Finally Braving A Demanding Classic: Possession

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So as a devoted fan of the genre, and now a horror blogger, I feel compelled to maintain a certain degree of street cred, so to speak, and there are some films that loom so large that, even if I’ve never gotten around to watching them, I find myself behaving as if I have, as if ‘of course, I understand this reference, for I have undoubtedly consumed the canon of the great works of horror cinema in its entirety.’ And often, you don’t need to have seen something to have a strong impression of it, to have taken in so many iconic images, to have had the ending spoiled, to know a work’s themes and where it fits into the history and larger context of the genre, to know that this or that performance is most esteemed or reviled, to know that this is a ‘very-important-work’ of a ‘serious-film-maker.’

Today’s film is one of these.  

So, the other day, I finally sat down and subjected myself to Andzrej Żuławski’s Possession. The next day, I watched it again to take notes, and here I am now, writing about it…I just wish I had actually liked it. But, you can’t have everything in life and my intention on this blog is not to write movie reviews, declaring things good or bad, but rather to process my thoughts about work that is worthy of consideration, and even if I find it difficult to get through (this was not the first time I tried watching it, just the first time I succeeded), it is that.

One programming note: while Żuławski was indeed a Polish director, I’m not including this in my somewhat dormant series on Polish horror films (which can be found here, here, here, and here.) Filmed in West Berlin in English, I feel this doesn’t qualify – or if it did, so would Rosemary’s Baby, and that doesn’t seem like useful taxonomy. One day, I’ll finally return to that series and check out either his Diabeł or Szamanka, both filmed in Poland in Polish.

Possession (1981)

Apparently inspired by Żuławski’s own, this is essentially the story of a divorce. Mark (Sam Neil) is a spy who has finished a recent assignment and returns to his home in West Berlin to find that his wife, Anna (Isabella Adjani), wants to split up. They shout. He goes on a three week bender. They shout some more. She moves into a derelict building. There’s additional shouting, a small child covered in jam, and now some domestic abuse. He finds that their son’s teacher, Helen is Anna’s doppelgänger. Shouting continues. Anna stabs some guys and puts a head in the fridge. Shouting. Mark and Anna cut themselves with an electric knife and have sex in the kitchen. Shouting.  Anna kills her friend, Margie. Shouting. Mark drowns Anna’s lover in a toilet. Shouting. Anna’s been having a sexual affair with a giant, bloody, tentacled, squiddy creature (maybe feeding it somehow with these men she’s killed?). Shouting, and gunshots, and more doppelganging, and a final, disturbing image and soundscape of war. The end.

I mean, I’ve happily never gone through a divorce, but I guess that’s what it’s like?

I think a key in looking at a piece such as this is that, though it comes with the trappings of horror, it is really not a typical work of narrative, genre based storytelling. The dialogue vacillates between being naturalistically banal and unrealistically poetic and/or philosophical. The performances are totally stylized, expressionistic, making no attempt at recognizable, human behavior, but rather trying to express thoughts, feelings and experiences that transcend verbal elucidation. There are visual themes and concepts that reflect each other and all contribute to a kind of tone poem of bitterness and neediness and jealousy and separation and control, and a desperation for something that can’t quite be expressed, but which is no less necessary. It is captivatingly filmed, with a kinetic, ever circling lens; it makes no attempt to deliver likeable characters, focused as it is on two people in extremis, all kindness  and tenderness exhausted; the score is compelling and sometimes even surprisingly groovy; and somehow it is even occasionally funny. It is an idiosyncratic, challenging, unique piece of work, a nightmare vision of the lack of love, human connection, or any form of meaning, and the hunger for something to fill that gap, and while I still find it difficult, it is certainly an artistic piece worthy of respectful analysis – so, I’m sorry if I took a mocking tone in the previous paragraph – the constant level of shouting just wears me down.

So, how might I analyze it? What do I do with it all? Let’s consider some images and themes. It focuses on divorce and takes place in a divided city, the wall ever-present and East German soldiers always visibly surveilling through binoculars. Mark is a spy, and throughout the film, his jealousy and need to control mirrors those soldiers. This drama and trauma play out amidst brutalist modern architecture – spaces that do not seem designed for humanity or human relationships. We also have two pairs of doppelgängers; is the self doubled, or is it divided like the city? We barely meet Mark’s double, but Anna’s is totally different from her – warm, present, helpful, loving, articulating her thoughts in a way that Mark can receive. What and why is she? A fantasy for Mark – the ‘perfect wife’? A challenge to him? Even in the presence of someone so warm and giving, he is just as much of a bastard – how could he be otherwise with someone who doesn’t embody this ideal? And might that mean that with her tentacled paramour, Anna is creating an ideal as well? I don’t think the film sees a need to justify or explain.

I feel both characters inhabit a world where relationship is an impossibility. Mark is self-centered, abusive, and possessive. The possession of the title may reference that. Something he’d had was taken from him and he needs it back, even if he has already spoken of how he’s fallen out of love and has no interest in what his wife feels. Still, even lacking that interest, he needs to know what is going on with her – where she is – who or what she is in bed with – that knowing being a form of having her. Anna, in her turn, is inscrutable, driven towards an inexpressible exigency which Mark can only be an obstacle in the way of. There is really no way that these two could ever hope to relate to each other.

So much of this plays out in the performances, both of which are commendable, if also pretty arduous to endure. Mark is situated as the main viewpoint character, but no steps are taken to warm us to him. Emotionally clingy, physically abusive, and pettily cruel, he’s pretty much the worst. But all of these traits are also human, identifiable. It is easy to see the processes spinning in his fevered brain that result in his awfulness. Anna is not so readable. Her thoughts and feelings are an opaque mystery, and the deeply poetic words she speaks are inadequate to truly explain anything. One might assume that anyone would want to divorce this jerk, but I feel the film implies a greater depth to her dissatisfaction and desire for change.

I can only assume that this is rooted in the extent to which the film is informed by lived experience. Perhaps Żuławski could foreground a descent into the ugly emotional reactions with which he was more familiar, but the female counterpart remains essentially unknowable. Then again, perhaps I’m wrong to project my limited knowledge of his biography onto the characters. That may be an unfair oversimplification.

But the performances go farther than simply portraying difficult characters undergoing hard times. There is a stylization to the acting that pushes beyond anything so basically realistic. I must admit I found it more than a little off-putting, but I then also had to question why. I mean, the performances are really great: nuanced, physically and vocally extreme, expressive, unguarded, ugly (which is harder than it sounds), and magnetic – but they simply don’t talk and move and react like human beings tend to. However, I genuinely believe this is not a failing, but a clear artistic choice. In stage acting, performances are often stylized (the same could be said for the text), and in that context, I expect I would have had no issue, but in the cinema, we so rarely see anything like this, and that makes it more difficult. I am not well prepared to suspend my disbelief in this way in this medium, but it is surely not the responsibility of the actors or the film to only deliver that which we are used to seeing. If I have trouble connecting, it may simply be that I am not bringing enough to the film as a viewer, investing the attention and doing the work to meet the artwork in the unique space which it inhabits. I’m, of course, allowed not to respond well to everything; not every film is for everybody, but I feel like in this case, the film asks a lot of me and I’m not always up for it. I wonder how different it would have been if I’d had a chance to see it in a cinema rather than on my sofa.

This stylization is most clearly evident in the famous subway scene. In a rare peaceful moment, seeking to explain what she is going through to Mark, Anna tells the story of how she “miscarried her faith.” We see in flashback Anna walking through the subway and then simply snapping. She shrieks and shakes; she dances in a trance state; her groceries are smashed and, caked in egg and cream, she writhes and howls until blood and bile and pus and something bubbling and green start to pour forth out of her. The performance is intense, resembling more than anything, Maya Deren’s ethnographic footage of Voudou rituals, possessions in which the faithful are ridden by the gods. Possession has been put on display in countless horror films, sometimes very artfully and effectively, but this is different. It is an absolute act of performance art, but it feels less formed, not shaped to be scary, to tell a story, and rather more a documentation of a performer putting herself through something ineffable, something which I could only witness from some distance. And Adjani is really something here – there is a sense of truth to the performance, even if I had no concept of how to interpret what I was seeing on first viewing, or second. To be honest, I’m still not so sure, but here goes:

She confronts an essential existential absence. Nothing is important. Nothing is necessary. Life is empty chaos, a horror. She purges herself of whatever false faith she had still maintained and having done that, is somehow opened to the divine. She is ridden by it. Maybe she births it. She is consumed. And there is no possible return to life as lived before. She can live in her crumbling flat in worship of/service to/sexual communion with this phallic, cephalopodic monstrosity, murdering anyone who comes too close, who threatens her link with sublimity (How do I not absolutely love this? On paper, this is my jam!) and has no other needs, perhaps reflected in the fact that she never changes her dress for the whole film, though weeks or months have passed. This is beyond Mark. For him, god is a dog that has crawled under the porch to die. And, as he is our sole lens through which to view her and all the action of the film, we can never really understand what we witness. Our comprehension dies with him in a hail of gunfire as the whole spy subplot somehow comes back, and we are left as bereft of meaning, of the holy, as he is.

It is a confounding, confusing cinematic artwork which is horrific and funny and shrill and grotesque and ecstatic and somehow even somniferous (meaning it kept threatening to put me to sleep) – but maybe that’s just a defense mechanism on my part, seeking escape from the monotony of this emotional, sensory assault. And I haven’t even touched on so many other components that may carry meaning or may be there just to break the brain with their incomprehensibility: the esoteric lover, Heinrich and his suicidal mother, the pink socks, Mark riding a motorcycle, screaming manically before spectacularly wiping out for some reason, Mark’s double instructing a random lady to shoot at the spies; the list goes on. But I think it was worth putting myself through, worth reckoning with it. If nothing else, now I don’t have to pretend that I’ve seen it.

—

So, that was Possession, but why was it so hard?  I feel like the older I get, the more difficult it is to put myself through challenging work. Perhaps, had I seen this at 23, I would have fallen in love with its weirdness, its artistic unity, its extremity, its bloody, gooey, horrific divinity. But at 43, it feels a bit more like doing my homework, eating my vegetables. (Though I must say that I’ve enjoyed considering it and writing about it a great deal more than I did watching it, and the more I think on it, the more my appreciation grows – but I don’t think I’ll watch it again.) Am I getting lazy? Less adventurous? So much of what I come to horror for is just such extremity, to be challenged on a dramatic, moral, psychic level – and it does just that. In recent years, have I seen anything new to me that was such a challenge which I actually liked, or do I just have a warm place in my heart for difficult work seen first when I was younger (von Trier, Noé, Aranofsky, for example) and now I need films to be more ‘fun?’  If that’s true, is it a problem, and should I challenge myself more?

Maybe? Maybe not. Good art can also entertain and I don’t know that it’s exactly personal weakness to want to actually enjoy the things I take time to shove in my eye-holes. (Ouch.) Anyway, I’m glad I finally made my way all the way through it, twice. Whew. Good for me.

Queering Horror

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First, I should lay my cards on the table. I can’t lay claim to any of the letters of the LGBTQQIP2SAA… experience (hereinafter, in short, LGBT+), myself. However, I do find myself reading and listening to a lot that looks at horror from a queer perspective (e.g., the podcasts Horror Queers, The Gaylords of Darkness, and the sadly defunct Attack of the Queerwolf) and, as it is still Pride Month for a couple more days, I wanted to do something with the notion of “queer horror” and look at a couple examples that I enjoy. That said, I hope this is not received in any way as disrespectful. One might fairly ask why I, a straight-cis guy, should have something at all to say about queer-anything. All I can offer is that I write here about what I find interesting and I find this interesting and approach it with respect and appreciation. I hope that’s enough…

Muffinpines, Get Ready to be Babashook, 2017, drawing. USA. Babashook, Kylie O’Neil, 2018.

So to begin, I think there are a couple of reasons that I consume so much of this stuff. Firstly, the world of horror fandom can be a really varied place, featuring many thoughtful and insightful people, but also including some personalities that turn me off (e.g., the “horror-bro”), and explicitly queer and/or feminist content is simply a more pleasant listen; I feel I have more in common with an artist who would call themselves queer than an agro dude who would use that word to belittle someone or something. Secondly, I enjoy when discourse comes from a clear viewpoint. Having some inkling of the writer/speaker’s lived experience serves as a lens through which to view their opinion, making it all more personal, while also drawing attention to that lens itself. Now, to be fair, there are countless perspectives out there. One might look at horror from a Black perspective, or Jewish, or French, or Marxist, or Freudian, or as a person who does crossword puzzles, etc., but this is a very prominent one. You can find writing that looks at horror content from all of these other angles and more, but none of them have quite the profile in the world of horror criticism that queerness does.

Queer

And perhaps this is with good reason. ‘Queer’ is a once derogatory term, which has been reclaimed as a proud self-identifier of otherness (specifically in terms of sexual/gender identity). Horror is all to do with the ‘other,’ with what is outside the norm. What else is a monster? And while traditionally, the approach has been to posit that other as inhuman, abject, an object of fear, so much of the genre takes a position of at least sympathizing, if not outright identifying, with it. Who watches Frankenstein and roots against the creature (cue obligatory note that it and its first sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, which is very, very camp, were directed by an out gay man)? And even when the sympathies of the audience are not intentionally aligned with the monster or the monstrous experience on display (for another classic example, take Nosferatu, directed by another out gay man), there is still an inherent fascination, an attraction (sometimes conflicted) towards that which social/ethical/religious norms instruct us to abjure.

Especially given how focused the genre can be on the body, on flesh and fluids, on explicit, titillating, sometimes “gratuitous” sex and nudity, it is easy to make the leap from the allure of one deviation from the norm to another. I’d not be the first to observe that horror as a whole is, thus, pretty ‘queer.’

Reading a Film

But sometimes more so than others and in ways far more varied than I would venture to survey in such a short essay.  So, what kinds of ‘queer horror’ might we look at here? One major branch consists in queer readings of horror texts with no explicitly LGBT+ characters. This may be informed by knowing that the writer or director, or some key member(s) of the cast were not straight/cis, but also sometimes a text just lends itself well to the reading.

A great example here is Fright Night (1985). No characters are identified as ‘gay,’ but there is so much to read into it: Charlie ignoring his girlfriend, who is finally ready to sleep with him, because he’s so fascinated by the suave, magnetic man who just moved in next door (who is a vampire); Ed, a weird kid in a kind of showy way, ostracized even by his purported friends, who is seduced to vampirism with the line, “I know what it’s like being different. Only they won’t pick on you anymore… or beat you up. I’ll see to that”; the tragedy of Peter Vincent, a very queer coded (British accent, delicate physicality, lots of makeup), older character having to kill Ed (as a wolf) and watch him suffer and die – it feels like there is a connection there, like Ed would have been able to come to him for support and community, had things only been different; and of course, the fact that Jerry the vampire comes to town with his servant/roommate/live-in-carpenter, Billy (apparently they travel around flipping houses together and collecting antiques), and their relationship seems genuinely warm and tender (and Jerry seems truly crushed when Billy is killed).

Somehow, even the totally hetero-seduction of Amy on the dance floor (under very “bisexual-lighting,” long before that was a thing) carries a soupçon of queerness in her awakening to her own sexuality, identity, and the extent to which she is done with this immature boy – when she bares her neck to be bitten, she chooses otherness for herself (ending up somewhat shark mouthed for a time). Of course, by the end, the seductive/disruptive vampire has been vanquished, Charlie and Amy are back together, and everything’s very straight, but that does not erase all that came before.

I think the case of finding queerness in Fright Night represents the lion’s share of queer horror. A queer reading here comes easily, but any text can be “queered” or read in this way, and I enjoy hearing about/reading how individuals have found their own stories and experiences reflected in work that may have honestly never considered them. Sometimes it’s a stretch, but even then, there is the pleasure of a totally personal engagement with a work, which is far more fulfilling than a claim at objectively judging a work’s artistic/literary merits, or lack thereof.

A Question of Representation

Sometimes, interpretation isn’t necessary to find a character who is explicitly LGBT+; it’s all on the surface. This representation might be positive, as in the case of the basketball coach in Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, who is only ever shown to be a caring educator, seeking to help the traumatized young person in his care (who may also be gay – a plot point that is never firmly settled) navigate a world of murderous aunts and viciously homophobic police (though the real reason the film is so embraced is probably Susan Tyrell’s gloriously over-the-top performance, treasured by aficionados of high camp).

Sometimes, a case can be made for reading a film to be, even unintentionally, supportive of the LGBT+ community (I would argue this for Sleepaway Camp, but I don’t want to open that can of worms without a huge spoiler warning from the get go). Sometimes, a work may explicitly feature LGBT+ characters (such as an early 70s Lesbian Vampire film) but have obviously been made with a typical straight-male gaze in mind (though even in those cases, it can be compellingly liberating to watch a woman discovering what an improvement this alluring female vampire lover is over her brutish, abusive, and/or possibly deeply closeted and self-hating husband – e.g., Daughters of Darkness).

Very often, though, the representation can be toxic. This seems especially true with trans (or if not exactly ‘trans,’ then at least notably gender-nonconforming) characters, such as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

What fascinates me here is taking in how others navigate their own complex relationships with problematic texts. One may find certain elements noxious, or even harmful, and still treasure a given film. Hearing a trans person detail their complicated appreciation for Dressed to Kill, Psycho, or Terror Train, while reckoning with, challenging, and criticizing, or even decrying the perpetuation of the dangerous ‘killer-trans’ trope can be illuminating (outside of the purview of this essay, the same can be said, for example, of women, particularly survivors of sexual violence, who find comfort in exploitative rape-revenge films, such as I Spit on Your Grave).

This is an experience that I do not have personally, but I can find things uncomfortable; there can be that sense of ‘is this alright?’ ‘is it still ok to enjoy this?’ and sometimes I need to reckon with a film I love saying or doing something that I find ugly. Seeing how others thread this needle of engagement with work can be instructive. You can love something, and you can criticize it; you can find value and harm in the same place, and it is valuable to interrogate that juxtaposition. Life is complicated. (And of course, mileage may vary – a regressive, harmful message can simply ruin a film for a person as well.)

Queer as a Verb

The last strain of queer horror I’d like to look at is, I think, rarer, but might also be what interests me most, and it brings us first to a fairly academic discussion. In her book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler framed gender as something not natural but rather, constantly performed, continually being performatively played into being; furthermore claiming that certain performances of gender, such as drag, can serve as a kind of strategy of resistance; a heteronormative text/image/concept (one which not only presents, but reifies a gender binary/heterosexual norm) can be twisted, played with, mocked and thus undercut – in other words, it can be “queered.” I am no expert in queer theory (but I did read a bit of Butler, Sedwick, Newton, and Sontag in grad school 20-something years ago, studying performativity), so I can’t say if Butler exactly coined the use of ‘queer’ as a verb, as something one does, but I associate her with it. Ok, so let’s bring this back to horror and how it can be ‘queered.’

In discussing the way that religious, reactionary types may decry the corruptive influence of horror, Stephen King noted that, ironically, “horror fiction is as conservative as a banker in a three-piece-suit”; you have “normal society” – it is disrupted by an (often external) othered threat; eventually that threat is conquered, and everything returns to normal, or the threat destroys all and it is a terrible tragedy. With respect to King though, I think that only describes one (perhaps dominant) kind of horror.

Another kind of horror is, for me, represented by the work of Clive Barker, who I intend to discuss in far greater depth when I finally finish re-reading his 6 volumes of the Books of Blood, comprising the vast majority of his short stories. (Look for that at some point.) One of the things that makes him so interesting to me is how much he doesn’t do what King described above. Sure, he brings in threats aplenty, and they can be violent, gory, weird, and very often obsessed with sex/the body/flesh, but so often his work culminates in a point where that threat, that horror becomes revelatory.

Clive Barker – Midnight Meat Train 7, 2007

Whilst their experiences are still horrific, characters so often undergo a transformation that approaches the divine. What originally seemed terrible – scary – disgusting, twists into something of beauty.  By the end of the night, Kaufman in The Midnight Meat Train has witnessed untold brutality. It has been a nightmare: one that he wakes from mutilated and traumatized, but also with a sense of newfound purpose, of service, of glory. He falls to his knees and kisses the filthy streets of the city which had so disappointed him and to which now he pledges eternal loyalty. And I don’t think we, the readers, are supposed to be horrified by this. Elements of his journey were meant to be (and were) horrific, but having ridden this train with him, we attend his beatification in the spirit that he does, and the cognitive dissonance of the dread and the awe are delicious.

I’ve long felt that this is a kind of ‘queering’ of horror.  It may have nothing to do with sexual or gender identity (though Barker, himself, is gay and does often include gay characters), but is it any less subversive to render that once deemed utterly contemptible, transcendent?

A Recent Favorite – Suspiria (2018)

In planning to write this text, I’ve revisited a number of films and watched some for the first time, and while I’ve enjoyed most, I took the greatest pleasure in re-watching one of my favorites of recent years (which I’ve briefly touched on before) through this particular lens: Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), which can be viewed as a work of queer horror in multiple ways. It never explicitly states that any of the characters are LGBT+, but it is so easy to see romantic/sexual tension in their relationships – both between Susie and Sara and between Susie and Madame Blanc (not to mention among the feminist dance collective/witch coven in general). Furthermore, once those relationships are taken as a given, the story really comes to life so much more fully and is that much more emotionally resonant (I’ve heard that in the first draft they were explicitly presented, and so, in the final cut, they are still there even if the film never directly speaks of them). Also, Tilda Swinton plays a man, so that’s something. Guadagnino, himself, is out and the fact that the last film he’d made before this was the gay coming-of-age story, Call Me By Your Name, perhaps further frames the conversation.  But for me, this also serves as an example of “queered” horror, ala Barker.

Even before I picked up on the chemistry between the characters, I loved the tactile physicality and sensuality of the film. It is a film about dancers and I believe in the dance of it. There is a relationship to gravity, to the body in space, to breath that all feels so totally of dance. And I love how the witchcraft is woven so fully through the work of that dance. The academy is not just a location where a secret cabal of witches hides behind the front of teaching dance (as it is in the 1977 original). The dance is the witchcraft. And it really is gorgeous, and dark, and the grounding of the dance makes the magic feel all the more solid and corporeal.

Into this space, so focused on the physical relationship between bodies, enters Susie Bannon, still a quiet newcomer to the academy, but no longer the delicate waif of the original (Jessica Harper was great, but it was a very different role). This Susie may giggle shyly, but she also stares back with a disarming directness, and she notably does so with two women there: her fellow dancer, Sara (who, like Susie, is also being groomed as a possible vessel for Helena Markos, the mostly unseen founder of the academy, lurking beneath the floorboards, dominating the coven and feeding on youth) and the other matriarch of the dance company (and its dominant creative presence), Madame Blanc.

The connection between Susie and Sara could easily be read as simply friendship, but there are moments that feel like more. When Susie has been having nightmares (a common occurrence in the school) and Sara runs to her and pushes her way into her bed, there is a sweet intimacy, a frankness that approaches sexuality. At a later moment, Sara returns to Susie’s room and is crestfallen to find it empty (Susie’s with Blanc at the time). Finally, in the film’s climax, after Sara has met a sad and bloody fate (having discovered something of the coven/academy’s intentions), Susie releases her from her torment with a sigh of “sweet girl” and cradles her as she goes. All of this still plays well if there is no hint of romance between them, but with it, the moment is all the more bittersweet.

On the other pairing, every scene between Susie and Madame Blanc feels like lovemaking – it’s just that no one actually has sex. But in the transmission of choreography in the dance studio, or asking and avoiding personal questions while eating a chicken wing, or staring at each other across a crowded table as all the others laugh and sing, or in the rare touch they may share, their desire and connection are palpable. At first, it seems that there is a power imbalance at work (which feels both potentially improper and as if that is part of the allure) – after all, Susie is the young, inexperienced dancer and Madame Blanc has run the company for years, but by the end, it is revealed just how much the truth is quite the opposite and how much Susie has been in control all along, tenderly leading and indulging her lover (of sorts). Again, the story tracks if there is no attraction, but I feel it’s strengthened – made more meaningful – by its presence.

But I think the piece is queerer than that, and it is here that I return to that Butler/Barker notion of ‘queered horror.’ While it takes its time, and is absolutely dense with its themes of power, abuse, responsibility, memory, guilt, and so much more, by the end, Suspiria is an absolute abattoir. Bodies have been broken (one in a bravura scene of dance, magic, and power). Viscera dangle from abdomens. Heads explode. Arterial sprays paint the walls. You might say it’s intense. But it isn’t scary. For me, I remember being in the cinema, just glowing with something like joy and melancholy. It is really a moment of beauty – sad and violent beauty, but beauty nonetheless. I danced all the way home.

And I feel that in this, Guadagnino has taken Argento’s dark fairy tale of scary witches preying on young dancers (which I love in its own right) and he has absolutely ‘queered’ it. Partly through the addition of the magnetic exchanges between these central characters, he has twisted the threat of the original film into a revelation of sensual power, and dominance, and gentleness. There is a kind of vengeance here, but also mercy.

From the very beginning, the witches are pretty much ‘out’. Susie doesn’t need to discover that the school is being run by an evil coven (she watches some instructors cackling and toying with a couple of pantsless, ensorcelled police inspectors and rather than being shocked, she titters to herself and the whole event passes without comment) – she has to instead discover who she is, and has always been, however repressed she was at home (her religious mother referring to her as “my sin. She’s what I smeared on the world”), and accept this in both its strength and its sorrow. This is the rare remake that doesn’t just go a different direction with the source material, but rather subverts it, turning it inside out to enact a totally different project of queer, female power.

The only way that it is truly similar to its precursor is in how much they are both works of excess: Argento’s being an excess of style, of sensory data, of color and sound, and glorious violence, and Guadagnino’s being an excess of ideas). They are otherwise opposite films.

So Much More

And so, this is all just to scratch the surface of the world of queer horror. There’s so much more to explore: from the haunting, tender self-discovery of Thelma to the John Waters-esque grotesque camp of All about Evil or Seed of Chucky, from the ambivalence of Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy’s Revenge (presenting a very coded young gay man as the lead – a rarity, especially at the time – but centering him in a story that presents his burgeoning sexual identity as a deadly monstrosity, his only hope of salvation being the love of a good woman) to the explicit, gay-porn themed modern giallo, Knife + Heart, from the Carmilla based, French, poetic Blood and Roses to the Carmilla based, lurid Hammer Horror, The Vampire Lovers (really, Carmilla is all over the lesbian vampires, unsurprisingly). There is a deep well. And though I still can’t claim any particular letters, I’m sure I will continue to take pleasure in these bloody parables of self-revelation, as well as others’ interpretations of the countless texts onto which queerness might be ascribed.

Death by Stereo: Ten Songs of the Summer

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So, every May/June, I visit my parents in Ocean City, MD to help them prepare a show that they will perform throughout the summer. It’s great that I’m able to make the trip and I always enjoy the work, but sometimes, it is just exhausting. My “workshop,” so to speak, is an out-door space and I’m generally working there from early morning until it starts getting dark each day. It’s a lot, especially when it’s a really hot day. But thank the gods for headphones and podcasts and playlists. And the other day, when it was particularly hot and sunny, and I was really low on juice, I put on a playlist I keep in my phone for just such occasions – my list of groovy tunes written for horror movies. It never fails to pick me up when I’m down or put a smile on my face. And honestly, I don’t exactly know why. Sure, some of the films these are from are comfort food favorites (see comfort food part I and part II) and it’s nice to have a song take you there, but not all are. But there is something about this confluence of an 80s synthesized sound (in most, but not all cases) and music made to accompany movies that were supposed to scare, while still being, you know, fun – it just hits a particularly sweet spot for me.

And I thought, “Hey, that’s something worth sharing!” So, today I’m going to run down ten songs on my list. I noticed that most were already from the eighties, so I restricted the set to that decade. I’m excising from the list any cuts from scores (I’m sure that could be a whole other post) or songs not written for the film in question, but just used on the soundtrack. I’m also not taking more than one song from a given source, with apologies to the soundtracks to The Lost Boys, Fright Night, and The Return of the Living Dead (all of which offer their own complete iteration of this list), so sometimes, hard decisions have had to be made about what to leave out. 

Every year, I hear people talk about what the ‘song of the summer’ is. Well, something about all of these just feels like summer somehow. I suppose some are from real popcorn horror movies, while some just feel hot, I guess. But beyond that, in the summer, when it’s hot and sunny outside, I just love to hide in a dark, air conditioned room and watch something that will give me chills. So maybe all horror music feels like the summer to me.

That said, let’s get into it and run down this list of “Ten Songs Written for Eighties Horror Movies, Not Including Score Orchestration!” (catchy title, huh?) These come in no particular order, really just the sequence I hear them in my playlist.

Dream Warriors – Dokken (1987): Nightmare on Elm Street 3

Dokken - Dream Warriors (Official Music Video)

I’ve already written about my appreciation for this series entry – I think it’s probably the best example of what Nightmare on Elm Street movies have to offer. And this song is a part of that. I mean, the whole film is just such a good time and having a song to rock out to where you find yourself screaming out the name of the film is just such cheesy, glorious fun. I think for horror to work, you have to be open to it. You can’t be too cool to get scared or it won’t work. Maybe that’s why so many of the songs on this list, this one certainly included, are so unabashedly sincere, and rocking.

The Ballad of Harry Warden – Paul Zaza (1981): My Bloody Valentine

The Ballad of Harry Warden (1080p with lyrics)

I just love a folksy ballad about murder and/or a disaster. Old broadsheet ballads, Nick Cave, The Willow Garden, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald; that kind of thing is rather my jam. And this tune, which plays over the credits of My Bloody Valentine, one of the better entries (I think) of the first slasher cycle, really delivers the atmosphere, the nostalgic regret, and the beauty that the film deserves. It’s just so very pretty, but it’s got this pinch of pain, of threat. It’s a great song for a singalong around a campfire, if only I weren’t so shy about playing my guitar in front of other people…

Angela’s Theme (You’re Just What I’ve Been Looking For) – Franki Vinci (1983): Sleepaway Camp

Frankie Vinci - Angela's Theme (Sleepaway Camp)

Sleepaway Camp is an easy movie to love (so intentionally sleazy and accidentally sweet, all while (I suspect) totally inadvertently making a case for trans rights, all in a dirty little slasher that seems to, more accurately than most, show kids at summer camp in a way that is oddly, rather believable (though I imagine there’s often less murder), and this ode to Felicia Rose’s Angela is one really groovy, synth-tastic gem. It plays over the credits, following a key moment which shouldn’t be spoiled if possible, and is in a kind of dialogue with that moment, allowing it to linger as the credits roll. It’s just the perfect cap to a really enjoyable flick.    

Pet Sematary – The Ramones (1989): Pet Sematary

Ramones - Pet Sematary (Official Video) [HD]

I remember being freaked out by the trailers on TV for Pet Sematary when I was a kid. I would have been 10 or 11 when it was being advertised and we had always had cats, so the image of Church, back from the dead and now evil, was just really disturbing for me – a mix of sad and wrong and scary that got under my skin. Many years later, I finally read the book and was struck with how ultimately mournful it all is, far more than scary. And yet, for the 1989 film, the Ramones contributed this upbeat anthemic rocker with downbeat lyrics (I don’t wanna be buried in a pet sematary – I don’t want to live my life again) for the end credits, and it’s hard not to bop your head when you hear it.

Tonight (We’ll Make Love Until We Die) – SSQ (1985): The Return of the Living Dead

SSQ - Tonight (We'll Make Love Until We Die)

It’s honestly difficult to pick just one song from this soundtrack, but in the end, I think this might be my favorite of them. It’s got a great sound, it is clearly for exactly this film with lyrics about rising from earth beds, smells gone sweetly rancid, and dancing among the dead, and it is the tune that plays during the iconic cemetery striptease that Trash (Linnea Quigley) performs right after voicing her fantasy about being eaten by old men and shortly before becoming zombified herself. How could I choose anything else?

Come to Me – Brad Fiedel (1985):  Fright Night

Fright Night Soundtrack - Come To Me

An instrumental version of this song is used as the vampire seduction theme throughout both Fright Night and its sequel, but on the soundtrack album, words were added to make more of a pop tune out of it. Either way, it is a sultry, cool, evocative piece – utterly appropriate for apple eating, chunky knit sweater wearing vampires to beguile beautiful women to. And it’s a perfect accompaniment to Fright Night’s brand of good old fashioned vampire story meets modernity (ala 1985).  

Cat People (Putting Out Fire With Gasoline) – David Bowie (1982): Cat People

David Bowie Cat People Putting Out Fire Music Video HQ

Another song that has a different version on the album and in the film.  On Bowie’s Let’s Dance album, the song is sped up to be, I guess, more danceable (yes, let’s), and it’s fine. But the version made for the film with its slowed down intro is just so rich, with a gorgeous building tension that just explodes when it kicks into gear. Since Cat People (an interesting and enjoyable, and very 80s remake of the classic Val Lewton original), it’s been featured on a few other soundtracks. Notably, Tarantino put it to really good use in Inglourious Basterds, but its steamy quality just pairs so well with the sweaty, New Orleans set, sex obsessed film for which it was named.

I Still Believe – Tim Cappello (1987): The Lost Boys

The Lost Boys - Soundtrack - I Still Believe - By Tim Cappello -

Ok, I’m breaking my own rule here. This wasn’t actually written for the movie. Apparently, the version in the film is a cover of a song by The Call, but Cappello did record this to be on the soundtrack. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Cappello’s appearance in the film, performing this song, surrounded by fire, oiled up and swinging his sax around, is just perfect: exuberant, cheesy, over the top, totally earnest, and unapologetically passionate and joyful. It sets the tone for Santa Carla night life youth culture—everyone there is really having a fantastically amazing time (so much life) and amidst the hubbub, Michael and Star lock eyes. Their actual romance may feel tacked on (fueling those who claim the stronger connection is between Michael and David), but in this moment, the connection feels magical.

He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask) – Alice Cooper (1986): Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Alice Cooper - (He's Back) The Man Behind the Mask

Alice Cooper has at least three songs on the soundtrack of Jason Lives, but this is the only one that is really directly about the movie, or at least its titular killer. This is possibly the silliest of the Friday movies, and this celebratory ode to Jason fits in with it just great. Past that, it’s just a love letter to the whole slasher formula: kids fooling around in the woods, or out on lovers’ lake, and running into homicidal trouble in the form of a masked psychopath. It doesn’t feel like a horror movie exactly, but in some way, it can scratch the itch.

Maniac – Dennis Matkosky and Michael Sembello (1983): Flashdance / Maniac

Ok, this is a pretty odd inclusion. But it comes with a story. So apparently Matkosky had heard about some serial killer and it inspired him to start writing. Once begun, he and Sembello came upon William Lustig’s effectively gruesome 1980 horror film Maniac, and it gave them fuel to round out the rest of the lyrics with gems such as:

He’s a Maniac. He just moved in next door.

He’ll kill your cat and nail it to the floor.

(Though, to be fair, nothing like that actually happens in Maniac)

Somehow it got on the radar of Flashdance’s director, Adrian Lyne who requested they change the lyrics to be more about a girl who’s dancing and less about a serial killer involved in feline carpentry, and it became the MTV hit that everybody knows, but it all started with something pretty dark and playful. So I’ll leave you with that.

And that’s it for now. Maybe some other time, I’ll dig into some scores that I think stand out, but for now, I hope this helps enliven your summer months…

The Eyes Have It

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So, I missed a week there. Sometimes life gets busy and it is simply not possible to keep up with my self-imposed weekly schedule. But it was for a cool (though entirely non-horror related) reason.  The cabaret I work with in Kraków, Poland had an opportunity to give a few performances in Lyon, France last weekend, which was intense, exhausting, rewarding and more than a little time consuming (17 hours of driving each way to transport costumes and some small scenic elements). And so, I thought I would honor my little French sojourn by rewatching something French, Georges Franju’s stunning, poetic, and shockingly gory for 1960, Les yeux sans visage, A.K.A., Eyes Without a Face.  

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

But here’s the thing. I really loved this movie when I first watched it a few years back, but three days after returning from France, I hopped on a plane to the States to come help my family prepare their summer show, and so I ended up revisiting Eyes Without a Face on my phone on the plane, exhausted, with limited cognitive abilities. It was far from an ideal viewing situation. And now, I find myself jet lagged and struggling to come up with anything particularly incisive to write about it. So I’ll keep this short.

Apparently, Franju, who had won acclaim as a documentarian and puzzled/disappointed French critics with this transition to a genre film, had to navigate some choppy seas to appease various censors in adapting the novel by Jean Redon. To satisfy the French, the gore had to be curtailed. To satisfy the English, scenes of experiments on animals had to be greatly reduced, and oddly, to satisfy the Germans, the key element of a “mad doctor” had to be softened. One solution Franju struck upon was to center the film more on Christiane, the daughter whose face had been so disfigured in an accident rather than her father, Dr. Génessier, a surgeon obsessed with perfecting the skin graft that will allow him to give her a new one, stolen from one of the girls he and his assistant periodically kidnap and murder. In focusing on Christiane, the film adopts a haunted, sorrowful tone, dwelling more on her lonely, doomed life as a caged bird, than on the extremities of her controlling father, so driven to fix her, to perfect her, who after afixing a stolen face, instructs her to “Smile. Smile! Not too much…”

The result is a sometimes jarring, often wistful, haunting little masterpiece, which reportedly shocked audiences upon release. While the most gory elements may have been omitted, the surgery scene in which a girl’s face is cut off is rather effectively gross, multiple scenes of Dr. Génessier’s assistant, Louise luring some girl to her doom are quite disturbing, and some sequences, such as a girl awakening to find herself strapped to a table, prepped for unwilling surgery (not to mention the other girl who awakens to find herself faceless and wrapped in gauze), or the father being eaten by the dogs on which he had been testing his new skin graft techniques, are respectively terrifying and brutal.

The cinematography is gorgeous, the music is odd, and unsettling (notably the mad, circus like soundscape that accompanies Louise when she’s hunting for a new girl or disposing of a body), and the imagery is truly indelible. Throughout most of the film (except for when a new face has been grafted on, which will inevitably go necrotic and have to be removed, the graft technique not yet perfected), Christiane wears a featureless mask, granting her a seeming gentle peacefulness so unlike the sorrow that fills her. The mask itself, in its simplicity, is striking and was even apparently an inspiration for the original Michael Meyers mask in Halloween. It is beautiful in its way, but it is also a cruel imposition, denying her own identity, her own experience and pain.

Frequently, she removes it, only to be told time and time again that she must develop the habit of wearing it always. She is not allowed to feel her sadness. She is not allowed to be her disfigured self (perhaps because her father was responsible for her state, as he had been driving and caused the accident with his recklessness – if her deformity is unseen, he has done no wrong), and her father’s attempts to heal her would actually result in her ultimate disappearance; another girl has been buried in her place – she is dead to the world – if the surgery is finally successful, she would have another person’s face, would have to accept a new name, would have to take on a new identity, merely the creation of her father, her own self lost to the process.

In the end, faced with yet another poor girl strapped to a table, Christiane opts to free her, herself, and all the animals her father keeps as pets/decorations/experimental subjects. The dogs escape and tear him apart and, adorned with white doves and faceless, Christiane slips off into the night, finally free and alone, and herself. It is lovely, and sad, and it lingers in the memory. And yet, for all its poetic beauty, the film was derided across Europe and particularly in France. I can’t imagine it was all that well received in the States, where, among other things, the key facial removal scene was excised, and yet it was marketed under the B-movie title, The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and packaged as a double feature with a two-headed creature feature called The Manster. French critics were appalled at the crass horror of it all, and I imagine that American audiences who went to the drive in for some schlocky fun were nonplussed by the tender, artful misery on display – for lack of a better word, its Frenchness.

But it really is something special.  My brain is running low at this point, so I don’t know that I have anything more illuminating to add, but if you haven’t seen this, I recommend giving it a chance. Eat some cheese, drink some wine, and watch the classiest face stealing movie you’re ever likely to come across.

Bon apetit…