Awakening on a Cold December Day

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I don’t know how December is treating you, but here, it has been grey and dark and cold and misty. Plus, the air quality is bad enough that the government is sending everyone text messages that they should just stay home and watch ghost stories. Ok, well, the first part of that was true. But yeah, nothing suits a grey December quite like a somber story of ghosts and loss and buried trauma. This is one of those.

The Awakening (2012)

In no ways revolutionary, but capably constructed and carried out, Nick Murphy’s classic ghost story (which he wrote and directed) makes good use of its post war Britain setting, a small, likable cast, and a few good, creepy set pieces.  It may not hold up as a masterpiece for the ages and was not terribly well received upon release, but watched in a dark room on a rainy day, it offers a few chills, some charm, and a tidy, affecting payoff.

Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is a paranormal investigator in 1921 London, specializing in disproving occult mumbo jumbo but, racked by her own losses (her parents when she was quite young, a lover during the war), apparently desperate to be proved wrong. She’s approached by Robert Mallory (Dominic West), a teacher at a boarding school in the country where a boy has just died, possibly due to the ghost long said to roam the halls, a private home until 20 years prior. After some convincing, she ventures off to the old house to put this haunting to the test.

After unpacking a prodigious amount of scientific equipment, laying traps for any troublemakers attempting to simulate a spirit, and actually undergoing a few eerie encounters, she makes quick work of it, both identifying some children that had been bullying the dead boy and trying to scare her and the teacher who, shattered by his time in battle and desperate to toughen his charges to survive the horror he has witnessed, had left the boy out in the cold where it seems he died of an asthma attack. No ghosts—just boys being boys and men being incapable of processing emotion in an ethical fashion.

The supernatural disproven just in time for half-term, all the boys but one, who seems to be an orphan, go home, no longer terrified to return after the break.  Florence makes ready to leave as well when she sees the apparition of a young boy and decides to stay on to determine what exactly is afoot.  This leaves only her, the head housekeeper, Maud (Imelda Staunton), the orphan boy, Tom (Isaac Hempstead Wright—Bran of Game of Thrones), Mallory, and a bitter groundskeeper, Edward Judd (Joseph Mawle) on the grounds of the ominous manor.

Florence redoubles her efforts, shaken by what she has seen but somehow drawn in personally. She strikes up a friendship with Tom and Maud, a romance with Mallory, is assaulted by Judd, and is beset upon by creepy, musical rabbit headed dolls, spooky doll houses tailor made to unsettle, ghostly hands rising from the pond in front of the house, and the vision of an angry man shooting at her with a rifle.

This is not to mention the fact that some other characters just seem off.  Before becoming violent, Judd already strikes one as a danger, and the otherwise gentle Mallory is heard shouting at someone unseen whenever he is alone.  This house is not a happy place.

There are twists and turns aplenty and a final revelation which might be predictable if you went in looking for it, but which I must admit, took me pleasantly by surprise.  And all of it presents a fairly poignant account of people haunted by loss, incapable of letting go of their mourning, their guilt, unable to see through the myths of their own memories to view the past directly and find a way to live.  Whether a former soldier with survivor’s guilt, one who had avoided battle, brimming with shame and hate, the mother of a murdered child, or one who has all but entirely blocked out the extremities of a childhood trauma (and hence, must awaken), everyone here must come to terms with some truth and either succumb to misery or find some way forward.

These themes are certainly not new to the ghost story, but are handled competently with a degree of poise. We do not have here an implacable specter, vengefully assailing the living, but rather, an absence, a loneliness, a pain that cannot heal, that will not be forgotten, reflecting the ache at the core of all the characters we come to know who are still drawing breath.

The cinematography is attractive enough and, along with Daniel Pemberton’s lilting and rather pretty score, contributes to maintaining an effectively elegiac and uncanny climate, agreeable to inhabit. While the affordable 2012 digital filming, with its grainy blacks and somewhat oppressive over-reliance on muted old-timey green filters has dated poorly, it does get the job done, and allowances can be made for working within budget limitations with the technology available at the time.

Plus, there are some solid little scares along the way, the centerpiece of which may be the sequence in which Florence finds a doll house representing the school building, in which she finds tableaus of scenes she has recently witnessed, culminating in a miniature of the room she is currently in, where her doll is looking into an even smaller version of the house and a figure approaches from behind.  Of course, it’s gone when she turns around. By the time the story has revealed its secrets, one might wonder exactly why the spirit felt driven to unnerve her thus, but the pleasures of the moment perhaps justify a possible lapse in internal logic.

In the end, Murphy has crafted an affable little spooker, grounded enough in character and feeling to warm the viewer to its cast of variously broken individuals, with sufficiently suspenseful filmmaking technique to provide some atmosphere and chills, and tightly enough plotted to offer a couple of gratifying surprises. 

Hunted by the Past

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So when I first set up this blog, I created three main categories to go in the sidebar: Film Reviews, Theory, and Books.  And somehow one of these has gotten pretty well populated and the other two remain rather sparsely so.  I guess the thing is that everything takes time.  If I write about a film, I probably watch it once to enjoy it and then a second time to take notes and consider it before sitting down to write.  Depending on the length of the film, that’s about 4-6 hours of pre-writing prep.  But if it takes me a couple of weeks (or sometimes longer) to finish a book, it’s daunting to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Anyway, I just finished reading something. I really liked it. I hope you don’t mind that these are first impressions.

The Only Good Indians (2020) by Stephen Graham Jones

Assuming that, like myself, many readers here may see more horror films than read horror books, I’m going to try to be a bit more careful here about spoilers.  So the story largely follows four Blackfeet men who in their youth carried out a bad piece of hunting, going after a herd of elk in an area reserved for elders of the tribe and killing them en masse in a bad way, slaughtering more than they could ever actually use, cruelly and disrespectfully (It’s hard to imagine truly respectful killing, but this is the opposite).

Over the next ten years, they all find themselves haunted by the ghost of that day, both in an emotional/psychological manner and in a really quite literal sense.  Something has come back, something that longs to hunt them down and pick them off one by one, after ensuring that they each taste something of the terror and tragedy they had wrought so glibly as young men.

Yes, they are being haunted by an elk.

It doesn’t sound that scary, but the story is often unsettling and there are some turns that are absolutely brutal.  This avenging presence takes its time and really works its way under their skin. 

A large portion of the book is given over to following one of the four, Lewis, who has moved off the reservation, married a white woman, and gotten a job at the post office.  He has obviously taken steps to leave his past behind him, but it lingers. He is torn by ambivalence regarding his heritage, his past actions, and the people he’s walked away from.

Roughly ten years after the carnage of the inciting incident, which resulted in the four friends being banned from hunting on tribal lands and Lewis and one other deciding it was time to leave the reservation, he flashes back to that day and from then on, starts feeling like he is being watched, toyed with, that he can’t trust the people in his life.  I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler (I already said they were being haunted) to say that he’s right, but the way it plays out, it is easy to doubt. He really goes round the bend, descending into a self-destructive and violent paranoia. I mean, he is basically right about everything, but he is also, by the end of the first part of the book, quite mad, dangerously and tragically so.

Really – some of this gets pretty rough.

It is at this point that the worm turns and what had been merely a vengeful presence, a memory, a sadness becomes embodied—taking physical form and implacably seeking her revenge.  Here the book also takes a stylistic departure, shifting between a third person narration of the actions of Lewis, Ricky, Cassidy, and Gabriel and a second person, speaking directly to the elk-woman or Po’noka:

“What you do after you’ve made your hard way back into the world is stand on the side of the last road home, wrapped in a blanket torn from a wrecked truck, your cold feet not hard hooves anymore, your hands branching out into fingers you can feel creaking, they’re growing so fast now.  The family of four that picks you up is tense and silent, neither the father nor the mother nor the son saying anything with their mouths, only their eyes, the infant just sleeping.”

It is a striking turn and initially took some getting used to, but it has an interesting effect throughout the rest of the novel as, from one line to the next, the narrative may shift, situating the reader in the position of the killer, the aggrieved party seeking retribution, while still readily identifying with these four guys, all well drawn, each deeply flawed, but trying to do better—utterly human, and hence unforgivable, two legged, rifle carrying threats from the perspective of the elk.

I don’t want detail the events of the plot because there is effective suspense here, and the book is worth reading, but thematically it is interesting and rich. It may even be somewhat muddied, but maybe that’s good.  This exploration of guilt, native identity, nature, responsibility, respect and disrespect, historical violence, revenge, inconsolable pain that can’t be forgotten, a past like a millstone round the neck, and the question of a future freed from that weight is all the more rewarding for the fact that it is messy like life and not clear like a political tract.

We have endless cycles of harm having been done – to the environment, to a people, to animals, and to individual humans who repent their misdeeds, who love the people in their lives and whose loss will, in turn, harm others.  And there is a sadness that lingers, a guilt.  Life on the reservation feels bleak, a dead end road for those who stay, but life off the reservation feels like abandonment, like erasure. Everyone has done wrong in one way or another and it is not clear if forgiveness is ever possible—of oneself or of others.

And that is life, right? We take things for our own need and others are harmed and we move on. Every minute of the day. But the book asks us to pause and dwell in that space for a moment, to consider repercussions, to have a moment of recognition for the horror another has experienced.

There’s a moving passage late in the book wherein the daughter of one of the four comes across the site of the initial hunt and comprehends it in a very personal way:

“But, that story being true, it also means—it means her dad really and truly did this, doesn’t it? Instead of being the one down in the encampment, bullets raining down all around, punching through the hide walls of the lodges like she knows happened to the Blackfeet, to Indians all over, her dad was the one slinging bullets, probably laughing from the craziness of it all, from how, this far out, they could do anything, it didn’t even matter.”

It’s a heart breaking moment of horrific realization. And it is only with that, it is only by reckoning with the crimes of the past, that there can be any hope of, if not resolution – perhaps that’s not possible—restitution neither—but some kind of forward movement, growth—life. And this is true regardless of whether we’re talking about an elk hunt gone wrong or any of the endless inherited traumas of human social life. Our history is full of horror and if we never open ourselves to it, endure it, build empathy out of it, and seek in whatever limited manner we can to heal from it, we will doom ourselves to carry it without end.

Anyway, it was a solid read. I recommend it strongly and am eager to check out something else by Stephen Graham Jones.  I understand his new book, “My Heart is a Chainsaw” is supposed to be worthwhile.  Perhaps I should add it to my basket.

Happy Santa Claus Day, Killer Santa Claus Day

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So, Poland, where I live, is a pretty Catholic country and here Old Saint Nick (or Mikołaj as he’s locally known) doesn’t come on Christmas Eve, so much as on St. Nicholas Day (December 6th), often referred to in English as Santa Claus Day.  With that in mind, I can think of no better day to kick off the Holiday season with a short, blurby look at two of the best Killer-Santa movies that don’t involve Linnea Quigley being impaled topless on antlers or “Garbage Day!” I got to check out both of these last year on Shudder’s “Joe Bob Saves Christmas” special and I think they’re still there if you want to check them out.

Deadly Games –  AKA – Dial Code: Santa Claus (1989)

Chris Columbus swore that he hadn’t seen this fun French thriller before making Home Alone one year later and while anything’s possible, one could certainly be excused for having doubts.  Here is the story of a young boy left alone on Christmas Eve, who has to fight off a deranged killer dressed as Santa Claus through the use of his inventive traps and tricks seemingly inspired by Bugs Bunny cartoons.  The tone is darker, and sure, Macaulay Culkin was never attacked by a killer Santa, but much of the rest of the spirit seems so similar that it seems a big coincidence if that was somehow just the Zeitgeist that year.

Anyway, it’s weird. It’s fun. The killer is sufficiently creepy and the kid is sufficiently precocious. This boy is immensely rich and lives in a giant mansion filled with secret, toy filled passages and has access to all kinds of surprising automation, surveillance equipment, and early internet connectivity, but at the end of the day, he’s a little kid, scared and alone, who has to get really creative and be really brave to defend himself against a very real threat. It’s a really good time.

It seems in the beginning that things will be a bit on the lighter side, a whimsical romp.  But the killer Santa is really off in an interesting, unpredictable way.  He is deadly, but he is also so obviously broken and it means that you just can’t get a read on what he will or won’t do at any given moment.  It adds an edge.  The boy, Thomas, starts the film as a kid with more money and toys than he knows what to do with, obsessed with action stars ala Stallone. But by the end, he really has to stand up and become the fighter himself, and it’s duly exciting as he does.  And it really works because we never lose sight of his genuine vulnerability, isolation, and fear.

Christmas Evil (1980)

This is a special, if flawed seasonal slasher.  There have been more than a few killer-Santa movies, but this is undoubtedly the most heartfelt, touching, and grounded.  The set-up is boilerplate nonsense—a young boy sees Santa making out with his mother and is somehow scarred for life.  He grows up to be a kinda sweet shlub working at a toy factory, still utterly obsessed with Christmas.

He tracks the comings and goings of the neighborhood children, listing them in either his naughty or his nice book. He makes himself a really beautiful Santa Costume and paints his van to look like a reindeer pulled sleigh. Then he steals a bunch of toys from work and sets out to reward the deserving and punish the wicked.  Orphans get gifts and co-workers who have belittled him get murdered.

But all along the way, there is such sweetness as he tries so hard to spread the holiday spirit in a broken world where everyone’s just looking out for number one.  He gets pulled into a random work Christmas party and lights up the place with joy (before he threatens all of the children with bringing them something ‘truly horrible’ if they’re bad.) He brings a surprise shipment of toys to a sad orphanage, delighting the staff and kids alike. He hilariously and pathetically gets stuck in a chimney on the way to kill his boss.  And at the end, he drives his van off into the sky to carry on his magic ways, or he drives into a river and drowns, depending on how you read the moment.

And the violence is brutal and difficult and sloppy, bringing to mind George Romero’s Martin. Ultimately, you never feel Harry is a bad guy, but he is crazy, and he is not coming back, making the whole thing much sadder than scary, but sometimes horror should be sad.  This sweet putz, so obsessed with the idea of the holiday, becoming a killer is a wholly horrific turn, but there is so much warmth throughout the whole endeavor as well. Truly a holiday classic!

So, why so many Killer-Santa movies?

Really, it’s interesting that this is its own little subgenre. Other than the above referenced Silent Night, Deadly Night and its direct sequel (referred to in the intro above), a quick internet search finds results for at least 20 other films of this type.  Why is this such a thing? 

On one level, it just seems obvious. We have a beloved holiday character who is always watching you and judging you and who then comes into your home under dark of night to leave you something and maybe take something away. It’s all a bit creepy. Also, I think that we all invest a lot of trust in the idea of Santa, and the actual human actors portraying Santa, with our kids. Go to the mall and put your infant on a stranger’s lap. While you put your trust in him, I think there could be some trace concern, fear, apprehension, just waiting to be filmically expressed.

Past that, I think it’s just that Christmas looms so large on the cultural landscape. In western culture, even among the non-religious, or people of other faiths, Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year. It lasts for at least a month and is just omnipresent.  It is natural that successful horror can be made from inverting this warm, family holiday which has such cultural saturation. It’s no surprise that there are far fewer (though certainly a non-zero quantity of) killer Easter Bunny or Thanksgiving Turkey movies.

Finally, it’s just really good press when the PTA tries to have your movie yanked from cinemas, which is just another reminder for those complaining about “Cancel Culture” that a) in the past it was far more common for things to get literally cancelled and b) it was often (though not always) kinda good for building cult-status-notoriety. Just sayin’.

Drinking Life to the Dregs

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It’s a big world of horror cinema out there and I think it’s always interesting to explore work from different regions.  Not only can you find a variety of new stories or folkloric sources, but you can often find new approaches to tone, to styles of acting.  Having seen at least a few examples of his work, I find Park Chan-Wook’s handling of tone quite fascinating.  Comedy, brutality, sentiment, and naturalism co-inhabit his films in a way that, were they from Hollywood, I would criticize, but in his hands, they seem to heighten each other and really serve the work.  This is just such a film.

Thirst (2009)

This South Korean vampire feature from Park Chan-Wook (director of Oldboy, Stoker, and The Handmaiden, among many others) feels surprisingly fresh.  It hits many common tropes of the vampire tale, but consistently strikes a unique inflection—at once, teeming with life, often hilarious, and also quite grounded and corporeal.  While being stylish and nice to look at, it is not particularly stylistic or atmospheric. However, the film comes to life in its scene work—in character interactions and the genuine relish with which the characters and the film experience each moment.

Based on Émile Zola’s 1868 naturalist novel, Thérèse Raquin, the story follows a priest, Sang-hyun (Kang-ho Song, recently of Parasite) who feels dissatisfied with the degree to which he is actually anyone helping through his work.  He chooses to take part in a vaccine trial for the deadly leprosy-eque Emmanuel Virus, which he is not expected to survive. And he doesn’t. But, perhaps thanks to a blood transfusion from an unknown and never disclosed source, he happens to become a vampire and comes back to life, though still with the virus, the symptoms of which only ease up when he feeds. (None of this, surprisingly, was in the Zola text)

Sang-hyun’s resurrection is heralded as miraculous and the terminally ill flock to him, seeking his blessing.  One such supplicant is Lady Ra (Kim Hae-sook), the mother of Sang-hyun’s permanently sickly childhood friend, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun). Having prayed for him, Kang-woo’s cancer apparently disappears and Sang-hyun is invited round for dinner where he meets another childhood friend, all grown up, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), Kang-woo’s miserable wife. 


Tae-ju had been taken in by Lady Ra as a child and brought up as her daughter/servant, before coming of age and being married to the endlessly sniffling, shivering, dripping, and infuriatingly, if moderately goofily endearingly, dependent Kang-woo, thus shifting from daughter/servant to daughter-in-law/caretaker. There is an immediate attraction between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju and it isn’t long before, Sang-hyun feeling a bit freed from his priestly vows by the whole vampirism thing,  they begin a passionate affair, eventually murdering Kang-woo (as Tae-ju gives Sang-hyun the false impression that Kang-woo beats her), and eventually turning Tae-ju into a vampire.

As is often the case, as our original vampire protagonist is quite careful and conservative in how he feeds, never having killed anyone who was unwilling before Kang-woo, his progeny is wild and kills with abandon. Having lived so long under the thumb of another, Tae-ju embraces her newfound power and makes a bit of a mess (you just know when someone paints every surface in their home white that sooner-or-later, there will be blood).

This leads to inevitable conflict between them, culminating in Sang-hyun driving the two of them to fields atop a barren cliff where there is nowhere to hide from the coming sunrise. Tae-ju initially fights to live, but in the end, acquiesces and they sit on the hood of the car to watch the sun come up before turning to ash.

But again, the plot, while there are some nice turns along the way, is largely what one expects from a vampire story. But that really doesn’t detract (much) from the joys of the movie. The first thing that sets it apart is its aforementioned tone.  I suppose it might not be classified as a comedy, but it is persistently very funny. Much of that exists in small moments, a reaction shot here, a snide comment there, but it can also fill larger set pieces.  After Kang-woo’s murder, both Sang-hyun and Tae-ju are initially haunted by what they’ve done and for a time, they lose the vigor in their relationship.  This is largely down to the fact that both keep hallucinating the drowned Kang-woo (in all his drippy, snotty, idiot grin glory), especially whenever they try to have sex and he lies, clammy and dribbling between them.   This kills the mood, somewhat.

Another tonal element centers on the pure joy of new power.  There is a stretch that could have come from any super-hero film when Tae-ju first learns what Sang-hyun has become and gets him to show off for her (in a sequence that suggests the first time Superman takes Lois for a flight in the 1978 film).  It’s telling that she is the one who is excited by it.  He hadn’t really thought to explore the extent of his new abilities, but she is thrilled to have him leap from tall buildings or bend coins to demonstrate his strength.  Of course, when she has turned, this excitement continues.

And then there is the Zola based kitchen sink melodrama of it all: two people succumbing to desire, their thirst if you will, going down a rabbit hole of murder, co-dependence, recrimination, and depravity, ending in somewhat mutual suicide.  The oddest juxtaposition in the film is really not between this mid-19th century narrative and the tale of a vampire priest in South Korea.  Rather, it is between the weight of the original subject matter, the crushing downfall of two broken degenerates, and the light touch of the filmmaker as we follow two characters who are both very likable in their ways: our melancholic protagonist who is genuinely trying to do good in his (un)life, or at least to minimize harm, and his more sanguine paramour whose greedy lapping up of every pleasure is quite infectious.

In his preface to Thérèse Raquin, Zola wrote that his intention was “to study temperaments and not characters” and apparently (I’m going from Wikipedia here—I haven’t read it) this resulted in a cold, clinical presentation of the story which influenced the early naturalist literary movement.  Here, those temperaments survive, but Park Chan-Wook really gives us characters to accompany them: sometimes ridiculous, sometimes tender and shy, sometimes thoughtful, and sometimes unable to control themselves, though they sometimes want to.   It is anything but cold.

Sang-hyun goes on a significant journey over the course of the film.  At the beginning, he is lost.  Unfulfilled in his role as a priest, he takes his life in his hands, volunteering for the trial vaccine.  He in unable to, in any way, live for himself.  By the end of the movie, he becomes a kind of leper, a monster, an adulterer, a murderer, an abuser, by all counts, a sinner, but he also becomes someone who can genuinely smile. 

Right before driving to the cliffs at the end, he stops the car by the camp of people outside his monastery who now worship him as a miracle worker.  There, he gets intentionally caught with his pants down, looking like he was attempting to rape one of his faithful.  They turn against him, throwing rocks, chasing him away. As he flees, his elation is clear. He is free from their love and expectations. And they are free of their devotion.  He can live his own life and choose his own death. 

For a movie that features a nice old blind priest being stabbed in the heart, blood being vomited through the holes of a recorder, leprous boils and pustules, self-flagellation, liters of mucous, and a prodigious quantity of peeled off fingernails, the total effect is honestly surprisingly light and uplifting without being at all glib or parodic.  It’s quite a piece of work.