Polish Horror Series # 1 – Wilczyca

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So, back in 2008, I relocated to Poland.  I’d been living in Chicago for the previous 7 years and felt the need to shake things up.  My background being in the theatre, my only real association with Poland had been due to some theatre artists, largely already dead, who had made a deep impression on me and I just had the general sense that this might be someplace with interesting art and theatre and culture, so I signed up for a course in teaching English as a foreign language, bought a one way ticket, and took off. It wasn’t long before I met the woman who would later become my wife and found myself ensconced in my new life here.

Being a horror fan, I’d been very interested to sample the local fares in that domain. The only problem is that there aren’t many of them, and those that exist are a) hard to find and/or b) lacking English subtitles. (My Polish is passable in some contexts, but it should be better…) So, I was really happy to see that along with the excellent folk horror documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which recently came to Shudder, there are two therein referenced Polish films (also included in Severin film’s box set, All the Haunts be Ours): Wilczyca and Lokis, Rekopis profesora Wittembacha.  Wilczyca had long been on my radar but I hadn’t been able to find it anywhere, so I was really happy to finally have a chance to check it out over the weekend.

And with that, I’d like to start a recurring series here on ye ol’ blog.  Of the really-not-many Polish horror films in existence, there are a few that I’d long ago given up on tracking down. I think that, as I’m not planning on moving anytime soon, I should finally dig further into this aspect of local culture and work my way through the limited catalogue (really, there are probably about 30-40 feature films to choose from in total and that includes some pretty cheap, student film looking entries). So, starting with today’s post, I’m going to occasionally highlight a Polish horror (or, more frequently, horror adjacent) flick.  Sometimes that will be a longer text and sometimes, it will be more of a blurb length short review, depending on how much I can say about the given film.  So, without further adieu, let’s get into…

Wilczyca (She-wolf) (1982)

Wintry and atmospheric, this is less the “Polish werewolf movie” that I’d heard tell of, and more a historical drama with folkloric/horror elements. Marek Piestrak’s film is also an interestingly small, and yet effective little picture, showcasing striking cinematography, key concerns of Polish history, and a couple of standout performances; all in all, an odd, sometimes enigmatic, sometimes sexually charged, sometimes outdated-in-terms-of-gender-politics little package.

In short, Kacper Wosiński, a veteran of an early 19th century uprising (from the late 1700s until the end of WWI, Poland was off the map, its territory divvied up between Austria, Prussia, and Russia – during that time there were a number of uprisings, attempting to expel the occupying forces), returns home after a long absence to find his estranged wife, Maryna, dying due to complications from a botched self-performed abortion. On her death bed, she curses him, clutching a wolf’s paw, refuses last rites, and promises to return to haunt him, before finally passing. We don’t have the full story, but from some of his later dialogue, we understand that he had been some charming combination of abusive and neglectful, and her venom feels justified.

His brother insists that a stake be driven through her heart before burial, doing so himself, as Kacper is unable. It is here that we first have a touch of horror. The folklore is not exactly precise – it seems that if not dealt with appropriately, there is the fear that she will rise – as something like a werewolf, or a witch, or a vampire, or something unnamed and undefined, but bad, and vengeful, and powerful. The scene is uncomfortable and effective. Kacper is not exactly sympathetic, but his reluctance to desecrate his wife’s corpse is emotional and the ugliness of the situation is solid. However, perhaps because Kacper couldn’t carry out this responsibility himself, the stake will prove ineffective.

After all this, Kacper leaves his home, never to return and reconnects with his friend Ludwig, a fellow veteran of the uprising who now has to flee the Viennese partition into Prussia, presumably due to revolutionary activities (apparently in the novel on which this is based, he was fleeing the Russian authorities, but as Poland was still under Communism at the time of filming, they had to change the bad guys to Austrians).  After helping his friend to the border, and possibly seeing his dead wife/wolf/just-the-wind-and-fog at the crossroads, he returns to Ludwig’s estate to look after it for him and, in terms of Ludwig’s own young wife, Julia, to “protect his honor,” a task which he rather fails at as she immediately takes up with an old flame, Otto, a Viennese officer.

And here, we get to the heart of the movie, for Julia so closely reflects and even directly resembles Maryna (in fact, they are both played by Iwona Bielska, who is pretty stellar in the dual roles) that he comes to feel that she is possessed by the spirit of his wicked spouse, becoming a wolf at night, taunting him, haunting him, and possibly eating his beloved dogs (a warning: there is a scene with a wounded dog that looked concerningly realistic—I don’t know what filming practices were at the time, but I really hope it was ok).

For her part, Bielska is an absolute treat. While the film is not necessarily good to its two female characters (I’m not sure exactly how to read things, but I suspect we’re supposed to be on Kacper’s side, but are we, really?), she is gloriously villainous and deliciously cruel, with a spark of wicked intelligence twinkling in her eyes.  Her performance really is quite magnetic – sensual, playful, and often kinkily evil (a nigh vampiric flashback of her lustily feasting on the blood of Otto’s wounded hand after a wolf bite comes to mind). There was even a surprising queer note as she is first introduced in an intimate moment with her maid (to be fair, it’s not exactly very positive representation, as it is perhaps meant to portray her selfish hedonism—but it was still a surprising inclusion).

Anyway, Kacper becomes convinced that she must be dealt with, being his responsibility twice over, and silver bullets in hand, he moves to do so, driving the film towards an unanticipatedly bloody climax.

As may already be clear, I’m not entirely sure what to make of this film, or how to read it. Is it a straightforward, folk-influenced historical drama about a man set upon by dark forces, rising to repel them? Is it a more complex story of that same man forced to reckon with the consequences of his own bad actions? Is Julia possessed by Kacper’s dead wife and definitely an evil supernatural entity (it seems clear that she is the “she-wolf,” but her taste for blood play that we see in the flashback with Otto certainly pre-dates Maryna’s death)? Are we supposed to read the two female characters as (however alluring and compelling) essentially wicked antagonists and cheer Kacper’s actions or are we to doubt his convictions and dread violence being done to Julia as Kacper is triggered by her infidelity reflecting that of his former wife?  

Are the characters even really people or is it all perhaps allegorical? When Ludwig has to leave, Julia expresses frustration that his “patriotic” activities occupy him so much – do the women represent some natural, self-centered national impulse, focused on the body and sensual pleasure, which does not support and thus, undercuts attempts at revolution? Or is it possible that this is actually critical of those partisans who, in heady patriotic fervor, neglect the self, family, and actual people, as opposed to ideals? The film has a flavor of allegory, even if these readings are not intended, and the degree to which these questions abound, left it lingering in my mind.

All in all, this was an interesting watch, what these days would be called a ‘slow burn’ – rich in atmosphere and performances, sparse in terms of plot, drawing on a strong sense of place and history and character. It is only vaguely a “horror” movie, but it does have enough elements to be included: the staking scene, the appearance of Maryna (somewhat zombified) at the crossroads, the suggestion of the supernatural in terms of Julia, and her knowing, animalistic villainy.  It’s never in a hurry to get anywhere, but I found it totally watchable throughout.

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So, that’s the first of these.  I won’t be doing one every week, but in the coming months, I’d like to return to this series periodically and both write about the other Polish horror films I’ve seen and search out some more that are new to me. Hey – if you happen to be Polish and have a suggestion of something I should look for, please drop a line!

The Masochism of Horror Viewership

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Horror has to be one of the most maligned genres.  While not everyone may like Romantic Comedies or Musicals or War Movies, I think it would be rare to hear a fan of these genres asked, “Why do you watch that awful stuff?” or told, “I’m surprised you watch these movies – you’re such a nice person.” It’s obvious that, going back many decades at least, there is an assumption of Sadism – of pleasure taken in (watching) the suffering of others. While I can’t deny the presence of that tendency (of course, there are moments when many a horror fan thrills at an “awesome kill”), I think the act of viewing this material is much more complicated, often rooted, in fact, in the opposite—in a kind of Masochism.

Why watch a horror film, after all, if you don’t want to be scared, or disgusted, or disturbed, or somehow assaulted (all typically negative experiences)? I think we often watch in order to be on the receiving end of the harm (in a safe way that leaves no marks). We want the intensity of that experience, to undergo that trial.

And I’m not alone in this view.  Carol J. Clover is most famous as a horror academic for coining the term “final girl” in her discussion of the Slasher subgenre, but I feel her actual focus in Men, Women, and Chainsaws is rather a question of identification on the part of the horror audience, often in terms of gender; while horror viewers (generally thought to overwhelmingly be male) are often assumed to identify with the killer, stalking and murdering young women with sharp phallic objects in an obvious sexual metaphor, she observed and theorized about those same male viewers rather identifying with (or fluidly shifting identification between the killer and the) “final girl,” both masochistically sharing her suffering and vicariously sharing in her violent victory.

And so if there is a kind of masochism to viewership, to what does it extend? Only to being startled or disgusted, or might it also include being criticized—morally or ethically interrogated? Do we just want to have a fun roller coaster scare ride, or do we appreciate when a film maker really sets out to give us a hard time, implying that perhaps we should question our enjoyment of this content, even perhaps directly trying to give us a bad, frustrating, unsatisfactory experience to make a point? Is that something we can value in a film, or do we just get tired of feeling scolded? Of course mileage may vary, but with that question in mind, I’d like to look at three films that I feel, in some way criticize the genre, and to varying degrees the viewer: Funny Games (2007), Berberian Sound Studio (2012), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012). All will be discussed in detail, so if you want to avoid spoilers, I recommend watching them first.

Funny Games (2007)

Michael Haneke’s scene by scene English language remake of his own German language 1997 original is a direct provocation of the viewer. While it sets up a very effective, dread filled, brutal home invasion thriller, it subverts audience expectations at every turn, purposely frustrating the viewer, questioning point blank if this violence is what the viewer actually desires, and, by implication, also asking why?

A family comes to their summer house for a vacation. Once there, they are intimidated, put upon, and ultimately held hostage, tortured, and killed by a pair of polite young men, dressed for golf, one of whom periodically breaks the fourth wall, implicating the audience in their “funny games.” It is a kind of Brechtian spin on Straw Dogs, regularly breaking the flow of the narrative to address the viewer’s desires.  Interestingly for a piece this uncomfortable and frequently brutal, the film refuses to show any actual violence.  Everything happens when the camera is looking the other way. Most strikingly, during a scene in which a young boy is killed with a shotgun, the camera has followed the other killer into the kitchen to watch him fix himself a sandwich. 

This is followed by the killers leaving the man and woman tied up and broken, with their dead son in the corner. The camera is now unflinchingly still (it doesn’t cut and barely moves for about 9 minutes) as we sit with them in their grief and pain.  Furthermore, the pace of the whole film now slows down as we watch them attempt to get away and get help. The killers aren’t seen again for almost a whole hour and I feel that we are meant to want them back just so that something will happen. We should be frustrated and bored, and therefore criticized for sadistically wanting to instead see more pain.

When they do return, once again tormenting the couple, one of the young men, Paul, asks us “Do you think it’s enough? I mean, you want a real ending, right? With plausible plot development, don’t you?” For a short moment, we are given that as the wife gets ahold of the gun and shoots Peter, the other tormentor.  This is the satisfying moment of vengeance we’ve been waiting for, we’ve been set up to expect, and it’s the only on screen violence in the whole film, but it is immediately stolen away as Paul picks up the TV remote and rewinds the film. The scene plays out again, but she does not get to rise and revenge. Her husband is killed and later, so is she. The young men go on to the next house.

One may wonder why I’ve chosen this version and not the original to discuss and it is because I feel this one is even more pointed at me, at an American Horror/Thriller/Violent Film viewer.  As I understand it, the reason Haneke remade his own film in English was that he felt the original had been seen and appreciated by European film critics but that it had really missed its true target audience and that those people wouldn’t watch a movie with subtitles. His intention was to poke at me, or viewers like me – to criticize the fact that I/we want to see such violence, expect to see it, are unsatisfied if we don’t see it. 

It is a fascinating, frustrating, savvy, and sometimes intellectually dishonest viewing experience (which is rather the point) – a provocation on American popular culture, violent visual entertainment, and even the very idea of narrative cinema itself, in its inherent manipulation. It is a film you choose to subject yourself to.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Though I just wrote about Peter Strickland’s somewhat-tribute to stylish Italian Horror a week ago, I’ve been wanting to dig more deeply into it for quite a while now. On one level, it is the total opposite of a movie like Funny Games, richly enveloping the viewer in a thoroughly non-cerebral, surreal, sensual, nigh-hypnotic experience. But it does share some elements with the former film.

The most obvious of these is that once again, we do not see a single shot of violence throughout the entire run time. And really, no violence actually takes place.  This is the story of a very English sound engineer, Gilderoy, who comes to Italy to work on a horror film.  Nothing violent happens outside of that film – which we never see. But we do hear it, and even if we see how these sounds are being produced (largely in the mutilation of fruit and vegetables and the obsessive twiddling of dials and knobs), those sounds are quite disturbing.

Secondly, I feel that while it, to some extent, celebrates the style and creativity of Italian Horror of the 70s, I also feel that the film shares some of its protagonist’s unease with the subject matter.  The story is all about his discomfort – in Italy, working with this horrific material, necessarily getting caught up imaginatively in the audio performance of mutilations and violations, feeling pulled into something he does not like, his life and his art and himself all blurring together in a nightmarish manner.  In one scene, as he rips radish roots to create the sound of a witch’s hair being torn out you can see a flash of sadistic pleasure on his face as he destroys the vegetables, immediately followed by revulsion, by guilt.

And my feeling was that the film was there with him, sharing in this complex of reactions. His journey is our journey. We never see these horrors, but we do imagine them, enjoy them (the film truly deals in sensory pleasure), and find them distasteful, by virtue of experiencing them through his eyes, his ears, his hands (as they stab a cabbage or crush a melon).  

And while we are given mouthpieces to defend the film under creation, they come off (I suspect intentionally) poorly. In one scene, Santini, the film’s director, who refuses the title “horror” for his work, responds to Gilderoy’s objections: “I hate what was done to these beautiful women, but it is my duty to show. The world must know the truth and see the truth. I hate it.”  In the moment, he sounds so disingenuous and pretentious, just bald-faced placation of a worker to achieve the needed labor.

By the end, the film goes to some truly odd places, but among them, we are given a scene in which Gilderoy effectively tortures a voice actor, subjecting her to deafening awful sounds in order to eke out her requisite screams. Ultimately, she gives him what he wants before she storms off and he is left to reckon with his own cruelty and monstrosity. We are left to sit with his horror of himself, with our horror of our own pleasures.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Of these three films, this is the only one I’ve watched multiple times, but it is no less trenchant a criticism of horror fandom. Described by co-screenwriter, Joss Whedon, as “a loving hate letter to the horror genre,” it is both a joyous jubilee of horror elements, monsters, and icons, and a direct judgement of what our enjoyment of these films consists in.

Simply described, we follow a group of young people who go to the eponymous cabin in the woods for a weekend of partying as they are manipulated into embodying certain stereotypical horror characters – the slut, the jock, the stoner, the virgin, etc., so they can be killed by monsters of their inadvertent choosing, all as a part of a ritual, orchestrated by a well-organized and well-heeled team in a subterranean control room in order to placate ancient evil gods, thus stopping them from awakening and destroying humanity.  

Time and time again, we see how these young people are not the stereotypes they are set up to be, but how they are being made into them. One otherwise perfectly intelligent young woman who has recently dyed her hair is drugged by that hair dye, such that she becomes the ditzy blonde who takes her top off and dies first.  The sensible young man, studying sociology on a full academic scholarship is similarly drugged to become more aggressive, to be an ‘alpha-male asshole.’

Time after time, we see how they would make sensible decisions but that they are manipulated to instead carry out the tropes of a (certain kind of) horror film. After stabbing an undead threat, an electrical charge is emitted from a knife, causing a girl to drop it (why else would she?); just when everyone should stay together and explore the house, gas is released so that they instead split up.  At every turn, things are made to play out in the most rote, expected, sometimes stupid ways.

This is perhaps most explicit in the sex scene that precedes the first murder of the film.  A boy and a girl have gone outside to fool around, but she’s cold and it’s too dark. We cut to the control room, where a group of men are all watching eagerly, waiting for her to undress. They increase the temperature, turn up the moonlight, and release pheromones into the air around the young couple.  Moments later, she straddles her partner, takes off her shirt and is soon after stabbed through the hand before being caught by a bear trap and finally beheaded.

It is here that we have a key moment of dialogue. A security officer, new to the job and uncomfortable with the sleazy eagerness of the men around him, questions if it is really important that they all see her naked. The two men running the show respond, “We’re not the only ones watching, Truman.” “Gotta keep the customer satisfied. You know what’s at stake here?” This was the moment, when I saw this in the cinema, when I really fell for this film.  Later we learn that it’s all about Lovecraftian Great Old Ones, but in that moment, it felt like WE, the viewers, were the real monster—we are who must be satisfied. And we will only be satisfied by gratuitous sex and violence.

This is often described as a horror-comedy, satirizing the tropes of modern horror films, but I really think it goes farther in criticizing us for wanting these tropes, for wanting to see these things. It directly calls out the sadism of the viewing experience.  Late in the film, Dana, the assigned final girl realizes that “They don’t just want to see us killed. They want to see us punished” for being young, for being sexual, for having fun. In this, we have a direct criticism of the much discussed Reagan-era slasher formula of Sex = Death. And we are criticized for wanting to see it, for wanting to see it play out in a certain specific way and in a certain specific order. It is a key plot point that the “virgin” has to be the last one standing – that everyone else must die before her and while she may live, first she must suffer.  And it is our fault, because it is what we want to see.

There have been plenty of other satirically knowing horror films that have a laugh at the expense of the common tropes: Behind the Mask, Scream, Jason X, the list could go on and on. But I think this one really calls us, the viewers, to task, all while also delivering a flick that is really (unlike Haneke’s) terrifically fun, and celebratory of the many elements of horror that we, the viewers, so love (what fan hasn’t paused to see all of the monsters listed on the big board when they are betting, or also paused during the gleeful ‘system purge’ scene to identify the inspiration for all the monsters on parade?). We are generally given what we want, but we’re also scolded for it.

How We See this Criticism

So here is the tricky part: if these movies all attack us the viewer as I’ve described, how do we feel about it? How do we take this in? How do we respond? Without some large questionnaire, it is impossible for me to really speak for the whole of horror fandom, but I have done a cursory survey of viewer reviews online (google and rotten tomatoes) of these three and it is noteworthy for me that I rarely see this criticism concretely addressed.

When Funny Games is liked, it is often for being a successful, scary, brutal thriller, and sometimes for its media criticism. When it is disliked, it is often because the pace slows down in the second half and it’s boring, or the characters are unlikeable, or that it doesn’t have a happier ending.

When Berberian Sound Studio is liked, it is often because it is beautiful, atmospheric, imaginative, disturbing, and/or unsettling. When it is disliked, it is because it is boring, weird, too artsy, or pretentious.

When The Cabin in the Woods is liked, it is because it is successful as a comedy-satire, because someone appreciates the inclusion of ‘Great Old Ones,’ or because someone enjoys the fan favorite elements of spot-the-horror-reference.  When it is disliked, it is because it isn’t scary, it isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, or seemingly because someone didn’t really get the point at all and they are complaining about the “clichés.”

Ok, a quantitative literature review, this is not. But these are the general trends I’ve seen and I find it interesting that I never really see backlash (or appreciation, for that matter) to the sense of being judged as a viewer (maybe occasionally with Haneke, but I feel I’ve seen that mostly from critics rather than viewers). All three have their admirers and detractors, but I haven’t really seen signs of viewers taking it personally.  Perhaps this indicates that the critique is generally accepted (negative results still constitute useful data) but I have no reason to believe that to be true. Still, I am left to wonder if I am receiving them differently than others. Am I just projecting my own sometime ambivalence?  Should I investigate my own response further?

Speaking Only for Myself

I suppose at the end of the day, I do take the critique; sometimes it’s earned, and I feel generally ok about that.  I think that human beings are vastly complex beasts and we all have dark little imps to feed. Sometimes, we do enjoy the suffering of others (and there is nothing wrong about indulging this in a way that doesn’t actually harm anyone – horror fiction is one method, but I also know a guy who likes to read about mountain climbers because their ordeals make him feel better about his life), and sometimes we want to get a bit (or more) battered ourselves.  If at the end of a film, I feel exhausted, wrung out, like I’ve got nothing left, I’m probably pretty satisfied, even if the experience was unpleasant.

As a fan of horror, I take in a lot of this content and I know I occasionally get inured to it. For my part, I don’t feel it de-sensitizes me to real life suffering, but when you partake in a lot of a certain kind of fiction, it’s easy to do so from a remove, like a worker in a control room, just monitoring knobs, waiting for something out of the ordinary to happen, but otherwise, even a bit bored. And I don’t feel it’s beyond the pale for someone, the artist making the work that I’m watching, to call me out and inquire if that is actually as it should be—if I feel good about that, and sometimes I do not.

I want to see beautiful things and perceive that beauty. Similarly, when I view the horrific, I want to be horrified.  Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of that, to try to approach work with fresh eyes, to be open to the experience – to be open to critique and take what’s coming to you.

Top Ten Movies of 2021

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Alright – here we are, having survived the trials and tribulations of the holidays and thankfully back to the grind of “regular” life. I had a little bit of a longer break between my last post and this, but sometimes life happens and that just can’t be avoided. Well, as we kick off a new year, whatever that means, it is often popular to do a retrospective on the last. All over the horror groups I follow on Facebook, people have been posting their lists of their favorite (or most hated) films of this last year, and it has really brought into stark contrast for me how few new movies I watch.  Out of the 104 horror movies I watched last year, only eight were actually released in 2021 and three of those were the Fear Street trilogy, so I can’t feasibly do a top ten. I guess I just don’t have my finger on that particular pulse.

But I can create a list of my favorite first-time-watches of the year, the films that were new for me.  And with one caveat, that is just what I will do. My one additional rule is that I’m not going to include anything on my list that I’ve already written about it on this blog, so with a shout out to the previously detailed Dark Night of the Scarecrow, The Unknown, Jakob’s Wife, and His House, among others, here, in the order I watched them, is my…

Top Ten Movies I Watched Last Year That I Haven’t Written About Yet

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

Where had this movie been all my life?  Ken Russell’s take on the Bram Stoker tale is a glorious mix of ridiculous B-movie monster flick, art house pretensions, over-the-top camp, and unsettling, grotesque horror. Where else can you see a very young Peter Capaldi heroically playing the bagpipes while chasing long toothed police officers, psychedelic visions, that could have been at home in The Devils, of Jesus being attacked by a giant serpent puppet, naked snake ladies slithering out of baskets, and a mongoose released from a surprisingly spacious sporran? Really, this one has it all.  Seriously, it’s a weird flick, but really fun, absurd, and somehow even a bit successful as a horror movie.  I wish I remembered more details now, but its oddness defies lucid description and I think I’ll have to watch it again pretty soon.

Orphan (2009)

I hadn’t given this one a second thought when it came out. Somehow it looked like a rote, jump scare filled evil kid movie and it didn’t call out to me. It’s only thanks to a student of mine having watched it last year and singing its praises that I deigned to give it a chance and I’m so glad I did. To be fair, it is filled with jump scares and features an evil kid, but it’s anything but rote. Rather, it is deliciously excessive and delightfully sleazy, while featuring solid, impressive, earnest performances which somehow ground the whole affair.  Vera Farmiga as the grieving mother starts the film off with a real emotional bang and Isabelle Furman, who was only 10 years old at the time of filming, is just amazing as the eponymous malevolent orphan, Esther – the kind of villain it’s hard not to side with as she is, while certainly evil, threatening, and unnecessarily cruel, also pretty damn awesome.   No plot details as this one has twists and turns aplenty and could easily be spoiled, but I strongly recommend it.

The Woman (2011)

Far from subtle, this parable of gender dynamics and patriarchal violence from Lucky McKee, is surprisingly effective.  The permutations of its plot rarely surprise, but in its moment to moment, darkly comic and frequently quite ugly presentation of the horrors of complicity, of the psychological underpinnings of reified cycles of abuse, this film manages to be totally exploitative while yielding actual emotional and social depth, before building to a satisfyingly bloody climax of great comeuppance. It’s followed by the 2019 film, Darlin’, which could be a runner up to this list. It is sometimes funny, often uncomfortable, and frequently horrific; plus, it ends on an upliftingly violent note.

Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

I had always thought that I’d seen this.  It just seemed like something I would have rented as a kid or early teen, but when I sat down to watch this last spring, I was happy to discover something utterly new to me and so, so, so very weird. Nicolas Cage delivers maximum Cage in this story of a really horrible late-eighties ur-yuppie (who could give Patrick Bateman a run for his money in a surprisingly similar story) who is either in the process of becoming a vampire or is just going round the bend. Maybe both are true – it’s hard to say, but regardless of how you read it, it does feature a Cage performance for the ages – jumping on the sofa while shouting the alphabet at his beleaguered therapist, shoving cheap joke store fangs in his mouth and running around shouting “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire,” just fully capturing, in a non-naturalistic, but no less effective manner, a man’s sanity snapping quite in half.  It’s hard to know what to make of it sometimes.  Things that seem intended as comedy sometimes feel sad, while moments of pathos deliver laughs. It’s a really unique, kind of great, little movie.

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

When I was a kid, I loved the 1986 musical Little Shop of Horrors. I played the soundtrack cassette to death, and later, once my family got a VCR, the VHS. And I remember at some point finding in a discount bin the original Roger Corman film.  I brought it home and just found it unwatchable, so different was this black and white Borsch Belt cheapie from the colorful, tuneful version I adored.  Thus, I am so glad that I gave it another chance this summer.  What a fun, odd, idiosyncratic picture.  Apparently shot in two days and one night on a leftover set, Corman’s creation really holds up as a blackly comic monster movie. I wasn’t ready to appreciate it as a kid, but this time, I found it captivating and really quite funny. Don’t feed the plants.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

I’d been meaning to check this out since hearing an interview about it with its star, Toby Jones, when first released, and I don’t know what took me so long.  This tale (from Peter Strickland – who later did In Fabric) of a soft spoken, gentle, terribly English sound engineer brought down to Italy to lend his services to an Italian horror production of some Fulci-esque violent supernatural gore fest goes to some pretty heady, wild places.  We see how appalled he is with the subject matter of his work, and follow him into a weird blurring of realities where film and life bleed into one another. By the end, I’m not even sure where we ended up, but it was a rich, peculiar, sometimes unsettling ride the whole way there.  I’m sure I’m going to revisit this and maybe write further about it in these pages before too long. In the meantime, I strongly suggest grappling with this exploration of the inherent ugliness of horror, featuring some of the grossest fruit mutilations I’ve seen (that’s foley work for you).

The Lodger, a Story of the London Fog (1927)

Hitchcock’s third feature film, he reportedly described it as the first wherein he felt he had found himself as a filmmaker. This late silent era thriller is a genuinely exciting, expressionistic, and atmospheric Jack the Ripper inspired tale of murder, suspicion, threat, and revenge. A mysterious man comes to a lodging house during a spate of serial killings in foggy, spooky London. He’s got some odd hang ups about the paintings of blonde women filling his rented room and, well, all of the victims have been blonde girls (Hitchcock had “found his style”). Could he be the killer? Is the landlady’s daughter in danger? Is the local police inspector a really pushy and somehow oblivious creep? Is anything even certain by the end or are we still in doubt? This is streaming free on Youtube and is well worth the time.

Spontaneous (2020)

This blackly comic and equally tragic film featuring high schoolers inexplicably exploding was obviously made about school shootings (kids running through school hallways before a bang is heard, blood is spattered, and more young people have to reckon with horrible, senseless loss beyond understanding), but being released in 2020, and featuring quarantines and speedy pharmaceutical trials, it eerily suggested the pandemic as well.  I really liked it, eliciting laughs and tears in roughly equal measure, while leaning into a romantic angle that I was willing to buy. Regardless of which contemporary issue it is mapped onto, its exploration of the mystery and horror of death without hope of explanation or meaning is moving, funny, and occasionally shocking.   

Wounds (2019)

I had heard mostly not-great things about this first foray into English language film from Babak Anvari (of Under the Shadow), but I’m glad that I gave it a try.  This story of a seemingly sociable enough bartender dragged down a rabbit hole of viral video violence, body horror, and nigh-Lovecraftian weirdness before ultimately confronting the absence at his core kind of rattled me.  There are many moments where I’m still not sure what exactly was going on, but it got under my skin, creeped me out, and lingered in my mind well after finishing the viewing.  I get how this would not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was very badly reviewed in general, but I found that it delivered a mature, uncanny, and rewardingly both fleshy and cosmic brand of horror. I’m very curious to check out some of Nathan Ballingrud’s work, the author upon whose story it was based. Added to the basket.

Godzilla (1954)

This is another film I could have sworn I’d seen on some rainy Saturday afternoon in my childhood, but having recently finally seen it, I think I must have only watched later iterations. Wow, for a fifties monster movie, featuring a guy in a rubber suit, this lands with real gravity. But, really, how could it not?  Released in Japan only nine years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and focusing much less on the giant lightning breathing lizard than on the devastation of a civilian population, Godzilla features a threat beyond imagining awoken by nuclear testing and the only scientist who has found a way to stop it, unwilling to do so for fear of a new horrible weapon being unleashed on the world, having been delivered to humans who cannot be trusted with such awful power. And while it was clearly filmed on a budget, the filmmaking is totally effective and the monster can be actually scary—the sound design alone is pretty chilling—but probably nothing disturbs quite so much as the simple image of small children being scanned for radiation.  Just the night before, I had watched the disappointing Godzilla vs. Kong and this was a great antidote – pretty much the opposite movie in every conceivable way, and such a rewarding watch.

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And that was 2021. Ok, there were other things too: an ongoing pandemic, family health concerns, worldwide economic issues, and all sorts of stuff that was not exactly fun. But, these ten movies were bright spots.  I look forward to the new discoveries this next year holds. Happy New Year all!

A Christmas Treat

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Well, it is Christmas time, and with it comes the expectation, sometimes unfulfilled, that we will all gather together with family and friends to share in the warmth of community and close contact.  It’s time to travel home, wherever that might be, to come together with those you most care about. To warm yourself by the fire, or just in the glow of colored lights, while outside the cold and the dark press in. And it is a time for indulgence – to treat yourself to something sweet, something rich, a bit of luxury, with the grey expanse of January and February stretched out before you. Not to oversell it, but today’s film is just such an indulgence—a classic about which I seriously doubt I have something new to offer, but writing something anyway is a gift I give myself. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out before reading as spoilers abound. At the time of writing, I know it’s on Shudder.

Black Christmas (1974)

Bob Clark’s holiday proto-slasher classic (which I’ve previously touched on here) is such a stunning piece of work that it’s shocking to think that it was rather poorly received on release.  It seems that reviewers of the day saw it as nothing more than a sleazy bit of pulp – just a killer picking off sorority girls one by one in grotesque death scenes, just producers cashing in on the juxtaposition of the holiday atmosphere with violence and death. And to be fair, it is all of those things, a paragon of pulpy body count cinema, full of tension, discomfort, and some real scares, but it is also such a deeper film experience, full of life well observed, alternatingly hilarious and tragic and terrifying and horrifying, all in a tightly constructed little package. What a holiday treat!

I think what most stands out about the film is the degree to which its characters are given room to breathe (until they’re not).  There is a lived in quality to the sorority house and in the relationships between the girls who live there. In an early sequence, the camera moves around and within the house, suggesting the perspective of the killer even when it isn’t directly giving us his POV (which it also does), catching glimpses of the young women and the points of connection or conflict between them.  Amidst the warm cacophony of their little pre-Christmas gathering, we overhear fragments of a conversation between Barb (Margot Kidder) and her mother – who it seems she won’t be spending the holiday with – a moment that will have a domino effect for the character throughout the rest of her time in the film, fueling her bitter, angry drunk behavior, but also telling us something of what hides beneath her tough demeanor.

We also get many establishing moments for the other girls, meeting them a bit – the sweet, doomed Clare (Lynne Griffin), saying goodnight to her boyfriend, excited and a bit scared at the prospect of introducing him to her parents; Phyl (Andrea Martin) lovingly embracing her big, shaggy mustachioed boyfriend, who will later make such an impression as a foul-mouthed Santa; all of the girls forcing the house mother, Mrs. Mack (Marian Waldman) to put on the ugly nightgown they’ve bought her before she goes off to find some of the bottles of booze she’s strategically hidden around the house; and significantly, Jess (Olivia Hussey), fielding a call from her problematic boyfriend Peter (Kier Dullea), wherein we start to catch wind of the possible discord between them and of his emotionally abusive tendencies.  Even in the case of some characters who are more roughly sketched out, there are small details, subtleties which help them feel more solid, more present, more real.  These are never disposable teens, waiting to get picked off; they are likeable young women who care about each other, who are sometimes cruel to each other (I’m looking at you, Barb), who have lives and hopes and dreams.

Of course, none of them will make it home for the holiday – none of them will survive at all.  One after another, they are all killed by somebody, a killer who we never really see, and about whom, we never learn a single thing. We don’t know why he’s in this house, or why he kills, what his name is, or what he wants at all.  And that is scary. After each murder, he calls the girls, using what we learn late in the film is another line in the house, and vocally unloads his unhinged psyche.  It is in these phone calls that the film first approaches the horrific.  There is something so threateningly beyond understanding in his psychotic stream of consciousness psycho-dramas; the phone calls feel like a violation, like an assault from the beginning, and it only gets worse. I have heard others wrestle with the text of the calls, trying to glean some sense of his story, but I think it is ultimately futile, and for me, it is so much more satisfying to have such an absence at the center of the action.

There is an interesting comparison to be made here with many other slashers, especially for those that spawned franchises.  Often, even when we don’t know the killer’s true identity, that killer takes focus, occupying the center of the frame. It is often the killer who gets fans. It is often only the killer who returns for the next installment.  This film is the opposite – the girls are the protagonists from start to finish and while the killer intrigues (and we are given at least one significant red herring to suspect), we never learn enough about him to connect to something – he never gets ‘cool.’

Instead, we have a bunch of young women to connect to, to root and fear for, and to lose.   And the film takes their side, though many characters who should do so as well, fail to.  We see all of them navigating inequities and dangers that seem startlingly contemporary (I suppose, highlighting how little progress there has been in some areas): presumptuous romantic partners exhibiting a potential for violence; police officers who don’t take their concerns seriously (such as when Barb reports Clare’s disappearance, but it isn’t until Clare’s boyfriend storms into the station that the police decide to start an investigation); and assumptions that their bodies and what may be growing within their bodies are not their own to make decisions about.

Made one year after Roe v. Wade, it is striking how straightforward the abortion subplot is presented. Jess is pregnant. She doesn’t plan to have the baby. Peter really doesn’t figure into this decision at all.  She has her own life plans, and changing them to satisfy this moody, piano destroying man-child is simply off the table. Interestingly, Clark has said that the film wasn’t attempting to make a political statement, but it is inherent nonetheless.  The intention may have been simply to set up a character who both Jess and the audience could grow suspicious of – someone we’ve seen get angry, even violent, someone who seems out of control, and has a motive, but in taking Jess seriously, and in never making her question or regret her own decision, the film perhaps accidentally stakes out a position concerning bodily autonomy and agency of character. Sadly, while she may overcome Peter’s attempts to control her body, to cancel her will, she is doomed to a more final violation of self, even if we never actually see it happen.

But what we do see, and hear, is so effective.  The movie is just tight as a drum, constantly setting up elements which pay off spectacularly, editing moments together for contrast or build in such effective, riveting sequences.  Of note for me is a short stretch when, while taking part in a search party for a missing child and/or Clare, an unnamed young lady sees something terrible and starts to scream. We see our protagonists start and run in the direction of the sound, but Clare’s father, who has been trying to find his missing daughter, gets there first. We see a look pass over his face – shock and horror –then relief –then sadness, right before the young girl’s mother comes running up, sees her own child, inhales to scream and – we cut to a phone ringing in the sorority house. It’s the killer, who will subject Jess to more of his horrifying psycho-sexual carrying on, having just killed Mrs. Mack. While she’s on the phone, the camera shows so much empty space in the house all around her. He could be anywhere. She is alone. A shadow falls on the stairs that she doesn’t see. Then feet appear and – it’s Peter – not the killer –unless he is –but he’s not –but is he? He’s here to tell her that she will be carrying the baby to term because he has decided that they are getting married and that’s just that (the killer might have been more pleasant). It all takes about two and a half minutes; and it is all so rich with nuance and real sadness and danger and suspense and character. It is a microcosm of the whole film.

I love all kinds of horror movies, but I particularly appreciate when films in which a lot of people die actually make some space for grief, when films filled with terrible things can allow characters to reckon with them, to have regrets, to be human. This is so present in the Barb arc.  Early on in the film, stinging from the conversation with her mother, Barb lashes out at Clare right before she’s killed.  As the film progresses, we see Barb get more and more drunk and inappropriate, sometimes hilariously so, but it also becomes obvious that underneath her prickly exterior, she blames herself. She drove Clare away to who knows where and is responsible for whatever has happened to her.  She lashes out at the others, screaming at them to stop laying this blame at her feet, but I don’t think they ever have. It’s only her own guilt manifested, projected. Finally, Jess puts her to bed to sleep it off, and it’s moving to see the tenderness with which Jess cares for her belligerent, troubled friend. Finally, it is awful when drunk and defenseless, she is stabbed to death in her bed with a crystal unicorn as carolers sing downstairs, covering her screams. Again, we have a feast of character and suspense and deeply felt emotion and terror.

I could go on endlessly, describing other well-constructed and brilliantly acted sequences, other well observed nuanced life details (I love that Claude the cat jumps up on the lap of poor, dead Clare and starts licking the plastic bag on her face that suffocated her – because sometimes cats lick plastic – it’s just a weird thing they do—maybe Bob Clark’s cat did), but it probably serves the movie better, would serve you the reader better to just go watch it again (I really hope no one is reading this first –too late now, I suppose). It’s Christmas. Treat yourself.

Also, in the spirit of the season, take care of yourselves out there.  May your coming year be free of psychos in the attic shouting obscenities at you on the phone!