Tag Archives: black and white

The Dreamy Allure of the Night Tide

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

So, this week I’m writing from a new location. Typically, I’m based in Poland, but every May/June, I come back to the States to help my parents in Ocean City, MD as they prepare the performance they will give throughout the summer at Jolly Roger Amusement Park (they write, produce, and perform an original short pirate musical every year – with magic, and juggling, and new locations that need to be realized on the outdoor stage – this year, I made a cave). It’s just the three of us doing all the work, and thus it is always a huge undertaking (hence why there’s been more time than I would like between my last post and this), but it’s also satisfying to be able to help my folks out. I’m an only child and I happened to move very far away. Also, it’s a pleasure to spend my days doing physical work (painting/scenic carpentry/prop-building, etc.), whereas much of my labor at home revolves around the computer. It’s an exhausting, but nice, change of pace.

Ocean City is a summer resort town with all your typical features: boardwalk, beach, overpriced chintzy goods (t-shirts, flip-flops you’re gonna lose, etc.), roller-coasters, ferris-wheels, and carnival games where you can win a stuffed pig or something, and I must admit that for years I didn’t have the greatest relationship with the place. We’d moved here from New York when I was a kid, and at the time, the area was much more rural than where I’d come from – I just didn’t feel like I fit in.

But the rides and arcades were fun. And I always loved this ride through haunted house.

But that was middle school – when no one fits in – anywhere – and in the years since, Ocean City has changed, and so have I. The town underwent development of a double edged nature. On one hand, the presence of chain stores and sidewalks makes me more comfortable – it’s nice not to feel so much like some yahoo in a pickup truck is going to run you down when you’re trying to cross the road, and being able to pop into a Starbucks or Panera offers a comfortable place where I can set up with a laptop and relax a bit. On the other hand, I think it’s safe to say there has been some loss of local color. Color I didn’t always appreciate when I was eleven, but outlet malls bring less cultural specificity than something like, say, the kitschy “Shanty Town,” specializing in sea-side souvenirs, one used to pass when walking to the bridge that goes over to the beach.

But as I said, I’ve changed too. Once upon a time, my main association with this place was the natural awkwardness of middle school and the fact that we’d moved somewhere that kids hunted and fished and used racial slurs, and that really was not my scene. Now, as an ‘adult’ (I’m only 44 – am I really an adult?) my association is doing this creative and physical work for my parents, and also just the beach – the ocean – the image of the carnivalesque boardwalk at night (even if I’m not so likely to visit as I’ve rather lost my taste for crowds). And the ocean does have a draw. It’s surprisingly easy to ignore the tanning throng and let the crash of the waves wash over you. It captivates, and mystifies, and intimidates, just going on and on, so much bigger than comprehension, and only ever showing its surface. When I come in the summer, there’s little time for it, but I do value those brief moments when I can go take it in (as I did today to take some of the pictures above). And when I come in the winter, that’s the best – the town empties out and it feels like you have it all to yourself.

And so, to bring things around to the raison d’etre of this blog (in case you were wondering if I ever would), I wanted to focus this time on a bit of coastal horror, taking a look at a special little film, which I suspect is underseen, set in a locale similar to where I currently find myself.

Night Tide (1961)

Directed by Curtis Harrington, distributed by AIP, and set at a seaside boardwalk fun fair (my connection to OC – I imagine this must be similar to what things looked like here 60 years ago), Night Tide was released on a double bill with Roger Corman’s The Raven (which I may write about some day when I return to my series on Corman’s Poe films). Though not actually based on a work of Poe’s, it takes its title from his poem, ‘Annabel Lee,’ (about a lovely young woman who’s died – I know, what a twist! – but seriously, give the poem a read – it’s fun with something like the cadence of an old murder ballad) showing a fragment of the text before the closing credits begin (as one might see in a 60s Corman-Poe joint). It’s also Dennis Hopper’s first starring role and it might be my favorite thing I’ve seen him do. Often carrying a kind of bombast, here he is so understated, simple, and direct in his performance and it is quite captivating (I mean, I also love him running around like a madman with a chainsaw in each hand in Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, and this is pretty much the opposite).

As for the film, it is difficult to classify, but certainly a real treat. You could say it’s fantasy, or a psychological thriller, or a dream piece. You could even say it’s horror – kind of (and I will – I practice big-tent horror classification). On one level, it is the story of Mora (Linda Lawson), who works as a sideshow mermaid, but fears that she is a real monster (a siren), that she has killed men before, that her new beau may not be safe with her; and yet, she feels the call to be who she really is in spite of all this, to answer the call of the ocean, of nature, even if that brings darkness. That’s horror, right?

And it is the story of Johnny (Dennis Hopper), the young man who, having joined the navy to see the world, falls in love with her and goes on a surreal journey into a watery mystery, warned on all sides to cut off involvement with this fascinating young woman, told time and time again that he is in ‘grave danger,’ whether due to the police investigation concerning her dead boyfriends, the ominous implications of a tarot reading, or the old sea captain who explicitly tells Johnny that his girlfriend is literally a sea monster. That also seems like horror.

Finally, the atmosphere is just so enveloping, mysterious, and seductive, pulling you into its cinematic pleasures: the taste of sea salt, the feel of the surf splashing your cheek, the smell of cotton candy, and the janky, upbeat sound of the carrousel calliope. It is such a vibe – this dark mix of the sensory overload of the carnival and the majesty and raging power of the endless sea, all of this hinting at a dark threat born in nature, or madness, or something beyond the grasp of our limited understanding. That too seems like a horror film. And atmospheric work such as this is one of the things this genre offers better than any other, which I really love.

And yet, in spite of all this, I hesitate to call it horror outright (but again, I will). The flow of the story is just different somehow. Though there is fear, and there are stakes, and there is this encounter with an unknown and unknowable something that cannot be accepted, but also cannot be overcome, the rhythms of the story play out much more like those of a dream than a nightmare. Johnny, however much he is driven by love or fascination or fear, seems more to flow from one encounter to the next, pulled deeper and deeper into the oneiric spell, his experience sometimes bleeding over into a literal dream. The result is hypnotic and captivating, but it’s not scary – even when his lover’s arms become clammy tentacles, pinning him down, even when his life is actually in danger, or hers has ended too soon.

I think the genre category that best captures the film is probably fairy tale (though let’s hold onto horror as well so I feel justified in devoting a post to it on my horror blog). A defining element for me of many fairy tales is the evenness of their telling. It’s important that the frog found at the root of the rotten tree can only speak the truth, but it’s not particularly noteworthy that he talks (he’s a talking frog –what else would you expect him to do?). It’s not weird. In a fairy tale, there can be so many plot turns or character choices that to us seem odd, but nothing in the tale itself, for those who inhabit it, is ever weird. It just is. And then the next thing is. There can be monsters, but their existence doesn’t break the world for those that meet them. I wrote about this element when discussing another siren/mermaid movie, The Lure. It seems that these seductive watery characters of myth and legend can’t help but bring the characteristic tone of those legends with them. And beyond the flow of the narrative, the dialogue here all has a simple, unadorned quality like that in a fairy tale as well. Everyone (and especially Johnny) generally speaks in short, direct sentences. There is a stylistic flatness to their delivery – and by this I don’t mean to imply a deficiency of the performances, but just to describe a defining quality.

But it’s interesting – while the story moves in this unhurried fairy tale fashion, the drama is explicitly about the fear that this fairy tale could be true, about resisting it or denying it, about one’s comprehension of reality not being able to square with this new information. In a relatively late scene, once Johnny has been told what Mora is (or at least what she thinks herself to be), she pushes back against his disbelief, saying,

“You Americans have such a simple view of the world. You think that everything can be seen and touched and weighed and measured. You think you’ve discovered reality. But you don’t even know what it is.”

And this is, I think, the heart of the film. By the end, things have been mostly explained away. The fairy tale has been reduced to a story of petty human manipulation born of loneliness and insecurity. But there is still more than one seed of doubt. We have spent all but the last five minutes immersed in this sense of mystery, confronted with the awareness that there is magic in the world – that it is all more than we think, that we could all be more than we imagine – that the night is alive and that the sea has a call. Five minutes of psychologizing at the end cannot erase that. We are left with enough cause to disbelieve the rational explanations. There are still unanswered questions – and they will remain unanswered. Even if Mora wasn’t actually a mythical creature, there was more here than meets the eye – even if only in the depths of the psyche. We wake from the dream, reading about poor, beautiful, dead Annabel Lee, unsure of what was real and what was imagined, but sure of the spell we’d been under.

And somehow, in the final moments, it is as if Johnny also wakes up and just moves on with his life, seemingly unperturbed (the mood lingers, but only just) by what he has been through, by what he has lost (though, to be fair, perhaps having your lover try to drown you takes the bloom off the proverbial rose).

And it’s a great performance. This is a completely different Dennis Hopper than I’ve seen before. His Johnny is so small, insecure, and lonely. He’s also open and sincere and utterly lacking in guile. His behavior wouldn’t fly in today’s climate (his refusal to take no for an answer when he first meets Mora is creepy and could be experienced as quite threatening), but I can’t help but like him. I can’t help but feel for him: so alone in the world and unsure of himself – constantly fidgeting, he reminds me of a puppy that has had a growth spurt and just doesn’t know what to do with its newly large paws and gangly legs. He feels like the young boy protagonist of a tale from the Grimm brothers. Again – taken one way, Johnny does so many things wrong (disbelieving the woman he claims to love, denying her own lived experience), but he still comes across as, if not sweet, then innocent. He’s really into Mora, but he doesn’t understand her – he doesn’t have the capacity to understand (and maybe that absolves him somewhat of his faults).

I wonder about Mora’s reaction to him. When first they meet, she’s trying to listen to a jazz band in a café and he won’t stop trying to chat her up. He then proceeds to walk her home though she tells him not to. Finally, he forces a kiss on her cheek, against her wishes. And still, when he asks when he can see her next, she invites him to breakfast the next morning, leaving him dancing along the boardwalk railing in the night air as she goes upstairs. Why? Does she fall for his boyish charms? Is she really a siren and does she have some compulsion to draw young men to her rocks, even if they’re over-pushy?

From the next morning, she seems to enjoy his presence, to want him around. She also seems so much older (even ancient, or ageless) than him in spirit. There is a sadness within her. He moves through life in naïve simplicity, but she seems to carry the weight of knowing. And maybe that is his appeal for her. Pulled towards the depths by the anchor of her truth, his straightforward lightness could appear as a buoy.

At one point, Mora and Johnny come across a raucous beach party, drummers banging under torch light. One, who seems to know her, asks Mora if she will dance for them. And she does, giving such an interesting performance – her movement vacillates between organic flow and jagged lurches forward or back, up or down. She spins madly, but can also stop on a dime. It feels quite modern, but also free – without specific form. I feel the whole dance expresses her internal tension between the wild and keeping control, between her interior nature and her will. But in the end, she is overcome with the dance (and a vision of the mysterious woman – perhaps another siren- who haunts her, reminding her of her true self and where she must finally go, what she must finally do) and she collapses. The appearance of the other siren brings to mind the wedding scene in Cat People (1942), when the other Serbian woman (who one assumes is a cat person as well) recognizes Irena as her sister, calling on her to be herself, to join her.

A promotional still rather than a screen shot, but a nice pic nonetheless.

It’s probably already obvious, but as with Cat People, there is also a very strong and very obvious queer reading here (hey – June is Pride Month). I think whenever in a horror movie, a character lives in fear of giving in to their true nature and becoming the monster they know themselves to be, giving in to an alluring call that they abhor and abjure, but can’t deny, the reading is a given. And the fact that Mora reaches out, trying, like Irena in the earlier film, to establish a relationship with a man (not to mention the two dead boys before him), using him to hold her in the ‘normal’ world she’s trying not to stray from, surely does not detract from this reading. Also, apparently the director, Curtis Harrington, is considered “one of the forerunners of New Queer Cinema” (which I must admit I know nothing about – this is just what Wikipedia tells me).

And there is some comic queer coding as well, such as the scene where Mora has sent Johnny to the bath house for a steamy massage from the big, beefy, cigar chomping, towel wearing Bruno. While working out Johnny’s tension, Mora’s boss and father figure, Captain Murdock pulls a sheet aside and seems surprised to find Johnny there in the back room. Bruno looks up and asks, “Ah, Captain, you want me to pound you later?” to which the captain responds with British accented erudition, “Now, am I likely to forego a pleasure like that?” Then we go back to warning Johnny to get away while he still can, but the scene seems like a pretty big wink.

Still, it is sad that where this reading takes us, given the film’s conclusion, is that there is no possibility of living authentically (whether in terms of sexual identity or anything else) in this world. Giving in to nature does not end well for Mora or those around her. Even in a fairy tale, you may not get a happy ending. And the lack of that happy ending is not surprising here, given the degree to which the whole film leading up to is has been suffused with a dreamy melancholy. There may be real, beautiful magic in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be happy. It’s more likely to be lachrymose or simply mad. And then it might try to kill you…

—

And that is Night Tide – a lovely little film that is really worth 80 minutes of your time: a bit of a dream, a bit of a fairy tale, a bit of a glimpse into the seedy beauty of this early 60s beach town. It’s even a bit of a horror film. Just not the scary kind.

Relentless Subjectivity: The Witch and The Lighthouse

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

So, finally last week, I had a chance to go to the movies for the first time in months and catch Robert Eggers’s The Northman before it left cinemas. While it’s not my favorite thing that he’s done, I was happy to have the chance to see it on the big screen and hear it at full volume (it’s a loud movie). On one level, I really wanted to catch it because – hey, an epic-mythic Viking tale of revenge, working with the same source on which Hamlet was based, just sounds pretty cool and also, having so appreciated Eggers’s first two features, I feel a sense of loyalty and will check out pretty much anything he makes for a while.

But this isn’t a Viking blog – it’s a horror blog, so today, I’m not going to delve much into The Northman, but rather those first two movies which so enraptured me: The VVitch and The Lighthouse. I’ve long wanted to re-visit them and consider them together as they share many elements and artistic/thematic preoccupations. Plus, they both just delighted me on first viewing. And as it’s also a blog about ‘delight,’ here we go…

The VVitch: A New-England Folk Tale (2015)

The film centers on Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), eldest daughter of a family of puritans kicked out of a New-England colony for somehow being too puritanical. The family patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson) thus drags them all into the wilderness to work the land and make a life for themselves, free to be as pious as he wants. Unfortunately, the only thing he’s actually good at is chopping wood (and this he does plenty of – in an obsessive, fevered, nigh masturbatory manner – his only outlet for the storm of emotions broiling within). Their vegetable plots are sad and barren, their corn beset by blight. They are barely scraping by, such that William has secretly sold his wife’s silver cup, her only remnant of her life and family in England, to buy a trap so they might catch animals to eat and somehow survive the coming winter.

Then one day, while Thomasin is playing peek-a-boo with her baby brother, he suddenly goes missing from one moment to the next, never to be found, and it doesn’t take long for their minds to first start teeming with intimations of the supernatural (the children had already spoken of a ‘witch of the wood’ before the abduction), before directly turning on Thomasin and accusing her of being the witch (having already been blamed for the cup’s disappearance), her adolescent female body a natural site for this confluence of desperate pride, religiosity, puritanical fear, and a terror of nature itself.

We see supernatural elements, but it’s unclear what is real and what is fantasy, and it all builds to a fevered, bloody family self-destruction. By the end, only Thomasin remains and when the devil appears before her in the form of the family’s goat, “Black Philip,” and offers her the opportunity to “live deliciously,” I can’t imagine rebuking her acquiescence. Her world is one of ‘sin,’ and she has already been labeled and attacked as ‘wicked,’ not to mention starved of the simple comforts of society. Under such conditions, if a goat seductively asks, “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter?” the answer is clearly “yes.” As she rises naked into the night, joining the fire-lit coven, it is emancipatory, rising towards an existence that simply must be better than what she’s known. Good for her. And at the same time, this sense of empowerment comes with the bite of tragedy and that juxtaposition makes the moment more than both.

This was, I believe, my fifth viewing since The VVitch was released seven years ago – and the experience of watching it has changed over time. I remember being so pulled in at first by the mystery of what was actually happening. Was there really a witch or was it just a case of this family projecting their supernatural fears onto the dire circumstances they had chosen to inhabit? If there was a witch, was it really Thomasin, or was this scary old crone actually out there, using baby’s blood as body lotion and/or wood stain for her broom? And was she the same as the lady in red or was there a group of women living in the forest and stealing children? The nightmare of it all was heightened by my inability to find firm ground on which to stand, and when it finally culminated in its explosion of goat/family violence and its denouement of triumphant, exultant, and willfully chosen witchery, it was deeply satisfying, while still inhabiting a space just beyond my full logical comprehension. Now, having watched it multiple times, I enjoy dwelling in that space of uncertainty. The film could be read in multiple ways – more or less supernaturally or realistically, sociologically, psychologically, religiously – but I find it most satisfying to leave Schrödinger’s Box closed, all states remaining simultaneously true and false.

I recently listened to an interview with Eggers on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and something he said there feels like a key to much of his work – in all of his features, he tries to approach his historical characters from their own perspective, without judgement. Thus, subjectivity reigns. There is no objective viewpoint of what is “real” – if the characters view the world itself, and the nature that surrounds and suffuses them as inherently sinful, it is. If they fear the devil, he is to be feared. If their worldview is one in which witches haunt the woods, they do. And in this, the film doesn’t make a claim of what was real in the past, but rather, it just gives us a glimpse through their eyes for the span of the story.

His obsessive attention to historical detail really supports this approach and helps to bring it all to life – the VVitch was filmed with natural light, among settings built using only period appropriate tools and techniques. The language is as accurate to how people would have been speaking then as he was able – it all comes together to situate the viewer in a time and a place and a mindset – and in this case, it is a troubling, eerie, emotionally fraught, and terrifying one. Somehow, this exactingly accurate past re-creation allows for a story that need not be rooted in realism, but is free to follow the often dark flights of fancy of its characters. I find it interesting that he was praised by both Satanists and Born-Again Christians for understanding their perspective and showing it in a good light. That subjectivity of character invites a similar subjectivity for the viewer.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Here, Eggers runs with that subjectivity and manages to take it to an extreme point of delirium and fractured identity. This can make the film delectable for some and exhausting for others as it is, in a narrative sense, pretty difficult to track what is or isn’t actually happening at any given moment. But when I saw it in the cinema, I was absolutely up for its wild ride, and came away from it enraptured. This is the first time I’ve revisited it since then and, while I think it did suffer from being viewed at home, surrounded by distractions, its madly ambitious hysteria still captivates, not to mention the absolute cinematic pleasure of its visually striking imagery and the simple joy of its performances. (Also, as an aside, I did – sort of – discuss its source material here.)

In short, a man, Thomas (Robert Pattinson), comes to a remote island lighthouse in the late 19th century to be an assistant lighthouse keeper, running away from a dark secret. He is thrust into tight quarters with his partner-boss, the main lighthouse keeper, or “wickie,” Thomas (Willem Dafoe). After one month, a storm prevents them from being relieved by the next wickies. He goes mad. He has sex with a mermaid. Poseidon makes an appearance. Mysterious tentacles writhe at the top of the lighthouse. The two men circle each other in a dance of aggression, attraction, mirrored identity, and ever shifting power dynamics. The older man’s eyes become lighthouse beams, pinning the younger man down with the searing light of truth. All the while, the storm rages outside, battering their fragile shelter, the water getting into everything and spoiling the food. They run out of booze and start drinking the kerosene. In the end, having ‘spilled the beans’ on his past crimes, the younger Thomas kills the older, finally gets to see the coveted light in the tower, and has his liver eaten by birds on the rocks as waves crash around him.

Or maybe none of that happens. Maybe he’s only there a couple of days before he goes mad. Maybe he’s freezing to death in Canada, imagining this all. Maybe he chases Thomas with an axe or maybe Thomas chases him. Maybe Thomas the elder is gaslighting him, lying about how many days have passed to make him think he’s losing time and responding to things that have never been said, toying with him cruelly by means of Sanford Meisner acting exercises because there’s nothing better to do on this rock than torment his assistant. Maybe they are really the same person, two parts of a divided self. Maybe he’s Prometheus, trying to steal the light of the gods. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The gestalt effect is one of being trapped within an ever-shifting sense of psychosis, pushed and pulled by emotional impulses, by overwhelming forces both without and within, compulsions, repressed aspects of one’s self, the needs of the body. And if you are up for it, it is a great deal of fun. I mean, Willem Dafoe’s “Curse of Triton” speech, pure Shakespearean bombast, amidst the comedy and tension of a domestic squabble over how Thomas the elder cooks his lobster, is just about the most ecstatic couple minutes of film I can think of. But I can also easily see how this wouldn’t be for everyone.

It is not a film of plot. Perhaps it doesn’t even have one – there are events, but is there really a story, or is it all just a tour through madness, exploring the dictates of psychological and natural impulses and mythic passion? In any case, it is filmed within an inch of its life. The stark black and white cinematography is never short of beautiful; the tight, narrow aspect ratio is claustrophobic and reinforces the verticality of the central image – this giant phallus that the two men (if there even are two men) are trapped inside, driving each other crazy; and the whole film is so physically visceral. For a film set within a mental state, it is obsessed with physiology – with these men’s bodies. It is a film of flesh and sweat and stink, of semen and urine and vomit and over-full chamber pots that the wind blows back in your face when you try to empty them. I think centering the body in this way has a similar effect as what I discussed for The VVitch above. Just as intense historical accuracy opens the door to something beyond realism, so too does this foregrounding of biology result in highlighting something psychic or spiritual.

I think at the heart of it all is a desperate drive towards some ineffable transcendence (perhaps a theme here in the last couple of weeks, given last post’s film) – this is the light in the tower. Thomas the younger craves it and the elder guards it jealously, locking the younger man out and stripping down to worship the glory of this alien, geometrically radiant beacon. The Nature that surrounds them is that of 19th century Romanticism – terrifying in its power, beyond human comprehension or endurance – more than what people’s weak minds can hold. Thomas is mired in flesh, in the constraints of his mind, and is pulled both towards some sense of stability (dreaming of earning enough money to settle someplace where he can have his own land and no one will ever again give him orders) and also towards the power of something beyond, something inexpressible, something unmoored.  It is a riotous, gleeful, terrible space to inhabit for two hours.

Considering Both Films

There are certainly threads that run through both. Firstly, as mentioned, this totally subjective viewpoint really characterizes them, but there’s more. These films situate their characters in a specific relationship with Nature (whether that of the wind howling through the trees in the dark, wild wood OR the waves crashing against the rocks as the skies open and the heavens pour down OR the uncontrollable dictates of the fleshy human form) – one that is fraught with both fascination, temptation, horror, and worship. And both seem focused on themes of the individual carving out a place within that threatening yet so desirable Nature – in that, they both carry a myth of America – entering the fearful wilderness and claiming what is yours to take. They also both yearn for something beyond – for something sublime, whether it is to be found in Christian faith, a pact with the devil, the wind whistling in the dark forest, a light in a tower, or sex with a fish lady. They both firmly plant their characters in very historically accurate and oh so physical settings where everything is solid, corporeal, and material, but from which those characters can encounter the danger and allure of something else. On the strength of these two, I’m surely going to check out anything else that Eggers puts out.

So What About The Northman?

Well, I’m glad I got to see it in the cinema. It deserved that rather than the diminished attention, smaller screen, and quieter sound of a home viewing. And Eggers continues to foreground historical accuracy, nature, and the drive towards sublimity. There is a lot here to love – especially in the recreation of Nordic culture, religion, ritual, music, and mentality. But I didn’t really love the film the way that I had his first two.

I think the main issue for me is that in trying, as he has described, to meet his characters on their own ground, from their own perspective, he dooms the film to be unsatisfying for a contemporary audience. The main character lives in a world of fate and his ultimate satisfaction is to see that destiny fulfilled – even when there is no other dramatic/character reason to do something. I really enjoyed so much that led up to it (particularly Nicole Kidman’s performance – revealing secrets that prompt Amleth’s final push towards vengeance), but by the time that two naked Vikings are battling to the death on the lip of a live volcano, I was simply not that engaged – the fight hadn’t needed to happen, not really – its outcome doesn’t really matter – but what has been foretold has come to pass. And the film doesn’t question any of this – there is no dramatic tension of whether he is doing the right thing or not – he is just doing the thing he is doing. Now, I think it would probably mean a betrayal of the characters and their worldview had the film really posed these questions (a choice that would have felt quite modern, the expected dramatic turn), but in avoiding judgment, Eggers sacrifices catharsis, something that didn’t happen in The VVitch or The Lighthouse.

But I’m glad he got to make his Viking epic and I’m glad I got to see it. Even if the end effect underwhelmed, it was still a big, bold, bloody, ambitiously weird outing, and though the whole was less than the sum of its parts, some of those parts are really great, and I’m glad they got to exist.

The Eyes Have It

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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…

Threatening Innocence – The Bad Seed & Village of the Damned

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

When you consider the things that scare people, some are obvious and some are not. Though most spiders and snakes won’t bite you, some can kill and it’s hard to know which is which. Though standing at a great height on a windless day, there is no reason to think you might fall, if you did, it would be fatal. Though most of us will probably never be stalked by a madman with a knife, that would certainly be unpleasant and we could be forgiven fearing such a thing. But then there are some fears that seem less rooted in realistic threat: open spaces, for instance, or public speaking, or a doll, or a clown.

I think films like Child’s Play or Puppet Master work because toys should be safe. They exist only to entertain children and therefore, carry a de facto innocence. They are in our homes, with our kids, and we trust them, but trust necessitates vulnerability and maybe that’s scary. So if they happen to carry the spirit of a serial killer or have been animated by an ancient Egyptian spell, and come to life in the middle of the night to prey on our children or ourselves, beyond just being a danger, the corruption of the trusted, innocent plaything lends an additional sheen of horror, of wrongness.

So, too with clowns, a common fear. Again, they exist to make kids happy, but their image inherently suggests that something else might lie beneath the façade of a painted smile. Thus, it’s not that surprising that, while most might be perfectly nice children’s entertainers, the monstrous clown, grotesque beneath the greasepaint, has become a common image of fear.

And if these markers of innocence, these things that become horrific because it’s wrong for kids’ things to be scary, if they can send chills down the spine, what about kids themselves? I doubt I’m alone in thinking they too can be eerie. They are human, but they’re not really like us – and are thus somewhat alien. They come from us and we try to “raise them right” to share our values and perspectives, but they retain their interiority and we can never really know what’s happening behind their eyes. We love and protect them, treasuring their innocence for as long as it lasts, but we also know that they can lie, and take, and act out of a wrathful, violent sense of having been wronged. I read somewhere that every two-year-old is essentially a psychopath, but that most of us grow out of it. I’ve never been a parent, but I can imagine it’s a terrifying thought that yours might not.

And so, with that, I’d like to look at two films today that offer iconic treatments of the creepy child: The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned. To really discuss them in some detail, there will be spoilers so I recommend seeking them out before going any further.

What Is It With Overly Mature Blonde Kids?

There are many currents that run through both works, some of which are surface similarities and some of which speak to a deeper resonance. In both cases we have creepy children with flaxen hair, who can be unnervingly adult in their demeanor, whose threat is linked to their heredity, who kill remorselessly to get what they want, and whose parent figures take it upon themselves to kill them.  I think in both films, the creep factor is linked with this sense of a maturity beyond their years. For a child to be cold and calculating, to enact its own gaze, declaring itself a subject of equal or greater prominence as the adults around it, can be unnerving. Rhoda is often praised for her maturity, but sometimes her mother seems uncomfortable with it as well. The children of the village are never demure minors to be watched by their elders – they look back and with their look, they actively use their power, controlling people’s minds and bending them to their will.

We also have an interesting treatment of sociopathy in both cases, but they do differ in significant ways. Rhoda is described as a “natural little girl” who “knows what she wants and asks for it – not like these over-civilized little pets that have to go through analysis before they can choose an ice cream soda.”  Unhampered by social mores, she unashamedly voices her desires and does what she needs to in order to realize them. If this means murder, that is no bother to her and she feels no guilt; after all, she wanted it, now she has it, and she’s not the one who drowned so why should she be upset? The children are also free from remorse, and it is there that their alien potency lies. In their words, “If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are.” It’s not only mental dominance, but rather this amoral freedom that gives them an edge. And in both films, their parent figure futilely tries to instill a moral sense, only to come up against a brick wall (though said wall becomes quite useful in the second film). Much of the horror of both films is the realization of the impossibility of that moral instruction. They are simply different and cannot be shaped by a ‘good upbringing.’

The Bad Seed (1956)

Based on a book, and later a play, of the same name, Mervyn LeRoy’s film is high family melodrama of the first order, and it is a treat. At its center is Christine Penmark, the mother of a young girl, Rhoda, the titular “bad seed.” Having grown up with loving and doting parents, and then loving and doting on a child of her own, Christine has always feared somehow that she was adopted. After noticing concerning behavior from her daughter, she presses the issue and learns that she had been born to a famous serial killer. Somehow this penchant for killing skipped her generation and has been planted in her beloved eight year old child, a child whom we know is responsible for at least three murders and by the end of the film is unashamedly planning a fourth. Christine poisons Rhoda and subsequently shoots herself in the head (in the first of three endings in the film – it had trouble with the Hayes Code and had to do some narrative gymnastics to secure a release). It is an emotional, intense film and the confrontation with a horrific truth, long dreaded and now impossible to deny, situates it in the genre even without the presence of a creepy killer kid.

Central to the story is the classic question of Nature vs. Nurture.  The film is peopled with psychologists, crime journalists, and writers, and they are generally all of the opinion that the results are in and that environment alone shapes personality – a child from a good home, well raised, simply could not become criminal – it is only the socially and economically deprived who fall into a life of crime. The idea that a child could be born with such murderous inclinations is simply beyond belief. Thus, as Christine comes to this reckoning, she is alone in it and her concerns fall on deaf ears.  I think in this, the story circles around issues of class in an interesting manner.  It is clear that Christine comes from money (particularly in contrast to the Daigles, the parents of Claude, the child Rhoda kills), and it is unthinkable that a child of her station could commit a crime – that is something that only poor children do. Now, is the film’s stance progressive in showing how this villainy can grow even in the richest soil, or is there an ugliness in the suggestion that ‘bad blood will out’? After all, it is because Christine’s mother was a killer (from lower circumstances) that her daughter is doomed to be one as well. It is of central importance that Rhoda’s moral deformity is not just a question of happenstance, but rather of heredity.

The main thing that distinguishes this from today’s other film is how emotional it is.  Christine is so distraught by Claude’s death and it is so shocking when Rhoda isn’t. Christine is confronted with the weight of that loss by Claude’s mother, Hortense (Eileen Heckart, who rather steals the show as the drunk, broken mother, with nothing left to lose, gasping for the truth). The juxtaposition of Rhoda happily banging away Au Clair de la Lune on the piano as Leroy burns to death on the lawn is chilling and the choice to focus solely on Christine’s face through the sequence is heartbreaking – she knows whose responsibility this is – hers. And ultimately, the revelation of Christine’s birth is a source of great trauma, and the degree to which she is tragically torn between the need to protect her daughter and to destroy the evil she has spawned is powerful. When she finally decides to give Rhoda an overdose of sleeping pills (which she happily gobbles up as a new vitamin), it is to protect her from a world which would hunt her as a monster. It’s all very effective and it’s a shame that the censors of the time forced the adoption of such a bizarre ending (which I won’t describe, but is fun in its sudden, out of left field, over-the-top ridiculousness).  

Even with this oddly tacked on final moment, the total effect is enjoyably melodramatic and tragic, and it’s got a real bite.

Village of the Damned (1960)

The second film is also concerned with emotion, but more as a study of its absence. While Rhoda can be calculating, she also has a psychopath’s rage. In contrast, the children of the village are totally distanced from emotion, and this remove makes them uncanny. Furthermore, taking an unemotional, scientific approach is what distinguishes the main protagonists as well.

The story begins with a strange and intriguing occurrence. One day, everyone within the border of Midwich, a small British village, falls unconscious. In response, a military team investigates methodically, setting up a perimeter, seeing what happens when someone new enters (they pass out as well), and testing everyone when all is said and done.  One moment sets the tone for the rest of the film. Major Bernard, unable to reach family in Midwich, goes to investigate. When nearing the town line, he sees a police officer enter to check out a crashed bus and immediately collapse. He doesn’t run in after him or try to help him at all, but immediately turns around and drives the other way to call in the authorities. What a reasonable thing to do.

It’s soon discovered that every woman of child bearing age is now pregnant (a fact resulting in some heightened emotion – both good and bad as some husbands have been away on work or some teens have never even kissed a boy) and those pregnancies develop rapidly, resulting in a batch of eerie, platinum haired babies all born on the same day, who can telepathically communicate with each other and have some power of command over others. We largely follow Gordon Zellaby, an older man with a young wife who finds himself the supposed father of one of these children. A man of science, he does not seem overly bothered by his lack of true paternity, but is thrilled at the possibilities the children may lead to: “they are one mind to the twelfth power. Now just think what it would mean if we could guide it…we cannot throw away this potential just because of a few incidents.”

Others in the town, in the government, or in other countries where this strange event also occurred are made uncomfortable by the kids, and in some countries we learn that the children, and even sometimes the mothers, were all killed (in the USSR, the whole city where they lived was nuked because they had taken control and there was no other way to stop them). However, Gordon defends their value to science and human progress, establishing a school that they will all be moved into, where he can try to teach them, instilling human values of empathy and kindness.

In the end, he comes to understand the threat they pose to humanity at large (planning to spread and start new colonies), he calmly sends his wife away under some pretense, and managing to block them out of his mind, he goes for his final lesson with a bomb in his briefcase and blows them all up. While The Bad Seed chews the scenery at every opportunity (delightfully so), this films plays it cool, and that is perhaps its central theme. The children’s lack of passion, of affect is both troubling and powerful. They are more open to Gordon than some others because he is able to approach them from a position of scientific curiosity and not outrage, and in the end, he defeats them by acting in a precise, calculated manner.  It’s even easy to miss his change from their defender to their killer, and when I first watched it, I found that to be a flaw – something was missing.

While the first half had been so intriguing, in the second half, as we moved towards the climax, it was all so cool – where was the drama of this final decision? But on reflection, it is fitting that his was the only possible solution. The angry villagers with pitchforks and torches were immediately rebuffed and/or burned to death. The scientist who has simply made a reasonable decision and who goes to carry it out in a dispassionate manner can successfully mask his intentions and carry them to completion, thus saving the town, and possible the world itself.  It is not that he lacks emotion (he seems to love his wife, had been initially quite happy at the prospect of parenthood, and played the piano wistfully waiting to go off and explode), but he can act without it, and thus triumphs.

What’s Worse – Fire or Ice?

While Rhoda lacks empathy or true tenderness, she experiences passions. She wants, and demands, and takes hotly, lashing out when not accommodated. The children of Midwich are rather the opposite, acting only out of a calculated biological drive to live and to spread.  They do not rage or feel wronged; they do just that which is necessary. And which of these is really the larger threat?

In both cases, morality and ethics are absent. Neither cares about how others feel or what they think. But one is hot, chaotic, and probably far easier to identify with – we all get angry sometimes, feel wronged, want to have what we want when we want it – and the other is cold, reasonable, and organized. For my part, Rhoda is scariest in a personal sense – we know that the world is full of jerks and egoists who only care about themselves, and we constantly have to interact with them (though hopefully none of them will burn us alive, drown us, or push us down the stairs). Furthermore, the horror of a child being so irredeemable is really awful. But the children of Midwich represent something much scarier on a larger, necessarily impersonal, scale. In their uniformity and cold, functional intention, they are the drive of progress, of power, of the future, of any system or machine that cares not who gets crushed beneath its wheels as it moves inexorably forward. Do they have a whiff of Nazism in their Aryan appearance and drive to power and domination?  Perhaps Rhoda is a more horrific person (because she is a person – a simplified perhaps, but well-drawn young sociopath), but the children of Midwich are a more chilling concept, especially since it probably can’t be forestalled by thinking of a brick wall: the future will come for us – it cannot be reasoned with – and it will break us.

But I’m sure your kid is great. A little angel. Nothing to worry about at all…