaphor” (which I feel should be attributed to someone, but I don’t, for the life of me know who – if you’ve any idea, please share), and this central symbol of one who has been robbed of life, self, and personhood, one who has been made an object, one who is robbed of agency and must serve obviously references slavery, and in the case of this film, it is not merely metaphorical. The shadow of the slave trade hangs all over this picture. It is why all of the characters are here. It is what has shaped their society – even the land itself. And just as its memory is very explicitly carried by the Black characters who continue to work for a small group of rich White people (now under the guise of business and industry rather than bondage), the weight of its sins hangs heavy on those currently running the show. There is a decay at the root of their family tree and they have rotted out from within – emptied, devoid of spirit.

Early on, the owner of a sugar cane plantation explains to a new employee why they keep a statue of a Black Saint Sebastian, his body riddled with arrows in the courtyard of their home:

“It was once the figurehead of a slave ship. That’s where our people came from. From the misery and pain of slavery. For generations they found life a burden. That’s why they still weep when a child is born and make merry at a burial… I’ve told you, Miss Connell: this is a sad place.”

I assume that when he references “our people,” he means the Black population of the island who are in his employ, but it really feels like he means himself and his family – they too have come from “the misery and pain of slavery” – it’s why they’re there; it’s why they’re rich; it’s why they’re in charge. And it’s part of why they’re so very lost, why their lives feel so meaningless, why all they can do is betray and hurt each other. From a modern perspective, I can see one criticizing the film for overshadowing the suffering of the slaves by focusing our sympathies on the poor, rich, grandchildren of slave-owners, but leaving aside the obvious explanation that this was made in the early 40s (and what do you expect?) – I think the film is astute in its observations about guilt both personal and generational – some things just can’t be forgiven; some things outlast death.

It’s heavy stuff, and it is a heavy film, though the artistry on display means it is somehow consistently still a pleasure. Similarly to their first collaboration, Cat People, Lewton and Tourneur walk a line between realism and the supernatural, this sensational tale of possession, Vodou, and magic dovetailing with a thoroughly human story of guilt and jealousy under the shadow of unforgivable crimes. Once again, we are uncertain as to what is real and what is magic. Almost everything can be explained away as psychologically motivated actions, and yet the sense is that there is a cultural chauvinism, an unearned arrogance in the way the White characters discount the knowledge, experience, authority, and power of those descended from the people their grandparents had enslaved.

Also, similar to Cat People is the high style and evocative film making on display. Some of the composition is simply breathtaking. Working with a different cinematographer (J. Roy Hunt), Tourneur and Lewton maintain their ‘house style’ and Hunt really delivers. Almost the whole film was shot on a soundstage (the only exception apparently the beach and village scenes), but what Hunt does with light brings the island to life. The shadows of leaves blow in a dry, hot wind; moonlight creeps through the slats of window blinds; soft light frames a body standing among dried sugar cane stalks in such a way that he is both more and less than a man – he is a statue, or a god – both emptied-of and filled-with spirit.

This is Carrefour, which in French means “crossroads,” the most iconic presence of the film. The young protagonist is told by a servant she will find him at a crossroads, but in that servant’s somewhat British accent, it is impossible to tell if she is to find a ‘guard’ or a ‘god. His presence accompanies moments of transition: a young woman passing from the world she knows into the alien world of another culture, possibly one of unknown power; a somnambulant ‘zombie’ guided away from the home she resides in, but does not live in, and strikingly, a climactic sequence of killing and sacrifice as perhaps one enters the world of the dead to reunite with his love, or possibly just murders her and kills himself because he can no longer stand the pain of living; Carrefour is always there, watching, witnessing, maybe guiding…

His first appearance caps the primary “horror” scene of the film as the protagonist leaves the sterile, empty safety of the rich, White space she inhabits to venture out into the dark of night and Vodou magic. Working her way through fields of sugar cane by moonlight, leading her elegant but mentally absent ward, she navigates past tableaus of animal skulls propped up on sticks, a circle of bones on the ground, odd sounds whistling in the darkness, and some kind of animal carcass hanging from a noose. Finally, she comes to Carrefour and thus finally passes out of these shadowlands, into the “other” space she seeks, hoping to find the power to heal her charge.  

Lewton is said to have played a large part in terms of the script, and the writing really is a treat. I’ve read that the original screenwriter, Curt Siodmak (who wrote, among many other things, The Wolf Man for Universal) didn’t click with Lewton, who replaced him with Ardel Wray, instructing her to do more research into the culture and beliefs of what was then referred to as The West Indies, and it shows. I can’t speak to the accuracy of how Vodou is presented, but it feels researched. It feels like a good faith effort was made to feature folk practices with respect and not to generalize. It all seems more authentically ethnographic than work done as late as the 90s wherein Vodou might still come across as racialized malevolence, a sinister relic of people dark in skin and intent (and let’s not get started on 1973’s Live and Let Die – oof). I can’t say that it doesn’t at all exoticize (I mean, Darby Jones, who plays Carrefour, is possibly the main scare of the film, and much of that just comes down to his actual physical appearance), but given the period in which it was made, I’m impressed. I imagine at the time, they could have just told extras to act crazy while banging some drums and the general audience would have accepted it.

Notably, there is one striking scene of high ritual. The music is captivating, the bass so deep and powerful, and the participants so grounded in their practice. The houngan (priest) dances with a sword, his upper body articulating the rhythms of the drums. It is an evocative movement, but it is in no way wild; rather, it is one of great control and precision. Around him are normal people. They sing the song and watch with spiritual focus, but this is no generalized fervor. Eventually, one woman catches a spirit and, in a trance, enters into the central space, coming to the houngan, before collapsing under the power. Finally, two female dancers come out and their work is beautiful and intense, but also feels utterly specific – this is the dance of a real time and place and people, and regardless of any supernatural elements, the music and the dance do have power. This scene alone is worth the price of admission.

But I haven’t even said what it’s about yet. Loosely based on Jane Eyre, we follow a Canadian nurse, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), who takes a job on St. Sebastian to care for the wife of a sugar magnate. We come to learn there had been a love triangle between that magnate, Paul Holland, his wife, Jessica, and his half-brother, Wesley Rand. Wesley and Jessica had wanted to run off together and Holland seemingly prevented them – maybe by driving her mad, maybe by having the denizens of the island turn her to a zombie, or maybe she just contracted a tropical fever that caused permanent damage, leaving her empty, without a will of her own.

Having fallen in love with Holland (for some reason – I mean Tom Conway’s performance is charmingly cynical, but I don’t get the attraction), Betsy, the nurse, desperately wants to return his wife to health and tries taking her to a Vodou Houmfort (the above referenced ritual). There she learns that Paul and Wesley’s mother has been participating in the local rites, feigning possession by the gods to instruct the locals in better sanitary practices. Though her intentions are good, she has still been manipulating the people with dishonesty. But while the two of them are talking, the houngan performs a test on Jessica, driving a sword through her arm, and when the wound draws no blood, he determines that she is in fact a zombie. For all that Mrs. Rand rationalizes the seeming power of Vodou away in service of her own health based manipulations, the wound doesn’t bleed. Something is happening.

We later learn that Mrs. Rand had more faith in the local powers than she had initially let on, and it seems revealed that Jessica has indeed been irrevocably cursed (or again, she just had a fever, went into a coma, and came out having suffered mental damage). Regardless, Wesley can’t bear to see her this way any longer, stabs her to death and carries her into the sea, where he drowns as well while Carrefour watches from the shore. Concurrently, we see that the houngan has made a doll of Jessica and everything we see happen could conceivably be under his control. It rather feels, as with much of Lewton’s work, that both explanations are simultaneously true: the psychological and the supernatural overlaid.

In the end, the zombie has been freed from her liminal state of undeath, but the survivors persist in a state of grief, of suffering, the final shot being that of the statue of St. Sebastian, an image of pain, a symbol of past crimes that can never be forgotten.

This was quite a piece of work: poetic, deeply sad, and visually striking, with lingering images of mystery and exotic power. I must admit that it took me a while to get around to it because I’d felt a film from the 40s about this subject would probably be uncomfortable when it comes to issues of race and representation and that this might sour my enjoyment of an otherwise interesting piece. I am happy to say how mistaken I was. Sure – it does exoticize its Vodou practicing local population in ways that wouldn’t get a pass these days, but at the same time, I feel that population is given honest respect. The Black characters feel like real people, neither infantilized nor animalistic. Though none are granted a protagonist’s agency, they are shown as self-aware, intellectually critical individuals with a clear view of the ugly history that has brought them here, and while they may put on a friendly face for their employers, the film itself sees the ironic distance between that mask and their lived experience and knowledge.

One of the most striking moments comes early on, when the young nurse is being driven to the estate where she is to work. Giving her the island’s history, her coachman describes how the Holland family, by whom she is now employed, had brought his ancestors to the island on a ship with the figurehead of Saint Sebastian:

“The enormous boat brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.”

“They brought you to a beautiful place, didn’t they?”

“If you say, Miss. If you say.”

The simple, straightforward way that he takes in her thoughtless response and answers with a friendly shrug is heartbreaking. This is the world he lives in, and there is no reason for him to expect otherwise. I think it is significant that the film sees him and is on his side. The film is aware of history and understands how it continues to weigh down all involved – how its echoes continue in the present dynamic of who is wealthy and who serves (no one tell Ron DeSantis about this movie).

However, for all of my praise, one element did fall flat for me, but I even wonder if that could be intentional. It just feels like we don’t have much of a protagonist. We follow Betsy’s story, but the moment she falls in love with Paul Holland, so in love that she would venture into the darkness to save his cursed wife, I just disconnect from her. I don’t buy the romance, nor do I particularly care about it, and while she does take one important step in driving the narrative, she mostly just witnesses the dysfunction and misery of the family. In fact, the whole cast of central characters feels detached. There’s a heightened scene with Mrs. Holland, the mother, late in the film, but she is so listless and resigned throughout her whole emotional confession. Both Paul and Wesley are wracked by guilt, but they mostly submerge their feelings beneath a removed veneer of either alcoholism or snide pessimism. And of course the wife, Jessica, is just a silent cypher, an image of loss. But again, I wonder if this sense that the film misses a true central character could be an artistic choice – one more emptiness – one more case of a body missing its soul. The film moves forward with an evenness not unlike Jessica’s, echoing her haunting lack of inner compulsion, contributing to the overall mood of hopeless loss and debilitating guilt.

Finally, let’s talk about horror. So far, my favorite of the Lewton pictures is still Cat People – I just love how it balances its thrilling story with some honest scares and its rich psychological study that can be approached through multiple lenses. I Walked with a Zombie, it must be said, is not ‘scary’ (at least not for me). It is beautiful. It is haunting. It is intelligent and atmospheric and meaningful, and maybe supernatural, but it is not scary. Which brings us to that eternal question of the genre – does horror actually have to be?

This film takes us into another world of sorts, implying powers beyond our ken. It takes a deep, endless sadness and guilt and builds from them a physical space. It maintains a mystery around what is real and what is supernatural, around borders between life and death, around the obliteration of will, the erasure of self. And in its lyrical, guilt-ridden, poetic way, it is horrific if not scary, and I’m happy to include it in the genre (not to mention the myriad ways it has probably influenced later works). Plus, more horror with such artistic inclinations should follow its example of essentialized narrative and theme. For all of the feeling, mystery, atmosphere, and technical prowess it packs, it squeaks by at sixty nine minutes long – it can do so much without feeling self-indulgent, without dragging. In this era of four hour comic book movies, this discipline is refreshing.

Black Female Horror Directors – Part I

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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.

—

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.