Polish - Flinching with Delight

La Folie Halloween Show 2024 and a Recent Film Roundup

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Glen — No Comments ↓

As a horror blogger, I have long read other horror blogs and I think one of the most common sentences has to be “sorry I haven’t posted in a while,” or at least I like to think it’s that common cause, boy oh boy, does it apply to me! And to make matters worse, I missed all of October – “spooky season,” the lead up to the high holiday of the horror calendar, Halloween. All over social media, I saw people posting their movie-a-day watchlists, with fans around the world marathoning through the month, and as I check my Letterboxd, I find that I only managed 8 movies, horror or otherwise, for the whole of October.

But I like to think I have an excuse. As I’ve posted about previously, outside of blogging, one of my main pursuits is working with a retro cabaret group here in Kraków, Poland where I live, and every year we do a Halloween show – it’s always one of our biggest and most popular, as the holiday really brings out new, fun, creative ideas. And this year was no exception – so, sure, I didn’t write about any movies last month, but it’s because I was busy making my own Halloween, and even, to some extent, horror content. And if you will all indulge me, kindly strangers of the internet, I’d like to share a bit of what I’ve been working on.

La Folie Retro Cabaret Show – Halloween

This was a big show, with a wide range of Halloween-y variety acts, and the vast majority of it was brand new. Ghosts and vampires, mad scientists and mummies, black widows and boogie men – singing, dancing, aerial arts, burlesque, and comedy – funny, sexy, thrilling, and hopefully, once or twice, even a bit scary. We had ballet, swing, and Irish dance, we had big Broadway style show stoppers, we had loads of comedy sketches, and games with the audience – we even had a fair amount of special effects for the stage – tricks with powerful magnets, specially prepared candles, and blood pumps – neat stuff, if I do say so myself. And I do.

Honestly, there were too many numbers to detail each here (and I worked on them to varying degrees – e.g., if something is mostly dance, I’m no choreographer and I don’t play a big part in giving it shape), so I think I’ll just focus on a couple that I was particularly involved in, which were more ‘horror’ focused, and which I feel presented something new for our stage.

Haunted Theatre / Séance

Ours is a variety show made up of a series of discrete acts and we don’t tend to force much in the way of larger narrative onto the proceedings, but this time, we did add a bit of framing and in that, we had opportunities for some real Halloween-y fun, spooky atmosphere, and at least one solid jump scare. Before starting, the MC came out to explain that in the days leading up to performance, odd things had been happening and that we thought the theatre could be haunted. Of course, then the lights went out on him and, as technicians struggled to get them working again, while a ‘spooky’ version of our theme song played, he turned on a flashlight and was subjected to a series of creepy sights – a jump scare with a werewolf (that I think landed), a creepy little girl on a rocking horse, a Blair Witch-esque woman standing in a corner, tentacles grabbing at his face and a skeleton clutching at his legs, and finally, a bag headed figure approaching him with a knife as his flashlight flickered on and off before he was lost to the darkness and a scream rang out though the theatre.

This was such a simple little introduction – besides a considerable amount of time taken engineering the ‘creepy theme,’ the action was simply conceived and it did not take long to stage and rehearse it a few times (all told, it was only about a minute long), but I honestly think it worked great, setting up the night with a totally different vibe than we usually offer. More things this effective should be this easy to do.

This then led into our first number, which also functioned as a kind of secondary frame. Choreographed to the tune, “Swinging at the Séance,” this was set in an old abandoned house where we see two ghosts in Victorian wedding costume moving slowly and forlornly through the space, unable to connect with each other. Then a crowd of young people burst in with their loud music – laughing and drinking and carrying on, and finally, starting to dance. Through the tumult and boisterousness, the two spirits glide, each focusing more and more on a pair of dancers at the front of the stage until after a small lift, each dancer, unaware of the lurking ghostly presence, momentarily stands in front of one of the apparitions, who subsequently grab them from behind. Blackout.

The lights rise on the two dancers moving slowly and romantically, possessed by the spirits who can no longer be seen, able to hold each other once more in their borrowed bodies. The lights go cool and the other dancers slowly freeze as we watch the dead lovers embrace until the bodies seize up and fall to the floor, the party roaring back to life behind them. Eventually the others notice the forms twitching on the stage and react with a comic terror, finally running away.

While the dancing was in our typical wheelhouse (but no less fun), I think we managed something different with the mix of tones – light and comic, but also melancholic and lovely – underlined with a difference of movement styles, focus brought to the ghosts (as themselves or in possessed bodies) by virtue of their slow, steady glide through a churning sea of quick, bouncing bodies.

Then, at the end of the night, seventeen numbers later, we closed both frames by returning to the abandoned house in a straight horror scene. In the five years of giving cabaret performances, this is the first time that we included something that didn’t feature a song or dance or comedy or acrobatics or magic or burlesque, but was simply a dramatic bit of stage action.

All of the dancers from the first act return with a medium to communicate with and hopefully pacify the spirits. They gather round a table with candles and a Ouija board (hand painted by me) and invite the ghosts to speak. The phantasms return, once again taking control of the same bodies as earlier, borrowing text from Adam Mickiewicz (a significant Polish poet of the Romantic era) to share a heartfelt love scene before something seems to scare them away. The lights flicker, the Ouija planchet moves on its own (a special effect of which I’m proud), the candles go out one by one (another effect I’m proud of, and one that I’d first imagined doing more than 20 years ago and finally, for this, puzzled out how to accomplish), and the medium is taken over by a different, angrier, more dangerous spirit.

At first it seems that she is speaking to those in the scene – of their disrespect and inability to heed a warning, but it eventually becomes clear that she is actually addressing the audience, that this hateful spirit is present in the theatre itself, raging at all in attendance and promising to enact a bloody vengeance. It warns the spectators that it will choose one of them to follow, to haunt, to take as payment for their collective transgressions, and then the actress playing the medium screams and collapses, and in the dark (the lights can’t be turned on), it is clear that the performers are freaked out, that this wasn’t in the script, that something scary has actually happened.

Then we do a big finale song and dance to The Monster Mash (for which I sang).

Photo: Jarek Popczyk (that’s me without a pumpkin on my head)

I haven’t surveyed viewers, but I hope this worked for them. I’m really happy with both my self-engineered special effects for the stage and with making a little scene that I think got reasonably creepy and even, hopefully, a bit scary. We’ve done past Halloween shows, but never actually attempted a real scare, so I hope it landed well for people. But hell, even if it didn’t, I was thoroughly happy to try, and I think we stretched creatively in making it.

Night of the Vampires

And this brings me to another piece which was at least a bit out of character for us. Since the very beginning, we’ve had burlesque in the show, and over time, its presence has expanded in the work that we offer – sexy stuff to be sure, but also glamourous or absurd or otherwise creative: classic fan dance or silhouette numbers, a half-and-half Dance with the Devil, a “Sexy Salad,” a three girl strip poker with death scene, a super cute number with two competing 50s housewives accidentally losing their clothes until they finally stop feuding long enough to discover that they’re into each other and who then leave together before their confused husbands come home.

But this was something different. This piece, loosely inspired by Le Fanu’s Carmilla (and thus in quite good company) was easily the most directly ‘erotic’ piece we’ve yet done – with a much more sexual tone and vibe than we generally adopt. Even if a performer is getting down to pasties and a g-string, all in a mood of ‘fun with sexiness,’ that doesn’t always mean that it is exactly “erotic,” but I like to think this time it was. Now, I don’t know how this increased eroticism was received by the whole audience. At least one friend was really excited by it and gave great feedback, and I’ve heard tell of one person for whom it was too much, but as with the last piece discussed, I was so very happy to make it, and I feel so good about what it was that I’m genuinely less concerned with its reception. Maybe that’s greedy and short sighted of me, but if you can’t make what you, yourself, want to see, how do you do anything at all?

Carmilla – the first literary lesbian vampire, predating Dracula by 25 years.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I am a fan of the ‘Lesbian Vampire’ subgenre of horror and have written extensively about it here, here, here, here, and here. And in this case, that’s just what I got to make – a short scene for the stage, only 5 minutes and 40 seconds long, that is its own little Lesbian Vampire piece – with nods to Hammer Horror, Jean Rollin, and Jess Franco – with saturated color and flowing gowns and nakedness and doubling and desire and seduction and blood (with DIY blood pumps and hidden tubes to make the red stuff flow, masked in the bedsheets and under a corset – which I wish I could say worked perfectly, but at least worked reasonably well and next time, we’ll nail it) – what a joy! My horror fan heart was all the more warmed to score it with bits of the soundtrack to Hellraiser and Daughters of Darkness, as well as an awesome Roky Erickson song that I’ve written about here before called ‘Night of the Vampire.’

I wish I could say it had originally been my idea, but if it had, I might not have proposed it. Instead, I must give credit to Madeline Le Blanche, with whom my wife and I produce the cabaret, who thought up a three girl vampire burlesque act featuring Carmilla, Mina from Dracula, and an S&M Lady Van Helsing and asked me to flesh it out. So I went off and wrote a script which, though I felt it was a different direction for us, and could be too explicit for some, I was nonetheless thrilled to craft and was grateful that she’d commissioned it.

We start with a proper young Victorian lady sitting on the edge of her bed and reading a book. The music is the romantically dark and dramatic main theme to Hellraiser. Behind her, a shadow appears in the window and a hand touches the glass. The young lady looks up, feeling that something is strange, when the hand in the window extends and the damsel’s hand does the same. The silhouetted figure controls her and we see them mirror each other. The young woman’s hand caresses her own face and slides down her bodice before she pushes it away, then her other hand is controlled to do the same – and again she shoves it from her, mystified by what is happening. Both of her hands are made to reach behind and unclasp the ribbon from which a small cross hangs, allowing it to fall to the floor. Finally, the shadow causes one hand, after a final caress, to sharply turn her head to look back and see the darkened figure standing on the veranda. She recoils, but is pulled closer and closer to the door. When finally she reaches it, she pulls open the curtains to reveal the glamourous woman outside, looking in at her with red, hungry eyes. She opens the door.

Fog and moonlight pour in as Carmilla glides downstage, before turning to the young woman who is fearfully backing away and, with a wave of her hand, mesmerizing her and summoning her closer. The music shifts (to a bit from Daughters of Darkness) and a mirrored striptease begins. Their bodies copy each other perfectly – Carmilla enjoying her control over her prey, and, let’s call her Mina, or possibly Laura (more fitting for Carmilla), at first shocked to witness her own actions, but clearly enjoying them more and more. All in mirror, gloves come off, and then dresses (this mirror motif, in my mind at least, referencing the cabaret performance in Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos – it is a rather different action, but there is a thematic resonance). The mirror is dropped and Carmilla comes behind the younger woman to remove her corset, leaving her in the requisite diaphanous gown, before presenting her own corset for Mina/Laura to undo. Finally, down to pasties, a g-string, red contacts, and fangs, Carmilla guides her to the bed and lays her down, head towards the audience.

Initially, the ingénue is shy and covers herself somewhat with a bedsheet (which hides a tube connected to a blood pump, allowing her to position it for the blood effect), causing Carmilla to pause in her climb over the supine body as if to ask if she actually wants this. Mina/Laura acquiesces, lowering her shift to reveal her pastie adorned breast as Carmilla lowers her head to bite (and the performer compresses a large syringe, causing the blood to flow). It is sensual and bloody and Mina/Laura’s body seems to seize in tortured ecstacy before finally giving out and collapsing as her life’s blood drips down her neck and hair, pooling on the carpet (which we laid down to aid in rapid cleanup).

Then suddenly, with another change in the music, shifting to a driving rock sound, Carmilla looks up, hissing, and we see Lady Van Helsing enter on a higher level and descend the stairs to do battle. Carmilla greedily clutches her victim’s body, pulling it back to drop on the floor as she rises to face her crossbow wielding adversary. Again, she employs the mirroring power, leading Van Helsing to give up her weapon, knock off her own hat and undo her flowing cape. Lady Van Helsing draws a golden dagger to hold up as a cross, and after, lashing out, Carmilla claws at her, ripping off her skirt in the process, Van Helsing holds the cross to her head, eliciting a hiss as Carmilla loses consciousness.

Lady Van Helsing moves Carmilla on to the bed and, securing her in place by laying the cross on her bared breast, chains her hands and begins to remove her own gloves as a surgeon might don them. After a walk round the bed undoing her corset (among other things, making the blood syringe strapped to her back accessible, though still hidden from the audience), Lady Van Helsing draws from her bag a bottle of Holy Water and proceeds to lash Carmilla with it. Carmilla writhes in a mix of pain and pleasure as if in play with hot wax. Van Helsing then draws a stake and trails it up and down Carmilla’s body, teasingly, before raising it high to drive it home, when she realizes that Mina/Laura has risen behind her.

Gently taking her wrist, Van Helsing is made to drop the stake, as Mina/Laura moves her hair aside and comes in to bite (with her other hand, beginning to squeeze the pump). After a moment, she pulls back and looks to Carmilla, bound on the bed below, and then bites again, lowering the vampire hunter down so that her blood falls onto Carmilla’s body and into her waiting mouth. They both feed as the lights begin to fade. All three look out to the audience, lost to sensation as darkness engulfs all.

Hot, huh?

Again, I don’t really know how it was taken in by most of the audience, but I was so gratified to have this opportunity to make a bit of vampy erotic horror. I think the intersection of those two elements can be really fruitful – both absolutely to do with, and eliciting reactions from, the body and the mind – the hunger and the desire for the other being both mental and physical – sexual and violent, of the flesh and of blood. There is attraction and need and complication – all essential human experiences. This is a big part of what I really appreciate in Lesbian Vampire movies, wherein there is often a focus on desire and pleasure and it’s not simply about, as can often be the case in sexually explicit content, unveiling “boobs” for a presumed male viewership (though it can’t be denied that’s often present as well), and I think we offer that in this number. I’m immensely proud of this piece and I hope someday to be able to share it here (there’s been discussion of filming it for posterity, so who knows – it could happen).

So yeah, that was my Halloween (and of course, there were loads of other cool acts that I’m not even scratching the surface of here: 2 masked “boogie men” competing over who can best frighten a little girl, a Black Swan/White Swan ballet number complete with heart ripping, an Irish burlesque – dancing widdershins on the barrows by moonlight to gain gold, finding it hidden in the layers of clothes until an inner fey is unveiled, a skeleton doing aerial silk work, an audience interactive dating game show where all the contestants are monsters, and much, much, much more). I didn’t write about any movies last month, but my horror fan brain was still appropriately occupied I think.

But Also, Some Recent Watches

Finally, I just wanted to share some thoughts on a couple of movies from this year that, with the show in the rear view mirror, I recently had the chance to catch up on. It’s really rare that I manage to watch anything new, and so it’s always exciting when it happens. First, the other day, I got to check out a double feature of Immaculate and The First Omen. So-called “Twin Films” (such as Dante’s Peak and Volcano from 1997) are nothing new, but it’s a while since I’ve been so aware of two coming out so close to each other with such parallel plots. Of the two, I definitely preferred Immaculate – the atmosphere and performances just pulled me in and it even had some fun jumps and gross out moments – and a climactic sequence before cutting to the credits that was so satisfying, and so nice to see that it got to “go there.”

But while I think The First Omen suffered somewhat both from being a prequel, and thus in service to a pre-existing story while also setting up a new series that can grow out of it, as well as having a very predictable turn that I felt was intended to be a ‘big twist,’ but which was obvious from the very beginning, it did do something really interesting. My understanding of the conventional wisdom surrounding the Satanic threat books and films of the 60s and 70s, such as The Omen and the Exorcist, is that they represented a pushback against a secularizing counterculture moment in which society was turning against all authority, including that of faith, and especially a hierarchal institution like “The Church.” These works are all predicated on discovering the truth of radical evil – there is a devil, he is real and dangerous in our lives, and the only possible solace and protection comes from faith, from God, from the Church. Whether their creators directly intended this or not (for example, I read that Ira Levin, an atheist Jew, regretted that his excellent, feminist, cultural paranoia novel, Rosemary’s Baby had inadvertently participated in this reactionary moment), many of these works served to scare a reading/viewing population back to the pews. It’s the main reason that I’ve often found myself turned off by such content, especially exorcism films – they so often feel like proselytization.

But in this little, modern prequel – a really fun scary movie that takes great pleasure in delivering some reasonably shocking imagery of its own (with one much discussed moment that I had not seen on film before) – there is such an interesting angle taken. This brings me to a big spoiler that wasn’t obvious, so be forewarned. In this case, the sinister cabal within the church that is pulling all the strings to trap our protagonist into birthing the antichrist isn’t actually “Satanist.” Rather, they are an ultraorthodox wing of the Catholic Church, worried about the secularizing counterculture moment of the 60s/70s, who decide that they need to scare the population back into the pews by birthing the Antichrist (sound familiar?). The villain of the prequel is effectively the personification of the actual cultural soil out of which the original book and film grew. In this way, the film makers have their cake and eat it too – able to make a spooky antichrist movie with all the fixins, and still not turn off a loyal horror viewer such as myself who is otherwise loath to engage with such content. Neat.

And then last night, I finally got myself out to The Substance. I’d intended to do so more than a month ago, but with the Halloween show underway, it was just impossible to take an evening to go watch something for my own pleasure (I remember a good friend having the saying that “you can see the show or you can be the show”). But what a pleasure! Easily the most fun I’ve had at the cinema in a good long while – and I even got a few people walking out in the final act, which made it all even better (I’d heard it likened to Brian Yuzna’s Society, and I think it delivered). The intense style, the driving energy, the performances, the campy streak of black comedy and social satire, and the goopy, bloody, bizarre practical effects – everything about this movie was a blast and I love that this weird flick is getting so much mainstream attention (also, I cackled at the Act III title card). But what I think was most interesting about it of course requires spoilers, so beware.

Obviously so much of the thematic is all tied up in gender and youth and beauty – that’s clear from the outset, it is so present in the satirical, ironic gaze of the camera, and it narratively explodes in the final reel in a fashion at once emotionally cathartic, hilariously absurd, and honestly sad. But it is also quite on the nose and I can see someone taking issue with its bluntness (kind of like the big speech in the Barbie movie, but with considerably more body horror). But I feel there was so much to the movie. Ultimately, I think there was a larger exploration of people’s inability to share, to love the other as oneself (which includes the edict to love oneself) which surfaces in self-hating, self-destructive tendencies on both personal levels and for society as a whole. The Devil’s bargain that Elisabeth makes is one for which most of us would fail to follow the rules, and there is a satisfying horror in seeing it destroy her and feeling it cut close to home. One need not specifically “be an older woman in Hollywood, subjected to cruel double standards that serve to shape girls into objects for male pleasure when they’re young and then forget them when they age” to identify with the toxic impulse to wish oneself away (and then make it happen with compulsive, self-erasing behavior) in favor of some ideal, some wished for version of oneself, the “better” person who would garner the approval of not just others, but more importantly, yourself. This theme (we greedily neglect to take care of each other just as we fail to take care of, or love, or even just not hate ourselves), I found particularly effective and well handled – and it was served up with wicked humor, cinematic verve, and bubbling, fleshy, gory glee, presenting a harsh, bleak notion in a manner that is simply fun. I thought it was rather something special.

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And that brings us up to date. I hope you’ve all had a good spooky season. I have a plan for November, but it is ambitious, so we’ll see how that goes. It might come early December. Wish me luck!

Polish Horror Series #6 – I Like Bats

Posted on October 13, 2022 by Glen — No Comments ↓

Really digging into horror cinema (or any cinema) means engaging with all kinds of work. You’ve got masterpieces that are both entertaining and artistically profound. You’ve got cheap B-movies that aren’t “great works of art” but evince a love of the creative process and feature some worthy ideas. You’ve got utter trash that is all the more lovable for just how trashy it is. The highest highs and the lowest lows both have their pleasures.

But sometimes a work can be hard to classify. There are ideas there. There are moments, elements, a look, a shot, a concept that intrigues, a performance that holds your attention, but it doesn’t exactly come together for you. Sometimes you don’t know if you’re encountering an artistic choice, where filmmakers have really taken a chance on something different (narratively, in how a film is cut, in a non-naturalistic style of performance) or if it is frankly just ineptitude. Are the themes and ideas of a given film complex and nuanced, ironically presented and rich in their ambiguity, their seeming ambivalence in fact the point, or has an intended message just been muddled, having haphazardly thrown together actions, events, character choices, and images, resulting in a film that fails to achieve cohesion?

Continuing my intermittent journey through the relatively limited terrain of Polish Horror (See others here), today’s entry is just such a film. From moment to moment, I found it quite watchable, and there were elements to enjoy, but I’m still not quite sure what to do with it and I suspect some of its more puzzling aspects may simply represent failures of good storytelling. But maybe they are intentional subversions of standard narrative conventions and expectations. Either way, I don’t think my role here is to judge “quality,” but to discuss whatever of interest may be found in a given work. So, without further ado, here we go…

Lubię Nietoperze (1986) (I Like Bats)

Polish film posters from the 70s and 80s are a trip!

The first act of Krystyna Kofta’s and Grzegorz Warchol’s sometimes evocative, sometimes blackly comic, and sometimes narratively obtuse and meandering I Like Bats is quite an enjoyable vampire flick. Izabela, or Iza for short (Katarzyna Walter), is a modern, independent vampire in a small town, who is regularly hounded by her aunt and the ghost of her grandfather (who expresses his wishes by making his absurdly angry looking portrait fall from the wall) to finally settle down, get a man, and stop vamping around.

But Iza doesn’t want to hear about it. She seems happy living her life her way and rolls her eyes at her aunt’s entreaties. She spurns the advances of one pushy, entitled local creep and seems to take pleasure in hanging out with her bats, making pottery for her aunt’s curio shop, and apparently preying solely on unpleasant men, often those who first try to prey on her.

Her un-lifestyle seems quite satisfying and she resists her aunt’s insistence that it’s time to start acting like a ‘real woman.’ I think the film is most gratifying in these early scenes of her presenting herself as vulnerable (sometimes dressed as a prostitute, sometimes simply being a woman walking home alone at night) only to turn the tables on some sleazebag, and sometimes getting to be fully badass, walking away from exploding vans, luxuriating in the rain and the night, and indulging in quality time with her beloved, shrieking, chattering bats.

But then a guy comes to the curio shop, buys a tea set and the main story starts in earnest, as does the narrative and thematic ambivalence. Basically, she falls in love (for some reason) with this psychiatrist and has herself committed to his institution to be cured of her vampirism (does she really want that cure or does she just want him – it’s not clear). He doesn’t believe her and treats her for delusion, but eventually, he comes around, falls in love and, after a bout of artfully filmed sex (her first time), ala Pinocchio, she becomes a ‘real girl,’ seeing her reflection for the first time, and they get married and have kids. But in the final moments, it’s revealed that the vampirism has passed to her young daughter.

But this middle stretch gets difficult because the motivation for so many character choices and the moments when a character actually feels something and changes somehow all felt like they happened off screen. The film maintains a light, ironic tone, often set to the playful score by Zbigniew Preisner (who scored a few Hollywood films but would be best known internationally for his work with Kieślowski, e.g., Red, White, Blue, or The Double Life of Veronique), and there is no real sense of urgency to the proceedings. It’s hard to fathom what she sees in the psychiatrist (named Professor Jung – perhaps there’s something to read into this – maybe we are to take all these figures as archetypes and not characters as such), and his journey from skepticism to passionate love feels unearned. The world of the film is one where nothing has stakes (argh – sorry) or happens for a clear reason. Cars crash and no one notices. Kids break shop windows and come in to retrieve their ball and no one mentions the window. A woman in a bar gets bored, takes off her top and starts dancing and no one bats an eye (again, I can’t help myself). Things just are. And then they are something else.

All the same, it is disappointing when this cool, self-possessed character, who seems to rather enjoy her vampirism, suddenly sees a pretty boring guy, gets immediately love sick and starts pining after him; worse still, in the end, she’s somehow happy to have so dramatically changed. It all feels so disheartening that, given the ironic elements, I wonder if this is intentional. Are we meant to view her change as a fairy tale happy ending (the virginal dead girl gets “kissed” by the prince and “comes to life”) or are we perhaps supposed to see the inherent personality erasing loss of self in this recurring narrative?

Fairy tales often progress in an unquestioning mode. Things simply are the way they are. Whether a fish talks or a bean stalk grows into the clouds, characters accept everything as natural; nothing is ever shocking and I Like Bats does lean on some fairy tale elements. No one really questions the existence of vampires (they only deny that Iza could be one as apparently in this world, all vampires are men – is this some comment on how a certain kind of sexual desire is perceived?). The cinematography (which is really quite attractive) is often dreamy and artful. The location used for the institute is Moszna Castle, a palace with 99 turrets sometimes referred to as “Polish Disneyland” (also – and I wonder if this was meant to function as a kind of visual pun given that the castle is quite well known in Poland, and there is a strong theme of sexual desire running under the vampirism – “moszna” in Polish translates as “scrotum” – so take that as you will).

Furthermore, the film seems to take place in some unspecified time with some modern sensibilities but costuming and cars that seem from a more distant past. Similarly, the setting seems to be deliberately unfixed – signs are in Polish, but in one scene, they visit an institute where vampires are imprisoned in cages on the beach at “the ocean” (while Poland is on the Baltic Sea, it is nowhere near the ocean). There are many advertisements (for cigarettes mostly) in English and Iza’s small town seems surprisingly multi-cultural for my (perhaps incorrect) impression of Poland in the 80s. This all comes together to imply a dreamlike no-place and no-when, peopled by odd characters who sometimes act for no-why.

This had been on my radar for some time just because it is a Polish vampire movie (and there aren’t many if any others exist at all), but I recently got the chance to see it with English subtitles because the Severin Films remaster just came to Shudder (sadly, it’s quite difficult to do screen captures from Shudder – so the pics here are from an inferior print – the newly remastered version really looks so much better) as part of a set of movies accompanying the second edition of Kier-La Janisse’s fascinating House of Psychotic Women (the first edition of which I wrote about here). Her focus is on films that present “female madness” and I’m very curious how she frames this one. Though it is her explicit reason to be in the clinic, Iza’s vampirism does not read as any kind of mental illness. She seems quite happy with it and the way she lives. If anything, her insistence on the attention of this man seems like the unmotivated compulsion. Maybe therein lies the madness?

She seems constantly surrounded by sleazy, irritating, or pathetic men, and she seems to exclusively feed on those who in some way hunt her, who desire her, sometimes acting on that desire violently. Professor Jung doesn’t seem much interested in her at all, either because he doesn’t like women, or he doesn’t want any distractions from his work (two explanations he gives), or he just doesn’t like her. Is his indifference the magic spell that infatuates her so? She is only upset that he doesn’t take more interest. And in the end, when finally he comes around, rescues her from the beach-vampire-cage institute, and takes her off to go skinny dipping/make love to her until she’s human, she seems very happy in her “normal” human family life. If anything, the reveal of her daughter’s fangs (and penchant for killing gardeners) plays as a darkly comic twist – that even though Iza has put her dark past behind her and settled down into civilized life, this unruly female desire resurfaces in her offspring. Does the film want us to be happy for Iza in her newfound “normalcy” and to laugh at how the “problem” persists or does it want us to mourn for Iza’s loss of identity as she disappears into bland conformity and to laugh at how good it is that her lost vivacity continues in her child? Un-life will find a way.

It is a consistently watchable (and again, the look and feel and sound of it all is striking and expressive) and frequently enjoyable film, which still puzzles in its often confounding character beats. Is this an issue of poor editing and half-baked writing, or is it instead successful in ironically telling us a fairy tale that we should view as facile and even harmful, its disjointed, apparently unmotivated qualities supporting that reading? It’s hard to find much analysis on it in either English or Polish (thus, I’m particularly curious to see what Kier-La Janisse has to say). The short English descriptions online present a quirky vampire romance (but I found no real analysis or criticism beyond user reviews saying “weird, great movie” or “weird, boring movie”) and much of what I’ve found in Polish either describes it as a bit of superficial, erotic schlock produced late in the communist regime as a kind of ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the public entertained and thus pacified (attacking it as regrettably ‘low art’) or uses it as an example of how Polish cinema really didn’t respect and therefore didn’t succeed at genre film (attacking Polish film culture for being over-snobbish when it comes to matters of ‘low’ and ‘high’ art). Hey, if any Polish readers know of more insightful readings out there, please let me know – I’m very curious and limited by my embarrassingly weak Polish skills.

For my part, I watched it twice in a couple days and enjoyed watching it both times, but I can’t say if I think it’s good or not. It has been interesting to consider and it’s certainly got moments that shine. It’s fascinating how sometimes watching something from a culture you didn’t grow up in (even if you’ve lived there for a while – I’ve been in Poland for 14 years at this point), you can be more forgiving of faults, more open to reading what seem like very strange choices or even mistakes in a more charitable light. I often feel like maybe there’s something culturally informing all this that doesn’t land for me, that just goes over my head. It makes for a rich and sometimes mysterious viewing experience. If you’re not in a hurry, and you’re in the mood for an odd little piece of off-kilter vampire cinema from a specific time and place (trying to be no time or place), perchance this one is for you.

Polish Horror Series #5 – The Lure

Posted on July 30, 2022 by Glen — No Comments ↓

So it’s been a few months since my last entry in this series. I guess I’ve just felt intimidated at the prospect of working my way through the films for which no English subtitles are available. However, that day is not here yet. Today’s movie, The Lure (Córki Dancingu) is readily available (with English subtitles) and is really worth taking a look at, especially in terms of genre in general and horror specifically in Polish cinema.

When I started this series, I pointed out how there were rather few local horror films in this country in which I’ve come to live. Today’s film, a horror/fairy tale/art-house/mermaid/siren/heart eating musical set in and around a Warsaw nightclub in the 1980’s, offers a fascinating case study, especially in terms of the differences between its release domestically and internationally. If you watch the International trailer below, it is mermaids, mermaids, mermaids, sharp teeth, a bit of choreography, and the nightclub setting:

Watch this video on YouTube

If now, you watch the Polish trailer, all you get is the nightclub and sexy times:

CÓRKI DANCINGU - oficjalny zwiastun nr 1

Watch this video on YouTube

The respective posters tell the same story. Even the titles imply different films. “The Lure” sounds connected to fishing, and hence, fish – and their tails, but also something alluring, lured towards some kind of trap. “Córki Dancingu” directly translates as “Daughters of the Dance-Party”; it is a movie about girls at a nightclub. Nothing supernatural here.

I can only assume the Polish distributer felt there wasn’t a market domestically for a mermaid-horror-musical and decided to lean hard into the cool sexiness of the nightlife. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t do great in its home country as people bought tickets for one film and got quite another. Internationally, distributors leaned into its weird-genre-hybrid charms and this ambitious, fascinating, admittedly not-entirely-successful-but-still-essentially-likeable oddity found its audience. It’s on Netflix here in Poland and I wonder if, having been around for a while, the people coming to it now are more aware of what they’re getting into, and are thus more satisfied with what they get.

The Lure (2015)

Narratively, the film is inspired by a number of sources. The parents of both Agnieszka Smoczińska (the director) and Barbara and Zuzanna Wronska (Ballady i Romanse, the band who did all the music for the film) were part of the Warsaw nightclub scene in the eighties (as a club owner and performers respectively) and the three women, having grown up in similar circumstances, reportedly wanted to engage with their shared childhood experiences. The local legend of the “Mermaid of Warsaw” (more on this below) also figures into things. Finally, the most structural narrative influence is clearly Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (a story that was explicitly written to give children something gentler and kinder to read, with a nice happy ending, but which to modern eyes, is incredibly dark and sad), which really shapes the main thread of the plot.

In short, two mermaids, Złota (Golden) and Srebna (Silver) surface in the Wisła river (which runs through Warsaw) and find the three members of a band, “Figs and Dates” (who may also be a family – it’s not entirely clear) grilling and singing on the river bank. Srebna is instantly enamored of the handsome young bass player so they come ashore and join the band at a nightclub. In this version, they have legs as long as they’re dry, but what they lack will play into the story soon. The owner of the club is wowed by what the band has found and having overcome very brief concerns of having seemingly underage girls in his club, puts them to work as backup singers and strippers (after having some private time to sample their wares for himself – in a way that, though we don’t see exactly what happens, seems to have clearly been abusive). The customers are amazed by their tails which appear once wet and their beautiful voices, and they are an instant hit. But the central story is how Srebna falls for the young bass player and how her sister tries to pull her away from this doomed love which will eventually destroy her. What follows is only a spoiler if you haven’t read the Andersen.

So, in Andersen’s story, the mermaid must sacrifice her voice in order to get legs so she can go on land to meet her prince. She does this under the condition that if he marries someone else and she doesn’t kill him, she will die and turn to sea foam. So, in this version, she has legs if she wants them, but only has sexual organs on her fish tale. As the drummer/father(?) of the band presents them to the club owner, “They’re smooth, like Barbie dolls.” Thus, her relationship with the bassist can only go so far and he’s pretty turned off by the whole fish sex thing. And so, she undergoes an illicit, underground surgery where her tail is sawed off and presumably given to the woman whose lower half she then has sewn on. In the process, she loses her ability to sing, the girls lose their positions at the club, the band kind of falls apart, and the bassist still doesn’t love her.

Before you know it, we’re on a wedding boat, he’s married, and Złota is begging her sister to eat him before the sun comes up. In the end, Srebna goes to him, they embrace, her teeth turn sharp and scary, and at the last second, as the sky goes all golden, she just hugs him, loves him, and dissolves into foam. Złota rips the guy’s throat out and runs off into the sea. You know, it’s a story for kids!

Now, when you think “mermaid” I doubt horror is the first genre that comes to mind, but I think a linguistic issue comes to play here. In Polish there is only one word for ‘mermaids’ (beautiful women with fish tales that lonely sailors have spotted since time immemorial – though they’re usually just manatees or something similarly pretty) and ‘sirens’ (evil women from Greek mythology – who originally had bird parts – who would sing beautiful songs to lure sailors into crashing on the rocks and drowning). As it is one word in Polish, the two creatures are combined in one, and the two mermaids in this movie are also sirens (a kind of monster) with a habit of luring men with song and sometimes ripping them apart and eating their hearts. We only see this once or twice, but I think it’s enough to justify classifying this as ‘horror’ insofar as it is a “monster movie” of sorts, though perhaps a bit closer to the old Universal classics in that the monsters are the most sympathetic characters – and are simply misunderstood, mistreated, and taken advantage of by the human protagonists.

Beyond the notes of horror, particularly when hearts get munched on, the dominant tone is that of a fairy tale in that these ‘monsters’ are totally of the world of the story. No one’s mind is blown that mermaids exist; it’s just extraordinary to have caught a couple of them. And it is obvious that, as sirens, they could be dangerous – one of the first things the club owner asks upon meeting them is if they bite, but the drummer/father says they’re still young (he’ll learn how wrong he was later). Sometimes in fairy tales, things just happen and they are accepted by the characters within without shock. That passivity is featured here. Also, I find it interesting that almost no character in the film gets a name, but just a role. In the end credits, the members of the band, all prominent in the story, are simply “Percussionist,” “Bassist,” and “Vocalist” just as in a fairy tale, the characters will be “The Prince,” “The Shoemaker,” or “The Witch.”

So, regarding fairy tales, another one is very important here. In Poland, it’s quite common for some legendary creature to be associated with a given city. Wrocław has its gnomes, Kraków (where I live) has got a dragon under the hill, and Warsaw has a mermaid – she’s even on the official crest of the city. The story of the Warsaw mermaid is that she came to the banks of the river and at first the local fishermen were upset that someone was eating all their fish, so they made plans to catch her, but when they heard her sing, they loved her and allowed her to stay. However, one greedy merchant decided to take advantage of the situation, caught her in a net, and took her around to fairs and markets, displaying her beauty and monstrosity for a price. But, fortunately, the fishermen heard her cries and came to rescue her. Ever since then, armed with sword and shield, she has been there to protect the city.

What this story brings to the mix, besides a historical link between the city and mermaids/sirens, is the theme of exploitation, a significant undercurrent of Smoczyński’s film. Just as the Warsaw mermaid was captured and put on display, Srebna and Złota are, almost immediately upon entering human society, brought into the sex industry. The drummer has them strip for the club owner to show off their oddly featureless groins before splashing them with water and inviting him to digitally explore the slits on their tails. Satisfied, the owner wants some time alone with them. It’s interesting how impassive they are through this process. The director has stated in interviews that she intended a parallel with the immigrant experience, and the exploitation inherent within. At least at the beginning, the girls are unperturbed by the requests these humans make of them. However, after being left alone with this sweaty, sleazy older man, they are found unconscious, naked (in human form) and seemingly hurt by the experience. Even these magical creatures of uncertain age and experience can be exploited.

This extends into scenes with the family/band. In a late scene, the girls ask why they never play Frisbee, or go get ice cream, or get paid. In short, they are not family – they are not treated with love and care as children, and at the same time, they are not employees, paid for their services. They give of their bodies and their love and their voices and are afforded no respect or care or remuneration in return. In fact, upon realizing that they may be responsible for a man murdered by the river bank, the drummer/father abruptly punches them in the face, knocking them out, and the band rolls them up in carpets and throws them off a bridge. Złota responds to this upon return by eating his thumb (so, they do bite) and Srebna responds by having her tail chopped off so she can finally ‘be a girl’ for the bassist and they can have sex.

Sex and the (nude female) body loom especially large over the proceedings, and it is interesting how much it feels like this is a film made by a woman. While so many characters may leer at Srebna and Złota, the camera doesn’t. The body is a (super)natural thing and there’s nothing remarkable about someone walking around with no clothes on; the two of them are often unclothed, but they don’t seem quite naked – they wouldn’t normally be wearing clothes anyway – and their matter-of-fact manner is striking. There is also attention given to the clammy, scaled corporeality of their fishiness, the most natural thing for them, but something gross and/or fascinating for others. Similarly, physical desire is a strong presence, whether in terms of a bloody hunger for men’s hearts, a sweaty late night hook up, or Srebna’s desperation to have a full female body with which to consummate her love, and finally feel her affections fully returned.

It’s striking to me that, for all that Srebna meets a tragic end, she is really the only character in the film who is ever actually happy. However ill-advised her love is, she does feel it and the moment before turning to foam, she is at peace, glowing with joy. Złota is distraught throughout by her sister’s choices. Triton makes a few appearances and tries to talk sense into her. The handsome bassist isn’t into the tail and once she’s had her surgery, is uncomfortable in new ways. And every other denizen of this vodka fueled nightlife world, in spite of the surface level hedonism, seems suffused with emptiness and regret. The film is sometimes frenetic and wild, and sometimes libidinous, but more than anything else, it is sad. I assume that these notes are the most autobiographical elements of Smoczyński’s feature.

Which brings me to the songs. It is a musical and some of the music is quite good. However, it is in the musical numbers that I think the film sometimes feels less successful. Many of the songs seem to exist to primarily express a feeling, a concept, and rarely if ever link directly to the action of the narrative. Thus, they bring the story to a halt most of the time and while there is artistic and lyrical value to them and their filming, they give the film a disjointed quality that doesn’t always serve. I think there is a 75 minute, tight, dramatic, effective story tucked away inside of this sometimes shambolic film.

However, I think it’s a less interesting approach to focus on how something doesn’t work rather than considering what these other elements contribute, even if I might find them frustrating. I suspect the director didn’t really want to make a straight narrative film, and that these other tastes of life that suffuse this world express something of her own personal childhood experience of this scene. I could be wrong, but it feels as if there had been a lot of openness in the filming, filling every nook and cranny with character and theme and expression in often unscripted ways, and that it really was brought together in editing. If anything, rather than the songs and ancillary action interfering with the flow of the story, maybe the strength of the central story stands in the way of the film working as a more stream of consciousness-abstract piece. My mind just wants to lean on narrative as it is the easiest thing; it’s what I’ve been the most conditioned to focus on.

In the song sequences, and also in much of the negative space around the central story, there are so many little details, glimpses of the lives and failures and betrayals of various characters. This night-time world is full of lived-in character nuance, clearly meaningful to Smoczyńska. In an interview, she described how it was in her mother’s nightclub that she had her “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment, and first important feeling for a boy.” For example, we see the relationship between the Drummer and the Vocalist fall apart and we don’t really know why. The film isn’t telling their story, but they are afforded their own lives in which significant things happen even if we aren’t paying attention to them. In the end, when the Bassist has been killed, I still wasn’t sure if he was their son or not. They were at the wedding, miserable and avoiding each other – do they now have this grief to deal with as well?

There are so many little pieces like this. In one aside, Złota is picked up by a woman presenting herself as Militia (what the Police were called during communism). The Milita woman claims that Złota had eaten “a member of the public who was out on the town” (which she had), and in song, they flirt, pretend to point guns at each other, and eventually go back to the Militia lady’s place for a spot of piscine sex. At the end of all of this, the woman puts a gun to Złota’s head and Złota looks like she’s about to rip out her throat. What happened next? We don’t know. I feel like this is here to see the difference of how the girls interact in human society. Złota can satisfyingly hook up with someone without needing to turn to sea foam (and then maybe kill her). Triton can front a punk band and garner a bit of worship, but still just be here ‘on holiday.’ Srebna, on the other hand, is trapped in her love, in wanting what she can’t have.

The final effect is wistful, lost. We have been through this fairy tale, and while the little mermaid is happy in her death (which is kind of true in Andersen’s story too in its strange, creepy coda), there are no happy endings for anyone else – just blood and loss, and the open sea. It’s a unique, odd little movie, and while I can’t claim that it entirely works for me, I’m glad it exists, and I’m curious what else Smoczyńska will do.

Finally Braving A Demanding Classic: Possession

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Glen — 1 Comment ↓

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

Today’s film is one of these.

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

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

Possession (1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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