Flinching with Delight - Reflections on Horror

Fulci in the 70s: A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Don’t Torture a Duckling, and the Psychic

Posted on November 11, 2022 by Glen — 2 Comments ↓

The last month or so, I like to think that here on ye old blog, we’ve gone in some interesting and different directions. I went into some small detail on the Halloween performance I was recently involved in which, while not exactly “horror,” certainly played with horror elements. I dug into my own personal history with the genre, trying to reconstruct the stepping stones that led me here. I took a look at a little seen Romero gem with occult overtones. And before that, I finally got to tick one more film off my (admittedly pretty short) list of Polish Horror movies. But something all of these posts share is that none of them really tackled a bona fide “Horror Movie” with a capital HOR. Something to make you shiver with fear or retch with disgust, something to crack the brain open with the unbearable weight of its sheer awfulness. And so, I think it’s a good time to examine the work of a director who really did his very best to do exactly those things; let’s spend a bit of time with Lucio Fulci.

That said, my exposure to his work has been somewhat limited. I absolutely love the grotty, doom infused, shark fighting, tropical holiday of Zombi 2 (1979) (which I wrote about here). I appreciate the sleazy, lurid, violent charms of The New York Ripper (1982) (which I’ve touched on briefly before). And what horror fan could resist the atmosphere, the grotesquerie, the nightmare logic, and the ‘oh-dear-god-how-is-he-doing-that?!?’ gore of his Lovecraftian Gates of Hell Trilogy: The City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981)? But those five movies, all of which have made a deep, lasting impression on me, only represent less than a quarter of his horror movies (to be fair, they are also counted among his best by many fans – and I’ve heard pretty bad things about what some consider his worst). Still, I’d like to use this week to expand my knowledge of this idiosyncratic Italian who made some of the most effective, difficult, and really creepy films of the genre.

Working chronologically, I’m going to focus on his earlier works from the 70s, three films that I’ve long meant to see. As far as I can tell, they all come recommended, but I must admit I’m going in somewhat blind. And so, without further ado, let’s get into…

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)

After that introduction, it seems ironic to start by saying that this early thriller is not exactly a horror flick. Rather, Fulci really embraces the slick, stylish, bold film making of the giallo and this film bears more resemblance to Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (especially with the spooky dream sequences) or The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (both also from 1971) than to Fulci’s supernatural horror work in the 80s. It’s worth noting that over the course of his career, he worked in many genres; about half his films were horror, but he also made more than 30 westerns, sci-fi movies, musicals, erotic thrillers, and sex comedies. Still, this one is a vastly enjoyable, captivating piece; I think you can find seeds here of the kinds of films he would later create; and while it is not a horror film exactly, it does contain some startling or unsettling moments. Also, it’s got a great score by Ennio Morricone.

Very briefly, the film follows Carol, a rich but repressed upper class woman who is haunted by disturbing, sexual dreams of her wild, free-loving neighbor, Julia. It’s unclear whether she is offended by the other woman’s libertine ways or jealous of them, but she is certainly agitated by Julia and the wild parties she often throws next door. Finally, in one of her dreams, as they make love, Carol stabs Julia repeatedly in the breast. Of course, it’s soon revealed that the dreamt of neighbor has actually been murdered in just such a fashion and it’s off to the races to ferret out who the actual killer was. In its plotting, this is very similar to other gialli I’ve seen – there are twists on top of twists on top of twists and by the end of the movie, it’s easy to get lost in all of the betrayals and revelations. But I really don’t think you come to a movie like this for the story. This is an audacious, stylish piece, and with its constant blurring of the line between dream and waking life, it seems right in Fulci’s surreal, unsettling wheelhouse.

Much time is spent in the beginning with Carol’s dreams, dwelling alternatingly in the erotic and a sense of dread or terror: she pushes her way through a crowded train, running from or toward something, the other riders sometimes simple commuters and sometimes naked in a white room, partaking of an orgy; Julia’s bed is a blotch of red in an inky abyss; two naked hippies with white, pupil-less eyes watch and laugh from the balcony; a giant swan chases her across a field; her dead and rotting family track her progress. But even after the dreams cease, Carol still inhabits a hallucinogenic space, and it’s not always clear what is happening or why. The camera offers surprising views, shooting from odd angles and frequently playing with focus, forced perspective, and framing. The editing can be similarly intense, in one moment rapidly cutting back and forth in an almost strobe-like effect between Carol trying to escape a room and a door on the other side being kicked in.

Everything is infused with unreality. Is she actually being chased in waking life by a figure from one of her dreams? Did she commit a murder and not remember it? Why on earth is there a lab in the peaceful mental facility where she awaits trial in which they are experimenting on dogs like something out of Return of the Living Dead Part III, their torsos cut open but their visible hearts still pumping? (apparently, Fulci was arrested on charges of animal cruelty and his special effects artist had to bring the dog puppets into court to demonstrate how this had been filmed.) Real horrors of the waking world can thus be more horrific than her dreams. And they go just as unexplained.

While the mod stylishness is certainly foregrounded, as it often was in other gialli, and the plotting is kind of standard for this kind of movie, the sometimes nightmarish dreamy quality of the proceedings, accompanied by some gory or just bafflingly strange moments, really points to the interest in horror that Fulci would later pursue. The balance of surreality and tactility, the abstract, showy film making (including a De Palma-esque split screen sequence), and the totally visceral fleshiness all contribute to an uncanny viewing experience such that I was both pulled into the twists and turns of the story and periodically a bit unsettled. It’s a really engaging example of the giallo thriller and I think it’s fascinating to view in the context of Fulci’s larger ouvre.

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)

No ducks were tortured – just a Donald duck doll.

This is referred to as a giallo, but while it does follow the typical pattern of murder investigation and red herrings, it feels really quite different. Set in a dusty, remote Italian village, this purported thriller-horror-mystery initially seems to have more in common with Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) than with anything Argento, Bava, or Martino were doing at the time, that is if Amarcord had been full of child murder and witch abuse. The filmmaking is still striking in its intensity, its sharp angles, its creation of a mood, but long gone is any stylishness of setting, costume, or character. We start the film following three young boys as they mischievously get into whatever trouble they can in this small Italian town under the view of a modern highway, the temptations of the modern world out there, but out of reach. One by one, these boys, and then a few others, all end up dead: strangled, smothered, and drowned.

A massive police case gets underway; the press descend on the village; and most significantly for the story, the population of this quaint little town all turn on a few outsiders who are, one after another, blamed for these deaths: the town simpleton, a witch who lives on the outskirts, an old hermit. Interestingly, all of the child murders take place off screen, but the violence done by the townspeople is genuinely horrific, and I feel like that is rather the point. Much of the film feels less like horror than a dramatic crime story about a series of killings tearing a town apart, but one scene stands out, cementing the film in the genre with what I understand is Fulci’s first foray into explicit gore.

Also, Fulci really likes close ups of eyes.

Perhaps this is a good point for a spoiler warning – if you think you might want to watch the movie, go do that now – it’s streaming free on Tubi.

Magiara (Florinda Bolkan, Carol in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), a witch who lives on the edge of the community has been seen throughout the first half of the movie engaged in some kind of black magic with an infant’s bones, wax figures representing the three boys who are killed first, and voodoo-esque pins. After the police suspect she may have something to do with this, they chase her down with dogs, and question her. No interrogation is needed as she readily confesses to killing the boys with witchcraft in revenge for them disturbing her child’s grave. Convinced of her actual innocence (magic not being real, of course), the police release her, only for her to be immediately attacked in the cemetery by men from the village. They brutally beat her with sticks and chains, tearing her skin, rending her flesh. The makeup effects are deeply affecting – for all that Fulci’s films would go on to be favorites of gorehounds, there is nothing fun here. The severity of the violence done on behalf of the village to Magiara is hard to watch, ugly, and depressing. After they leave her for dead, she crawls to the side of the highway, and cars speed past as she collapses on the side of the road. If she isn’t dealt cruelty, she is met with indifference.

And while the film started lightly with the playful troublemaking of the three boys, it becomes clear that this is not a good place and these are not good people. In fact, one of the protagonists of the movie, Patrizia, is a drug addict and seems to be a pedophile, having been introduced nude and teasing/tempting one of the boys. Later she offers to pay another boy (soon to be a victim) with a kiss, and we also see her aggressively dragging a young, developmentally disabled girl, screaming across the town square so she can buy her a new doll. Much of this may exist just to make a red herring of this otherwise attractive young woman, but really, she seems potentially dangerous.

In the end (again – this is a film that really can be spoiled), it turns out that the killer all along was Don Avallone, the kindly, young, handsome village priest who has shown real care for the boys in his parish. While this does culminate in a deliriously crazy clifftop priest fight as Avallone does his level best to drop his final victim (his young sister) to her death, and when he finally goes over the edge, there is cringe inducing fun to be had in the way his face hits every possible sharp rock on the way down, the end of the film also lands with a surprising depth of feeling. This also distinguished it for me from much of the giallo pack.

A personal criticism of some gialli is that the plots can be so convoluted that at a certain point, I sometimes lose interest in following their permutations and rather just go along for the cool ride. It’s rare that the final revelation really touches me – these movies are all about the journey, not the destination. However, Don Avallone’s madness was pitiable and thematically consistent with what had been shown throughout the movie. He had such a whammy of “SIN” put on him by his religion, and the society surrounding him is obviously so mired in sordid, petty, meanness. The only way he felt he could care for his flock was to murder them while they were still “innocent” (and from what we saw of the boys, they weren’t even that).

When his motivations are revealed, it is sadly chilling, and the film ends with much more weight than I’d expected. It still doesn’t feel exactly like a “horror movie,” so much as a heartfelt, horrific, momentarily gory, atmospheric murder drama, but I think it is worth viewing for genre fans open to such things, and I’m enjoying my continued tracking of Fulci’s trajectory.

The Psychic (1977)

So, funny fact: I set out on this project, intending to really get into some “legitimate horror,” but in my ignorance, it seems that I chose three of Fulci’s thrillers from before he started making horror films proper (one book I checked last night after watching this third film lists Zombi as his first). Though all of them feature horrific elements, and one can find roots of his later work in them, none are entirely, unqualified “horror films.” Still, all of these are significant, impressive pieces of work and I’m really glad to have finally done this very satisfying homework. Case in point, The Psychic (also released as Seven Notes in Black or Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes – a very giallo title) still retains many elements of his early thriller phase (which began in 1969 with Perversion Story, an apparent forerunner of Basic Instinct/Fatal Attraction-esque erotic thrillers), but for the first time introduces a supernatural element, and along with it, edges towards the doom-laden mood he was soon to capture two years later with Zombi (between them, he directed his final Spaghetti Western, Silver Saddle).

And I have to say, I loved it. The Psychic is a gorgeous, somewhat gothic, and even surprisingly classy supernatural horror-thriller (“classy” being a term I don’t often associate with Fulci, though I’ve long respected his artistry). There is a thick, nigh-viscous atmosphere of inescapable fate, the feeling of the screws tightening, of a trap slowly closing around the protagonist over the course of the whole film, and there are a couple of just gleefully intense sequences of terror along the way, often underscored by the absolutely simple, haunting, unsettling theme that Fabio Frizzi contributed (and Tarantino later repurposed in Kill Bill – which, for my money, may be the greatest horror theme I’ve yet heard). As is often the case with Fulci, there is a pervasive dream-like quality to this tale of a woman whose psychic flashes haunt her with visions of murder and calamity. We’re not necessarily slipping in and out of a dream state as in some films, but the way her flashes of psychic insight impinge on her daily existence does contribute to a destabilization of confidence in the reality of the senses.

And at this point, I must say that if you think you might like to try this one out, go do it now (if you’ve got a US library card, it’s on Kanopy – otherwise you can watch it with ads on Popcornflix). There is really no good way to discuss this movie without touching on the ending. It was sadly spoiled for me and though I still enjoyed it, it would have been nice not to have had the (probably obvious, but still chilling) turn of events given away in advance (though also, to be fair, one poster I saw absolutely spoiled the ending – geez…).

Ok, so for those choosing not to heed my advice, a brief synopsis: Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) has been shaken by psychic visions her whole life, since, as a child, she witnessed a vision of her mother committing suicide a thousand miles away. To help her process her visions, she now retains the services of a parapsychologist (played by Marc Porel, the priest in Don’t Torture a Duckling). Having recently married a dashing Italian gentleman, she’s rocked by a vision of an elderly woman with a gushing head wound, a magazine, a red room, a broken mirror, a yellow cigarette in a blue ash tray, and being walled up by bricks like something out of a Poe story (apparently Fulci was quite a fan). She visits a palazzo owned by her husband, now gone to seed and recognizes a room from her vision, leading her to take a sledgehammer to one wall and uncover the skeleton hidden within. As her husband is arrested under investigation of murder, she starts piecing together the elements of her vision to uncover the true killer. But, as becomes clear over the course of the film, she had not actually seen a vision of the past, but rather, her own future, her own murder.

I appreciated how this realization doesn’t drop as a final scene twist. Rather, it’s more of a water torture situation. There is one small piece of evidence after another that points her in the right direction and that leads her to her final understanding, all functioning as a vicious puzzle box which she is compelled to open, only to find herself, in the end, closed within. At a certain point, it feels as if she understands what she’s hurtling towards but has no power to stop it, and O’Neill’s performance is pitch perfect – balancing a tragic drive to uncover the truth and the sense that her sanity is hanging by a bit of twine and each new revelation cuts another thread. She continues to try to “solve the murder,” pushing away the awareness that she is actually inviting her own.

I think in this way, for all that it still carries the typical giallo trappings of a murder mystery, a series of plot twists, and heavy doses of style, I think it is fair to count this one an actual horror. What is more “horror” than the dawning, terrible realization of an inescapable, awful truth? Additionally, the supernatural motif adds a certain flavor: a dread that is more than mere psychology, a delicious suspense that pierces like a needle. Much of the film may operate as an almost stately mood piece, but when it kicks into high gear, it sings.

The high point of this may be a late sequence when, chased by the man she thinks is the killer, Virginia hides in a church under renovation. Echoing a similar moment in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, while hidden on the scaffolding, the alarm in her watch starts to sound a tinkling version of Frizzi’s theme and the man sees her. A hunt ensues up ladders and across precarious planks as the full theme blares. It is a gloriously tense episode and it is reflected in the final, eerie, unresolved moments of the film, once the masonry work has been completed and Virginia’s fate has run its course.

—

And so, those are three early Fulci thrillers. It’s been a pleasure to learn a bit about his earlier work and all three were clearly proficient and effective films in their own right beyond the fact that they each imply something of where he would later go. It is interesting to see a progression from the showy style of the first film, in which the camera rarely deigns to shoot anything straight on, to the confident, masterfully constructed third film, which is much less ostentatious, and yet no less stylish or effective. It’s been great to expand my understanding of an appreciated director whose work I’d only scratched the surface of (though I don’t think I’m going to take a deep dive into his non-horror/thriller work – but who knows, maybe How We Robbed the Bank of Italy or his adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang are worth checking out). But, since I’m still itching for some crawling, goopy, mind-cracking horrors, I think I’ll stick with old Lucio for another week, so watch this space for a heavy dose of messy doom next time.

So, I Did a Thing – La Folie Retro Cabaret Halloween Show

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Glen — 1 Comment ↓

I’ve periodically mentioned that I work with a small cabaret group here in Kraków, Poland. It doesn’t really have anything to do with horror though, so it doesn’t come up that often. However, we just did a Halloween performance and while I can’t claim that it was a horror piece per se, I think we managed some spooky surprises and covered a wide range of holiday appropriate fare. Also, I managed to include some horror music I appreciate, a teeny tiny bit of gore, and a few homages to some old time horror which I love.

That said, I hope you might indulge me in running down some of the acts we put together. This may be a bit of an odd exercise as most readers of this blog wouldn’t have a chance to come watch the show, but interesting play with the elements and tropes of horror can take place in all kinds of fields and I think it might be worth examining this one case which I am particularly close to. As already mentioned, the objective here was not to horrify, scare, or disgust. Rather, I’d say the intention was to delight, thrill, titillate, and tickle some funny bones – but this was all done using horror roles, situations, and imagery. For context, we regularly perform (about every 4-6 weeks, there’s a new show) as a “retro cabaret,” offering songs, dance, burlesque, comedy, and acrobatics (among other things), all with a mid-century or earlier vibe (now we’re developing a 20s revue).

This was the third Halloween performance the group has done (the first, in 2020, was on-line), and a few acts were repeated or adjusted from the past. I’ve previously discussed our silent movie comedy sketch, “Silent Screams” (is there any chance I stole that title from an episode of Itchy and Scratchy? I didn’t intend to, but it may be the case…), which was loosely inspired by The Old Dark House, The Phantom of the Opera, and just a sprinkle of Scooby Doo: with women in unrealistically elegant gowns exploring a creepy old house by candle light, discovering a horribly disfigured fellow and recoiling in terror, culminating in everyone running around, bumping into, and terrifying each other. It’s a simple scenario, but with our gimmick of lighting it with one mobile handheld light, I think we gave it some cinematic flair and we were able to recreate some of the vibe of the silent horror era. We accompanied it with an excerpt of the score to the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, and I think that lent some grandiosity to the affair.

In other repetitions, we had an introductory song to the tune of the Addams’ Family theme, welcoming the audience to the show and we had one number from the musical Phantom of the Opera (musically out of our period, but the setting qualifies), for which I prepared a two way mirror so the Phantom could appear behind her. Technically, it’s so simple to do, but the effect really works nicely.

We also repeated a really fun act we had premiered last year – a blacklit routine with dancers in black clothes with skeletons painted on, recreating the dance from the old black and white Disney cartoon. I didn’t really do much with this one, but I did paint a lot of blacklight responsive bones and I think the effect worked well and the dance was just tremendously cute: silly, skeletal fun all around.

Otherwise, everything was new or had been further developed since last year. Of those, I’ll mainly focus on those acts for which I had some creative input.

For example, we had an aerial hoop routine with a sleepy vampire coming home just before dawn and trying to get some shuteye, only to be tormented by a mosquito she just cannot catch, her attempts to kill this pest leading her through the twists and turns of her aerial tricks. I was on the side of the stage on a microphone, providing sound effects, most notably, the irritating, tiny bloodsucker (as opposed to the beleaguered, larger bloodsucker). Finally, just when she has finally squished it and gone back to sleep, hanging upside down from her hoop, her neighbors start drilling into the wall – doing some renovations.

We had a duet of I Put a Spell on You, with two well-put together “perfect housewife” types both casting competing love spells on the same Hollywood star whom they both desire. One is sewing a voodoo doll, while the other is making a potion in the kitchen. The hapless celebrity finds himself mysteriously summoned and pulled between the two singers until they finally just tie him up and decide to share his affections. They are not exactly witches, so much as they just magically use the ordinary objects of the home to work their will on this targeted lover, objects clearly gender coded and linked to housewifery.

This brings me to something we often deal with that could be problematic, but which I think we get away with: in doing a “retro show,” there is a lot of play with “traditional gender roles” – the “perfect housewife,” for instance. There is always a risk of just reifying harmful images and expectations, but I hope and generally feel that isn’t happening here, there being an appreciative distance such that a certain retro style and charm can be embraced without suggesting a continuance of outdated and harmful norms. It would clearly be wrong to call it “camp,” but there is some theatricality akin to drag in how, having put on a given role, a performer can simultaneously demonstrate their affection for an idealized style and maintain an element of actuality, of themselves – in this case, that of modern women who are not actually bound in kitchens and sewing rooms.

There was a lovely little scene about a lonely toymaker whose dolls come to life one stormy night, give him a brief moment of companionship and joy, and finally turn on him, eviscerating the poor chap and making a marionette of his corpse. Being more razzle dazzle than Grand Guignol, the spray of blood consisted of red glitter, but I did have fun making one costume gag: under his vest, the toymaker’s gut was torn open with a gaping wound and after a moment of assault with his back to the audience (during which the vest was opened), he could turn to reveal his bloody injury.

Most songs were in Polish or English, but we did include one Spanish language piece, the traditional La Llorona. I had known the folk tale previously, but only recently met the song when the singer suggested it. The tale is very much a central/south American version of Medea. A poor (in some cases, native) woman is abandoned by her rich lover (who could be a Spanish invader for whom she’d betrayed her family and people) and is subsequently left with his children. To get revenge, she drowns them in the river and is doomed to be a wandering ghost, the weeping woman, forever searching for her children – and thus a scary story to inspire kids to come home on time (“come home when I say or La Llorona will catch you and drown you in the river”).

The song, on the other hand, is all emotion and doesn’t really tell the story at all. So, for this one, we made a layered performance. In the foreground, we had a singer in black Dia de los Muertos garb, at a flower adorned gravestone, and in the background the story was enacted on a screen by dancers and shadow puppets. Finally, the dancer portraying La Llorona came in front of the screen and she and the singer shared a moment of sad dance before she continued on her way. I’d played with shadow puppetry many years ago on another project and it was rewarding to return to, though apparently my screaming baby was a bit too much and that may have detracted from the feeling for some. I had just wanted it to really feel like it was howling enough that anyone would consider dunking it in a nearby body of water. But hey, it was an improvement on my first draft.

The top one was my first draft. I then attempted to make the second one a bit more ‘baby-like.’

I was in a small (mostly) pantomime sketch wherein a mad scientist enters her laboratory, unveils a body, takes a scalpel and cuts out the heart, then scoops out the intestines, and finally takes a chainsaw and removes the head. Then she’s not sure what to do and starts munching on an apple, deep in thought before having the eureka moment and putting the apple into the chest cavity, dropping a string of carrots (because that’s a thing – I linked a bunch of carrots together to look somewhat intestinal) into the abdomen, and finally taking a pumpkin and putting it in place of the missing cranium. After applying some jumper cables, a vegetative creature (me) with a pumpkin head rises from the slab and she puts it to work, sweeping the workspace.

Satisfied, she takes another apple and starts munching until the creature makes the connection between what she is eating and his own heart and moves in to crush her throat. I’ve been told it was funny and that people laughed, but I couldn’t tell as the pumpkin mask (the same one I’m wearing on my “About Me” page) really precludes hearing or seeing much of anything. Also, I got to use the pounding theme to Army of Darkness (from way after our typical era, but it’s orchestral so I can get away with it), which put a smile on my face.

There was a really cute burlesque routine (set to, i.a., Lil’ Red Riding Hood and the theme to The Bride of Frankenstein) in which the performer enters as Little Red, then strip teases into a wolf, with claws, a fur bikini, a tail, and a big scary wolf mask, which is just delightfully absurd. Then a hunter comes on and as they fight, she loses her clawed gloves, her fur panties and finally her hirsute bra, before he brings the knife to her throat and after a blackout, she is fully human again and he holds the wolf’s head, triumphant. It was a terrifically silly and hopefully unexpected idea and I think a really fun act. Plus, it’s always nice when my mother-in-law (a much better seamstress than I) helps out with a project, in this case, a tear-away fur bikini (I made the gloves).

Finally, we closed the show with a spooky witches’ Sabbath with the occultists in question meeting in a forest clearing to work their magic, do a bit of a blood ritual, and writhe organically in homage to a few different modern dance stylings (in which I did my best to rip off the same choreographers that inspired the work in Suspiria 2018). Unfortunately, they are set upon by angry villagers who tie them up, douse them with oil and burn them on a pyre. One moment later, the lead villager comes to the edge of the stage and – hard turn – starts singing a really jazzy, up tempo rendition of Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead. But after the first chorus, the witches rise from their pyre and approach the singer, before – another hard turn – whipping off their cloaks, revealing showy little red outfits beneath and jumping into the big finish production number with a kick line and all.

If I may say so myself, I really think this one came together and I just love the twists and turns of it. The abruptness of the changes just tickles my heart. And it’s all only a tad over 4 minutes long, so nothing can wear out its welcome.

Additionally, there were some other acts that I just had less to do with creatively, so I haven’t really detailed them. We had another witchy modern dance piece that was very cool, a Salome doing the dance of the 7 veils, a demonic burlesque, scary clown acrobatics, and a song from the Addams’ Family musical. Plus prizes to the audience for best costumes. All in all, I think there was a satisfying variety of acts and monsters and Halloween-ness.

On Halloween, I will say that it’s gratifying to see an appreciation for the holiday growing in this country where I’ve come to live. It hasn’t always been the case, and it still isn’t for everybody. All Saints’ Day on November 1^st is a very important, very somber local holiday and there has been and continues to be resistance to what is seen by some as a crass, commercial, “American” import – an unwelcome cultural imperialism which may threaten significant, emotional traditions: taking this time to remember those who have passed. I know I am biased as I come from Halloween country, but while I can sympathize, I really feel like the two events can peacefully coexist. I think it is lovely and important to take time to remember our lost loved ones. Similarly, I think there is value in having this one magical day in the year when imagination and spookiness reign supreme and we can all tread a bit, even very lightly, on the dark side – I venture it’s even healthy for one’s relationship to the concept of death to be able to approach it playfully from time to time. That has a value as well. Plus it is just fun. So much fun, that there seems to be more of it here every year, so much fun that little Polish kids are out there like pioneers of Halloween, going trick or treating even though many won’t be happy to see them and best case scenario, won’t have any candy, worst case scenario, might think they’re little Satanists, so much fun that we can put together a show like this and people come. It may not be very “horror,” but it is totally “Halloween” and I think that’s pretty great!

My Horror History – attempted reconstruction

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Glen — 1 Comment ↓

So a question that sometimes comes up is “how did you get into horror?” I participate in a number of Facebook groups and people repeatedly compare the earliest horror they saw, often in the context of debating what’s alright to show to their own kids and at what age. I know some saw and loved The Exorcist or listened to their parents watching Nightmare on Elm Street when they were five or six and just immediately fell in love with it and never looked back. That wasn’t me. As I mentioned when I wrote about Nightmare, I remember as a kid just being really wigged out by Freddy’s omnipresence before I was ready for him, but I was always into what might be termed ‘horror-adjacent, kid friendly’ stuff. I didn’t want to be scared but I did like monsters. But I really didn’t want to be scared. I remember I had this collected works of Edgar Allen Poe and I sometimes would turn it backwards on the shelf because old Edgar’s face was just a bit too intense for my young imagination. Or there was one night I remember when I was home alone and I was listening to my record of Thriller (on vinyl, not because I was that hip but because I’m that old) and Vincent Price’s rap just really got to me and I had to turn on all the lights and lock the doors.

But somehow, eventually, I did get into horror, to the point that here I am, trying to stay on top of my weekly publication schedule on this here ‘horror blog.’ So I thought it might be an interesting exercise to try to recreate my journey. How did I get here? What were the touchstones along the way that got me from that kid who had to turn books around to this “adult” who still gets spooked by shadows when going to the bathroom in the middle of the night…but one who also loves horror flicks?

Earliest Memories

Well, I know I always loved Halloween from the very beginning. I loved the spooky but not too scary atmosphere and we always threw a big Halloween party at our house. I loved imagining a costume and dressing up, though sometimes my imagination was stronger than the ability to pull it off – I vaguely remember a Hobgoblin (from Spider-Man) costume one year that was essentially just my snowsuit with a cape. I also remember early work with gore effects when I dressed up as a skateboarder who’d had a terrible accident and was all bandaged and bloody. Also, I know I watched the behind the scenes feature for the Thriller video every time it came on TV – it was surely my introduction to the very idea of special FX makeup – and somehow, maybe at some amazing thrift store, my parents even found me a child sized version of Michael Jackson’s jacket – the red one with all the zippers (technically, it was the costume for the Beat It video, but close enough).

I loved the Halloween specials that would air every year (The Garfield one, where he’s chased by angry pirate ghosts, really creeped me out) – it was a special occasion when they would come on TV. Certain kids films that had some scary moments really left an impression as well – The Last Unicorn, The Secret of NIMH, or Return to Oz, for example. I also remember some animated piece with a lot of seals and sea lions and a lot of them died brutally, though I don’t remember why – that left some scar on my soul, whatever it was.

Past that, as mentioned above, I liked monsters, but I didn’t need to be scared by them. Whether on The Munsters or The Addams Family re-runs or in a movie like Little Monsters (1989), I could appreciate how they were cast as misunderstood outsiders – monstrous but ultimately sympathetic figures – their weirdness worthy of celebration – because we’re all weird and feel threatened by the so-called ‘normal people.’ I don’t exactly remember watching the old Universal monster movies when I was a kid, but I feel like they could have been on TV some time (I think I must have at least seen Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein – which still holds up as a great horror comedy), but I loved Young Frankenstein, and I feel like I had an impression of the pitiable position of Frankenstein’s Creature, the Wolfman, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. On the other hand, I do remember being scared by real life anecdotes. At some point in Elementary School, I was into reading about the occult and mysterious things and I remember some book that detailed brutal acts attributed to Vlad Tepes which really shook me. I was not ready for historical descriptions of enemies skewered on pikes or children thrown to pits of hungry dogs. Still, I did enjoy a fun kids vs monsters adventure like Monster Squad.

I also did have an early appreciation of the gothic and enjoyably morbid. As mentioned above, I really clicked with Poe in perhaps 4^th grade (and remember memorizing and reciting The Raven for class). I don’t think I fully understood him – some of the poetry especially was a bit beyond my ken, but I really got the mood of it all. Otherwise, I remember that my family had some book of Edward Gorey’s. It may have been The Gashlycrumb Tinies (which I love), or something else – the memory is blurred. I seem to remember the image of a python with the impression of a child inside. Either way, it was not my book. It was my mother’s or it had been a grandparent’s. Maybe especially because it was not really for me, I just loved it – like some kind of treasure. It was funny, and dark, and the art was captivating, and it really had this blackly comic edge which spoke to me, the language suggesting a children’s book, but it was not really a children’s book – at least not like others I’d had.

Gorey also illustrated the covers for some gothic mysteries for kids that I just ate up during late elementary/early middle school (I’m not 100% on the timeline). The works of John Bellairs (The Curse of the Blue Figurine, The Figure in the Shadows, and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, among many, many others) just captured my attention and I remember reading them outside on hot summer days and having a delicious chill that probably foretold the appreciation I would develop later for horror.

At the same time, horror films were still too much for me. Though I loved movies like Beetlejuice, Teen Wolf, Ghostbusters, or Gremlins (which I went crazy for – you’d think those green, clawed monsters could be a bit much for 5 year old me, but I thought it was just great!), I remember even just the trailers for actual adult horror movies on TV really getting under my skin. I can’t put my finger on which entries in their respective series I saw advertised, but I remember being really disturbed by ads for some Phantasm movie, some Hellraiser flick, Child’s Play, Pet Sematary, and Poltergeist III. It was also probably about this time that my grandparents got cable, including the premium movie channels and I remember stumbling onto moments from some Friday the 13^th that freaked me out, as did a zombie film I’ve never been able to identify, but it featured the army and it wasn’t one of the Return of the Living Dead movies. Also, the bit in Poltergeist II when Craig T. Nelson swallows the worm in the tequila bottle, gets possessed by Rev. Kane, tries to rape his wife, and finally vomits out a squirming, disgusting tentacle thing just kept showing up when I would channel surf. I mean, it was like it followed me around. Still not into horror movies, I really did not want to watch it, but it would pop up when I least suspected it somehow.

A Middle Period – Edging Towards Horror

In the Middle School and High School years, I grew to enjoy work that was closer to horror and would periodically watch a horror movie, but still was not a “horror fan.” Some time in Middle School I discovered The Toxic Avenger (probably inappropriate in a wide variety of ways, but custom made for an eleven or twelve year old) and went on a kick of cheapie b-movie, cheesy fare which was generally in poor taste and never actually scary, but which featured tongue-in-cheek and/or “so-bad-it’s-good” campy sex and violence. It was probably around this time that I discovered USA – Up All Night, alternatingly hosted by Rhonda Shear in a ditzy valley girl mode or Gilbert Gottfried in a very Gilbert Gottfried mode, which broadcast salacious, cheap horror movies, but all highly edited for TV (which probably meant that some had been so chopped up as to be nonsensical). I remember summers when I stayed at my grandmother’s place, staying up late watching b-movies with my uncle and just loving them in their ridiculous, low budget, over-the-top glory. Up All Night also featured solid, “real” horror movies, but I would skip those in lieu of fun fare like Student Bodies, Eating Raoul, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Return of the Killer Tomatoes, or Monster High. It’s a long time since I’ve looked back on this, but I expect that was a formative time in developing my love for this stuff. These days, I still have a sweet place in my heart for this sort of campilly exploitative and yet loveably affordable work.

It was also during these years that I really fell in love with work with dark overtones. I bumped into Nightbreed one night on TV and was so struck by its utterly sympathetic, hunted monsters (who looked just amazing) and its one really scary figure – the totally normal human masked killer. In High School, I just adored The Crow and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and got really into the “White Wolf – World of Darkness” RPGs (Vampire, Werewolf, Wraith, Changeling, and Mage). They all engaged with horror concepts and characters, and sometimes, especially in Wraith – the Oblivion, a super fun game where you play a tortured soul who’s failed to move on after death and must endlessly wander the Shadowlands, they focused on the exact concept of Horror itself (I remember an Afterword in which one of the main White Wolf designers, Mark Rein-Hagen, included an essay on the difference between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ – probably the first time I’d ever considered this distinction – it wouldn’t be the last).

Still, when trying out some “serious horror films,” I balked. I remember renting Candyman with a friend and after the moment when Helen wakes up covered in blood, we both checked out and needed a palate cleanser (maybe we ended up watching The Lost Boys that night.) – I didn’t return to it again until years later, after college, watching it with the same friend, and that time we finished it, and I loved it (but was still unwilling to enter the bathroom for a couple hours – that was…not comfortable).

But no one was more influential in bringing me to the genre during this period than Clive Barker (who had, unbeknownst to me at the time, written and directed Nightbreed and written the story on which Candyman was based). While grocery shopping with my parents, I came across a discounted copy of Imajica (not horror so much as a mythological/modern fantasy), started reading it and was utterly intrigued. I brought it home and was hooked. It was so cinematic in its scope, so weird, idiosyncratic, sexual, mythic, magical, fleshy, and just absolutely epic, how could I not love it? Following that, I worked my way through his other non-horror, but still frequently gory and goopy works of weird fiction, such as The Great and Secret Show and Everville and eventually picked up a used copy of one of the Books of Blood (the collected omnibus of which I’ve been on and off revisiting for the last half year).

I’d read a bit of Stephen King before that, but not really his horror stuff, so this was probably my introduction to true horror fiction. And I loved it. It was captivating, the ideas were provocative, and though I could taste the ‘horror’ of it, it didn’t exactly scare me. I remember at the time thinking about how there was a big difference between reading and watching horror. When reading, I painted the picture myself and I set the mood – my imagination was part of the process and if I wanted to engage with the characters, the ideas, the themes, and the story, but I didn’t want to be scared, then I wouldn’t be (these days, I feel the same about any film – I have to want to and let myself be scared to actually get scared). But when watching something, it was more like a roller coaster and I had less feeling of control – just taken wherever the filmmaker wanted to take me and sometimes, I could be jostled around more than I liked. Eventually, having read The Forbidden (the source material for Candyman), and loving its exploration of the intersection of storytelling and belief, I was finally ready to revisit and embrace the film one day.

Becoming a Fan

During my college years, I saw some movies here and there, but didn’t really move forward much towards fandom, though one film did leave a lasting impression. While I’d enjoyed watching some ‘scary movies’ with friends (and also, on the horror theme, I loved watching friends play Resident Evil a lot, all screaming when zombies attacked, and really enjoyed this VHS board game, Nightmare (or was our version Atmosfear? I’m not sure.)), I still hadn’t been sold on just how good a horror movie could be. It wasn’t until a friend showed me Rosemary’s Baby during my Sophomore year that I finally got it, and came to understand how horror could be enjoyed beyond the level of screaming with friends at jump scares or laughing at b-movie schlock. Polanski’s film (which, it should be said, is very faithful to Levin’s book, such that Levin should really get some credit here) was just a revelation both in terms of the emotional and social impact horror could offer and in the simple, but masterful, film making that could be so effective. By that time, I’d seen plenty of startling moments and blood on film, but I probably hadn’t seen anything scarier than the scene when Rosemary is in a phone booth, desperately trying to make an appointment with her doctor and the camera just keeps moving around her, implying that every person on the street could be part of this mysterious Satanic conspiracy from which she is fleeing, that they could catch her at any moment. It genuinely blew me away and reframed in my mind what Horror could be.

Finally, after College and Grad School (where I did Performance Studies – a kind of theoretical intersection of performance theory and anthropology/sociology/(queer/post-colonial/gender/fill-in-the-blank)-studies, I relocated to Chicago and soon thereafter became a fan. I decided at one point, perhaps in 2002, to create a “midnight horror-show” performance (which as one review fairly pointed out, started at 11 and premiered after Halloween had finished – so it was oddly timed at best).

Sadly, I really do not have good pictures from this show – this may be the least blurry.

In preparation for this, I started doing research, watching horror movies like never before. I spent a lot of money in the video store in those days, just educating myself and working through the horror section as much as possible. I rewatched things I’d seen before and liked. I saw my first Argento films. I subjected myself to unpleasant watches like Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, and Cannibal Holocaust. I discovered films that I still love today, such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. I tried to watch the entirety of the ‘canon’ of horror of the second half of the 20^th century. And at the same time, I read voraciously about horror. That included very approachable works like Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, his history of horror literature, but also denser theoretical work such as Carol Clover’s much referenced Men, Women, and Chainsaws.

I have wrestled with this, but I cannot remember exactly what made me want to do the horror show (which had the glorious title, Dreadful Penny’s Midnight Cavalcade of Ghoulish Delights – some things about it worked and some didn’t, and years later we revisited it with different successes and failures – someday I’ll write about those experiences). Had I already become obsessed with the genre (I don’t think so), or was it just a bit of a whim – something I thought could be a rich subject for performance (probably)? I feel like there is a key moment that my memory has just lost. But I think it wasn’t until I started to view the work through various different theoretical lenses that I really became a ‘fan.’ While I had enjoyed a good scary movie now and then and thought it was fascinating that this was actually something to enjoy, and while I had seen some really good films in the genre that were clearly “about” things, it wasn’t until I came to these theoretical writings in this phase of ‘research’ that I really fully embraced it all.

For the second Dreadful Penny, we actually did a photo shoot.

Finally I had a framework through which to enjoy the full range of work on offer. I could appreciate the high artistry of an emotional-psychological piece like Jacob’s Ladder. I could revel in the campy charms of an independently produced, low budget, but so very creative and lovingly produced movie like Phantasm. I could vibe on the blatant social commentary with gore of something like Dawn of the Dead. And while I could also go along for the ride with a simple, bloody slasher in which it didn’t feel like the filmmakers had really intended to make “art” per se, I could also see how it serves as a rich artifact of a time and a place and a psychological-sociological portrait that rewards deep reading.

Over the twenty years since then, I have gone through periods of being more or less of a fan. I’ve had times when I’ve taken a break and come back fresh. I’ve also had periods of greater intensity, such as one which started in about 2016 when I started listening to a variety of regular horror podcasts and which has culminated in this current project of maintaining this blog and really trying to produce some interesting thoughts on the subject each week. Generally, that means watching movies and writing about them. But occasionally, it is something like this – just attempting a personal reflection about my own relationship to the work. So, thanks for joining me – this was enriching for me at least to take this stroll down memory lane – I hope perhaps it was somehow interesting for anybody else to read.

‘Tis the Season

Posted on October 21, 2022 by Glen — No Comments ↓

In discussing a genre such as horror, there are endless discussions of whether or not a given work should be included. Is something a thriller or a horror movie (can it be both)? Can it be horror if it isn’t scary (I’d say yes)? Can it be horror if there’s no element of the supernatural (of course)? These conversations often feel like pointless hairsplitting at best and mean-spirited gatekeeping at worst, but they also feel inevitable (I’ve spent at least one post going down that rabbit hole myself) – how can you really talk about something in any meaningful way if you can’t even agree on what it is?

But sometimes, it’s quite clear: the film was directed by one of horror’s most influential directors; it has both scenes of squirm inducing discomfort and sequences of stalking, home invasion, and assault; and it revolves around one of the all-time most classic “monsters” – witches. Very obviously, the film in question is not a horror film. More of a domestic drama. But one which I think a fan of the genre is well served by considering.

All of this is to say that this week, we’ll be looking at George Romero’s 1973 low-budget, feminist, occult drama, The Season of the Witch. As usual, there will be spoilers, so be forewarned.

The Season of the Witch (1973)

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about this movie that I like so much. As described above, it is a real stretch to consider it horror (more of a drama with intimations of the occult). Furthermore, while I absolutely appreciate the film’s socio-political position, it is more than a little on the nose, with what it lacks in subtlety made up for by being really, really blatant. On top of that, it’s fairly slow and not all that much actually happens, and while some performers stand out, it is clearly peopled by the regional talent that Romero had easy access to in Pittsburgh (nothing against “the city of bridges,” but some of these players would not have gone far in NYC or Hollywood). Finally, it was riddled with production issues, with the producers more than halving the budget and chopping Romero’s original cut down by more than 40 minutes (and tossing the negatives, such that most of that is fully lost). And yet, somehow, the result feels so idiosyncratic, independent, deeply watchable, and rather moving. It is not Romero’s best work, but one can easily see him in it, and I have enjoyed revisiting it from time to time over the years.

Originally titled Jack’s Wife, this is a story of a woman trapped by her role – mother, wife, homemaker. The original title suggested how utterly she is discounted by the world around her – not a person, but a relationship, a possession. The distributer felt that name wasn’t going to sell tickets and retitled it Hungry Wives!, marketing it as a softcore sex film. The fact that there is very little sex shown and none of it is remotely explicit meant that the target audience left cinemas pretty unsatisfied. Eventually, it was re-released as The Season of the Witch (after the Donovan song that plays in a key sequence), meaning that now many horror fans would leave unsatisfied, but some, such as myself, have found it to be a lovely, little gem.

Joan (Jan White) is the stay-at-home mother of an adult daughter. Her husband is out of town on business more than he is home. She has no vocation and no one really needs her to do very much. She spends much of her time idly drinking, gossiping, or playing cards with the other neighborhood wives (who are, to be fair, a real hoot!), but the whole time, however done up her hair is, or how perfectly she keeps her home, she seems distant, clearly unengaged, unfulfilled, with a gentle smile that never reaches her eyes. I wrote above that the film lacks subtlety, but White deserves credit for bringing genuine nuance to so much of her screen time. She communicates a great deal with very little and it is easy to immediately feel for her.

The film opens with a long dream sequence in which she follows behind her husband in the woods as he reads the paper, drinks tea, and eats breakfast, all the while leaving branches to whip her in the face, before he finally puts a collar around her neck, leashes her, and leads her into a kennel where he gives instruction for her care during the week he’ll be away for work. As I’ve said – not exactly subtle, but it is an effective, odd opening. Throughout the film, we spend a lot of time in her dreams, frequently unsure whether an event is real or imagined. We inhabit the space of her anxieties and dissatisfaction; the things she desires seemingly inexorably tied to those she fears: the violation of her home/cage, a threatening, magnetic male presence, and a dangerous, disruptive wild, dark power.

Through a friend of a friend, she encounters some materials on witchcraft and, her husband out of town and her daughter having run away from home (more on that later), she begins to explore the dark arts, edging closer and closer to reckoning with and owning her own will, and acting to have it done. Along the way, she has a fling with a younger man (an irritatingly trollish, but charismatic guy who had been intermittently seeing her daughter), burns a lot of incense, summons a devil (or maybe just lets a cat into her basement), and (accidentally?) shoots her husband. In the end, we see Joan again at a neighborhood party, but now her reserve, similar to that shown at the beginning, clearly implies a self-satisfaction that makes her the center of attention (even if she is still labeled in the final line of the movie as “You know, Jack’s wife”).

On the horror movie of it all, as Romero does again in his later film Martin (1978), it is never clear whether anything supernatural has actually happened or not. In Martin that question is central to the story and the horror – either the protagonist is a tragic vampire or he is a dangerous psychopath – the ambiguity is key. In this case, however, the film doesn’t concern itself with even questioning whether or not Joan’s magic has any effect. Perhaps Greg comes to her because she cast a spell under moonlight, or maybe he comes because she called him on the phone – in a way it doesn’t matter as much as simply seeing her ask for his presence (to the spirits or via technological means) – seeing her become a willful agent. But still, that uncertainty does add a taste of mystery to the proceedings that brings it somewhat closer to a horror film.

And of course, Joan’s plight is a horrific one – and all the more so for how unnotable it is. Suffering from what Betty Friedan termed “the problem that has no name” in her 1963 text, The Feminine Mystique, Joan finds herself in an empty existence, fulfilling the roles that had been set out for her (and the rest of her neighborhood housewife coterie), surrounded by the creature comforts promised by 50s era Madison Avenue and women’s magazines that glamorized homemaking and helped lure women back out of the workforce after the war. At one point, she has a dream in which she is being shown the house by some sort of agent, and it feels as if she is both being given a nigh endless list of “nice things” and being bound to a dreary responsibility, tied to this building and these objects; the scene is a bit funny, but also haunting.

There is an interesting contrast to be had with her daughter Nikki (Joedda McClain). As a young woman in the sexual revolution of the early 1970s, she has a totally different relationship to sex, relationships, independence, and willfulness than her mother. It’s not clear exactly how old she is, but it’s implied that she’s in college, such that she is in a casual relationship with Greg, an aggressively superior, yet smarmily charming student-teacher there. Still, for all of her freedom and steady self-confidence, she is treated by both her parents and society as a kind of a child. Following a falling out, she leaves home and is considered a runaway, the police called in to search for her. I can only assume that this wouldn’t have happened had she been a 20 year old boy.

The most striking scene in the film features this mother-daughter relationship. After accompanying her friend, Shirley, to visit a “witch” for a tarot card reading, the two of them end up back at Joan’s where Nikki and Greg are hanging out. In an increasingly uncomfortable episode, the four of them drink together, and Greg needles the older women, especially Shirley, targeting her insecurities of growing old, of being undesirable, attacking the hangups that stop her from doing whatever she wants and suggesting that sad, repressed people like her are ‘what’s wrong with this country.’ Nikki apologetically makes half-hearted attempts to reign him in and Joan makes some effort to cut him down for his cruelty, but at the same time, there seems to be a spark between them – antagonistic, but intriguing. Ultimately, she is complicit in Greg’s tricking Shirley into thinking that she’s just tried pot (it’s just a normal cigarette) as he proves a point about the susceptibility and power of the mind and viciously pushes Shirley to an emotional breaking point to reveal just how unhappy she actually is beneath her veneer of happy, square, middle-class housewifery. I mean, he’s not wrong, but he’s also a mean prick.

After driving Shirley home, Joan returns to find that the young couple is still there, sounds of laughter and sexual pleasure coming from her daughter’s room. Visibly unsure what to do, Joan creeps down the hall to her own room and closes the door, but she can still hear them. She buries her head in the pillows, but can’t block them out and is soon physically turned on herself, and disturbed by that fact. But is she so upset because it feels wrong to be so aroused by hearing her daughter’s moans or because she is jealous of a pleasure and a freedom that feel completely lost to her? She ends in tears shortly before Nikki bursts in, disgusted to realize that her mother had been listening the whole time. This is what prompts her to “run away.”

In the next scene, her husband is furious with her and even strikes her for doing nothing, for not stopping their daughter from “being balled in the next room,” for somehow failing as a mother in letting this 20-something young woman leave home. Notably, Joan is not worried about Nikki at this point – not really. She doesn’t explicitly say this, but Nikki is a confident and self-sufficient adult who can make her own decisions and deal with her own mistakes (something Joan, in contrast, has trouble doing). Rather, Joan is worried about herself – what she wants, what she no longer has the ability to put up with. Soon after, on a Donovan groove, she heads into the city, buys a chalice, a knife, and some herbs, and starts reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards before bed.

She also starts dreaming about a masked intruder breaking into her house and attacking her (in sequences that could have found a place in a more traditional horror movie). Does this dream figure represent the threat and attraction she feels from and towards Greg, the danger of her own unchecked desire running wild, the risk of tampering with dark, occult forces, or just a dangerous maleness, as much her husband as patriarchal society writ large? Later, as these dreams blur into reality, all of these possible interpretations will come to a bloody head.

In recent years, I’ve heard many female led horror films described as “good-for-her” films. Whether Thomasin in The VVitch, Dani in Midsommar, or Dawn in Teeth, there is often a specific and characteristic satisfaction to seeing some woman or girl, whom we have seen marginalized by the people in her life, if not society in general, rising up and taking her place of strength, even if that means engaging in bloody acts. Even if they end up complicit in murder, if not murderers themselves, it’s hard not to nod with a kind of bloody minded approval and think, “good for her.” Romero’s Joan is decades ahead of this curve, shooting her husband in the final reel (possibly accidentally, thinking him the dream intruder, possibly not), this act and its immediate aftermath intercut with her initiation into the local coven of witches.

In that ceremony, a rope is looped around her neck and she is led to kneel, echoing her kennel dream at the opening of the film. Does this suggest that she has just traded one cage for another? I’m not sure why, but in choosing this binding for herself, it doesn’t feel that way. As the film ends, she seems so much more alive. In its bundle of will, magic, the power of the mind, desire, and the mysteries of attraction, Romero’s film presents this woman coming into her own, coming to life, and it is an engaging and touching journey.

While only nominally a horror movie and not the strongest piece in his catalogue, this artifact of early Romero (his third film, after Night of the Living Dead and a romantic comedy I haven’t seen called There’s Always Vanilla) pairs interestingly with both The Amusement Park (also 1973), a recently resurfaced public service short he made about the horrific way the elderly are discarded, and the abovementioned, excellent Martin (also, I assume it must be a direct influence on the rather enjoyable Jakob’s Wife (2021), a story of a dissatisfied housewife getting her groove back after being bitten by a vampire – I wrote a short bit about it here). There could be a valid discussion of how much Romero succeeds or not in engaging with difficulties that were clearly not his own lived experience, but he does so with earnestness and real heart, while bringing some cinematic flair to this grainy, bleak setting. People complain sometimes these days about horror “being too political,” about “virtue signaling” trumping storytelling. Those people should avoid this film – they would hate it. But if you can give it the time, if you can make some allowances, you may find The Season of the Witch the small delight that I do.