Tag Archives: Zombies

Sometimes They Return: Cemetery Man

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Certain films make such a strong impression that even if you love them, you are rarely drawn to re-watch. It just seems better to sit with the first feeling they gave you – you don’t want a subsequent viewing to rob you of the memory of how they affected you. And sometimes, on top of that, a given film is just hard to find on streaming, even if you wanted to check it out again, such that your remembered first viewing grows in stature over the years: it becomes something treasured, almost mythic, a half glimpsed moment of true magic from long, long ago.

Such it was with today’s film, Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (1994). I’ve previously written on this blog about how I first saw it way back when: In high school, a good friend and I wanted to go see a movie, picked up the local newspaper to see what was playing (as one used to do), and saw a listing for a film with no description, but just an intriguing title. We went to the cinema and there was no poster, and the nameplate outside of the screening room was just sharpie scrawled on an index card. We bought two tickets and assumed we were in for something cheap and terrible, and when we went in, found that we were the only ones in attendance. We figured that with no one else around, we could just crack jokes at something that would be ‘so bad it’s good’ and settled in for a laugh. The film started, and we made a couple of early comments and then quickly shut up – because it was kind of amazing.

Poetic, absurd, artful, and successfully, intentionally funny, this was an unexpected gem, and one of the best cinema experiences I’ve ever had. We’d gone in completely cold, expecting the absolute worst, and were rather blown away by this peculiar Italian horror-comedy that was in turns silly, sexy, dark, and disturbing, with moments of grotesquerie both delightful and off-putting, not to mention a surprising depth and shades of existential profundity. I loved it. And I spent years carrying this memory, especially because in the streaming era, it was really hard to locate. Finally, after about 30 years, Severin restored and released the film on 4K and a clear, crisp print showed up on Shudder that did justice to its craft and artistry, so I was stoked to finally take it in again, and I knew it would be worth writing about. And it was, but not only for the reasons I’d counted on.

Rather, I suppose this is a case of something like “you should never meet your heroes” or maybe “you can never go home again” or some other such pat life advice, as my experience of re-viewing was not quite what I’d hoped for – there were still things to appreciate, but what had so impressed me thirty years ago, didn’t quite do it for me now. There were even elements that actively turned me off. I spent some time thinking about it, and then decided to watch it one more time, and happily then found myself enjoying it much more again. Interesting…

And so that is what I want to write about today – not just the film itself, but how and why it clicked for me so well in the mid-90s, how and why it didn’t when I first re-watched it last week, and what finally, on a third viewing, I found I could still love in it regardless of what could be viewed as significant issues. No matter what, it is clearly a unique piece of work, worthy of appreciation and consideration. So let’s get into it. There’s no way to do this adequately sans spoilers, so you’ve been warned…

Cemetery Man (1994) (A.K.A. Dellamorte Dellamore)

Cemetery Man Poster

Michele Soavi has been mentioned a couple times on this blog before. He was an assistant to Dario Argento and worked with a bunch of other big names in the Italian horror industry in the 80s. You can find him on screen in such masterpieces as Lucio Fulci’s The City of the Living Dead  (1980) or Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985), and of course, his feature directorial debut was one of my favorite slashers of the 80s, the stylish, if sometimes delightfully ridiculous Stagefright (1987) (the killer in the owl mask; Marilyn Monroe playing the sax; the cat jump scare in the back of a car (how did it even get in there?); the theatre director who’s an absolute asshole, but you sympathize with him cause you can see how he can see just how terrible his show is, and he is trying to fix it and can’t, and it just really stings – I love it all!). By 1994, Soave had a few films under his belt and took on this ambitious adaptation of a novel by Tiziano Sclavi, Dellamorte Dellamore, Sclavi being quite well known at the time in Italy for his surreal horror comic, Dylan Dog.

Originally released with the same title as the novel, Cemetery Man follows a worker at a cemetery in a small town in Italy, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) and his nonverbal, simpleminded assistant, Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), as they go about their duties: digging and cleaning graves, changing flowers, and most importantly, shooting in the head the zombies that tend to rise within a week of their original burial. Theirs is an absurd, repetitive, dreary existence and the ennui is strong with them. Dellamorte dispatches the undead that surround him with little more than a shrug and a sigh. And outside the gates of the cemetery, things are little better. The town, Buffalora, beyond the borders of which, he has never ventured, is small, venal, frustratingly bureaucratic and corrupt, with the mayor unconcerned about the dead rising as long as it doesn’t interrupt his campaign for reelection.

Things change for Dellamorte when he sees a beautiful widow (Anna Falchi) attending the funeral of her husband and he immediately falls in love with her. After taking her to visit the cemetery’s ossuary, she is so overcome with passion by the assembled skulls and bones that she also falls for him. They kiss like in a Magritte painting and proceed to have sex on the grave of her beloved husband, who rises and bites her, seemingly leading to her death. Dellamorte keeps her body under watch and when she rises, he shoots her, as is his job. But she just keeps coming back. One night, she returns as a seductive zombie, drawing him to her and sexily taking a chomp out of his shoulder before Gnaghi plants a shovel in her head. Later, she seems to return as the new mayor’s (the other one had died before the election) assistant, who already knows and loves Dellamorte, though she’s never before been to Buffalora or met him. They have a short lived romance, dependent on her belief that he’s impotent, as she has a fear of sex – he has himself chemically castrated, only for her to get over said fear and leave him for the mayor (in a problematic turn of events that we’ll get into later). And finally, she appears as a university student that Dellamorte goes home with. She also tells him that she loves him, but he soon discovers that she is a prostitute and that declaration just made the evening more expensive.

Along the way, Dellamorte goes down a dark path, sliding from a state of poetic melancholy at the beginning, through various romantic ups and downs, not to mention social indignities, to cold blooded acts of murder – some funny, some satisfying, and at least one quite disturbing. He has conversations with Death who tells him to stop killing the dead and that if he doesn’t want people to rise, to go shoot the living in the head to ensure that they won’t. This he does, beginning a vein in the film reminiscent of Kafka or Ionesco wherein it seems impossible for him to be caught, impossible for him to retain responsibility for his own acts, no matter how he tries – the police inspector will never see him for who he is and his crimes are stolen from him. The romantic gloom of the first half of the film is supplanted with an existential hopelessness – nothing has meaning: not life, not death, not love, not sex, not murder. Finally, he and Gnaghi drive away from Buffalora only to learn, as suspected, that there is no world beyond its borders – they are trapped within a snow globe – beautiful and pointless. In an odd turn, Dellamorte and Gnaghi exchange roles, Gnaghi now speaking and Dellamorte responding with Gnaghi’s characteristic grunt, and the film ends – they will return, events will play out again – perhaps a new iteration thereof, but with no meaningful change – nothing ever could.

You could imagine how this impressed me at 16. It is a weird movie to say the least, but one with a wealth of concepts, moods, and images. I’m sure I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but the philosophical vibe washed over me and left me intrigued, puzzled, entertained, and tickled with the idiosyncratic peculiarity of it all.

Plus, it must be said that it is beautiful to look at and also really quite funny, with loads of memorable details: the bus full of scouts that drive off a cliff and of course return as zombies, one of which keeps rubbing sticks between his hands menacingly as if to start an undead campfire, the sex dripping from Anna Falchi’s seductive line, “you know, you’ve got a real nice ossuary,” the scene when Gnaghi, so infatuated with the mayor’s daughter, vomits on her right before her boyfriend shows up on his motorcycle – she exclaims, “he threw up on me,” and the boyfriend responds, “cool – new fad” before she jumps on behind him and they ride away, unconcerned with the regurgitated bile between them, and of course, the sweet, child-like romance Gnaghi later has with her decapitated, reanimated head after she dies in a motorcycle accident. And again, beyond the comedy, I just loved the gory absurdity of it all, the morbid, poetic existentialism found in what I’d expected to be little more than cheap, b-movie detritus.

Thirty Years Later

Everything I’ve written above sounds great, and all of that is there to be found in the film, but that said, I did find myself sadly unsatisfied on the re-watch. First of all, things that had felt deep to me as a teenager, philosophically rich and ghoulishly beautiful, at 45, just seemed, I don’t know, facile? Shallow? Obvious? I didn’t come away feeling like this all revealed some truths of the human condition – but rather, it seemed more than a bit pretentious.

But all of that is fine. I mean it is an unfair standard to expect every film to reveal some profound truth of what it is to be human – that is a pretty high bar, and I wouldn’t judge any other film for not clearing it, and Soavi’s film genuinely deserves credit for actually approaching such an ambitious artistic feat. What really was difficult the second time around was how the philosophical-ness and poetic-ness felt not only slight, but actually ugly when it came to women, or rather, the woman, or even just “She,” which is as far as the film goes in naming Anna Falchi’s embodiment of feminine, sexy, mysterious, eternally unattainable woman-ness.

Dellamorte seems to have no other reason for falling in love with her than that she is beautiful, and she seems to have no reason to fall in love with him except the dictates of the story (to be fair, Rupert Everett is a very attractive man, but her attraction feels more like narrative convenience). While her perpetual return is intriguing, something about it feels uncomfortable: in Dellamorte’s story, there is one woman, without a name, who is all women, who is everywhere, whom he loves, whom he obsesses over, whom he doesn’t really know, and whom he can never truly have – she will always slip away from him, be taken from him; she is a failed promise, a lie, a tease. Life allows no such satisfaction – she exists (occasionally) only to be desired, to be longed for, but she seems to lack essence. She is an empty ideal – not a person – not a character.

And it does get pretty dark. I wrote above of the second half of the film when Dellamorte goes on a bit of an existential killing spree. Much of that is enjoyable – we see him killing people we’d earlier seen be jerks, or we see him kill dispassionately, because nothing matters anyway, but there is one time that he kills emotionally. Late in the film, drunk and despondent after being rejected by the most recent incarnation of “She” (the Mayor’s assistant), Dellamorte is approached by two young, attractive women in a tavern, one of whom is the next incarnation of the object of his desire. He goes home with them, is told that “She” loves him, and proceeds to make love to her. When he discovers that they are prostitutes and that he must pay extra for her declaration of affection, he puts a space heater in her bed, starting a fire that burns their apartment to cinders with them (and one other girl) inside.

It all feels like a Trojan Horse – Rupert Everett has brought so much charm and weary resignation to the role, and we have happily gone along with him on a dark, blackly comic, sweetly grotesque ride, only to end up in this ugly sequence of incel violence – a bitter man, denied the love he feels he deserves, feeling lied to and cheated, murders three young women because his feelings got hurt. It lands like a sucker punch.

Add to that the storyline of the mayor’s assistant (she is initially terrified by sex and feels free to love Dellamorte because the word around town is that he’s impotent (which he’s not) – he goes to a doctor and gets chemically castrated so they can be married – and then she turns up and explains that the mayor has raped her, curing her of her phobia, and she’s now going to marry him instead – you know, a totally normal, realistic reaction for an actual human female), and it’s hard to say that the movie doesn’t feel more than a little misogynistic. Somehow, as a 16 year old boy, so enamored of the glorious weirdness on display, I’d just failed to pick up on it.

Is this a case of changing social mores in the last 30 years (we are certainly more aware and less tolerating of elements of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and such these days) or is it just that I’ve grown up some and now find myself turned off by elements that I must admit I didn’t think about when I was a kid and first watched this movie? Whatever it is, it did sour me a bit on the film this time around.

But Let’s Give It Another Chance, Huh?

For all of the criticisms of the last section, I don’t want to come down too hard on the film (or on my teenage self). In spite of my reservations, there was still a great deal that I enjoyed and appreciated, and I thought I should give it one more try. And I’m glad I did. The first time I saw it, I had no expectations or even had negative ones and was so happily surprised. The second time, I was carrying the nostalgia of that first impression and it was a cold splash of water in the face to confront some problematic elements. And so, I wanted to approach it a third time, more cognizant and clear eyed of what I was going to see.

And I’m happy to report that I kinda loved it again. My criticisms stand – I don’t think there’s much of a way to get around them, but maybe even the most troubling elements can be an important part of the whole. Maybe the point is that the “love” between “She” and Dellamorte is a superficial fantasy – an illusory preoccupation to create a sense of meaning in a clearly meaningless existence. The degree to which She isn’t really a character is just the most prominent example of something that may be true of all of the other secondary players besides Dellamorte and Gnaghi. The degree to which the only significant female character is reduced to a symbol feels disappointing at the very least, but we don’t have to read it as being about gender – she is just the only other “real thing” in Dellamorte’s existence and she isn’t even real either. Nothing in life or death is.

When he murders her (as the college student) and her friends, it feels ugly, but this is a horror movie, after all, and perhaps this moment just brings the weight we should feel regarding all of his murders, but for whatever reason, don’t. We discover that our viewpoint character, the sensitive, charismatic figure at the center of all this hypocrisy and madness, sighing and rolling his eyes at the mendacity and ridiculous hopelessness of the world around him – we discover that he is no better than the rest – he is, in fact, awful. And yet, in the next scene when he shoots a bunch of people at the hospital, I feel we are right back there with him, only having held judgement against him for the moment, and are now feel free to laugh as he coolly murders doctors and nurses. Why was that judgement so short lived? Are we just sold on the lack of meaning, the absence of ramifications for his actions that so frustrates him? Is the movie doing in that moment exactly what it should? Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t want to give up all that I find to value in it just because it also contains parts I respond negatively to.

At the end of the day, this is a fascinating, funny, moving, troubling piece – I don’t think it is like anything else – it is like itself, and if nothing else, that is a thing truly worthy of praise. Furthermore, as written above, it is gorgeously shot, laugh-out-loud hilarious, shocking, and puzzling in a lot of good ways. The performances are uniformly excellent (Everett is so charismatic, Hadji-Lazaro embodies Gnaghi with lovable, quirky commitment – it’s really special, and Falchi, even if one could question the depth of her “characters” in the context of the story, is given a lot to do, and brings a lot of life and play to her four parts). The visuals are creatively striking and beautiful, and the score is a hoot. Finally, the film is thoughtful (even if those thoughts aren’t always the deepest, it is still thinking them) and takes big artistic swings without sacrificing the entertaining pleasures of being a weird, gross little horror movie. How could I not love something like that?

And so that’s that – I didn’t exactly have the experience I’d been looking forward to over the years, but it was interesting and rewarding to re-approach this film I’d treasured, find that it was other than I had remembered, or that perhaps I had changed, and ultimately, to come to terms with it differently. It was a reflective experience and time well spent. Plus, it is still, in many ways, really very cool and weird.

First Impressions – My Week in Horror

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Sometimes, I make plans that don’t quite work out. I watch something expecting it to connect with other works in a certain way, and it doesn’t. I check out a film or a book I think I’m going to really like and have thoughts about, and it leaves me lukewarm. I choose a film I really did like and find interesting, but when I sit down to actually commit words to the page, I find myself drawing a blank, with little to say really, other than that I’d enjoyed it. And sometimes it’s just so easy to procrastinate – a nice, but also dangerous, thing about having this blog is that watching a horror movie always feels like a productive use of my time – even if I don’t choose to write about it, I’m expanding my knowledge, doing my homework – indulgence easily justified as education.

This has been one of those weeks (more like a week and a half at this point). I watched a ton of stuff (much more than usual), but while I enjoyed most of it, I’m having trouble finding, let’s say, a thesis. So, in lieu of that, maybe I’ll just run down everything I saw, as plenty of it is really worth seeking out. 

These were first time watches, and even if something didn’t exactly live up to my hopes or forever change how I look at the world, I’m glad to have seen them all. That said, these will all be rather short reviews and I’ll endeavor to keep them spoiler free.

Murder Rock: Dancing Death (1984)

Coming off a run of some of his most significant pictures, this is the last film Fulci would make before illness forced him to take a break, sapping much of his creative energies (the 2 year break was apparently really hard on him – in the preceding 10 years, he’d made 17 films). I can’t say that it’s his best picture, but it’s far from his worst, and it is a fun, stylish, sleazy little giallo in its own right. More of an 80s dance infused erotic thriller than a horror piece, I think Fulci’s eye is still evident. There is a certain flair, especially in terms of kill scenes and dream sequences, all tied up in a sweaty bundle of flesh and fear. Set at a NYC dance studio where the students are all competing for a career making break, someone is mysteriously picking them off one by one, chloroforming them before driving a long jeweled pin into their heart – all as the lights flash and the music pulses.

In classic giallo fashion, the story is twistingly plotted and I was genuinely engaged in the whodunit throughout, but also typical for gialli, the plot is subservient to just making it all as sexy and cool as possible. At the same time, its gritty 80s New York setting plays counterpoint to its slick Italian panache, resulting in a sordid vibe which is no less enticing. Some elements might be a bit ridiculous (even in the high-80s, did dance students bop into the showers naked save for their leg warmers?), but it’s all part of the charm. Somehow elements that could irritate in a contemporary film, or at the very least, make my eyes roll (such as a particularly leering camera in the dance scenes) come across as oddly lovable, encapsulating an old fashioned, sweetly naïve exploitation cinema aesthetic of sleaze (Is that a thing? I feel like that’s a thing). 

That said, for an “erotic thriller,” there’s plentiful nudity, but very little actual sexuality. The film is happy to show skin, but is far more interested in Thanatos than Eros. Nevertheless, the overall tone, the tactile excitement of the filmmaking, is sexy in its own way. The interstitial segments of dialogue and “acting” may strain credulity (a strength of Fulci’s more supernatural fare is that the surreality of the horror elements somehow justify what could otherwise be considered lapses in acting or dialogue), but when it gets cooking, it is thrilling, with a fully satisfying final act reveal.

Siege (1983)

I’m not sure why I finally pulled the trigger on this little Canadian b-movie with an uninspiring poster of people in sweaters holding guns (I guess that’s Canada for you), but I’m so glad I did. The premise is that during a police strike, a gang of militaristic right wingers show up at a gay bar to cause trouble. They’re murderous bastards and, without going into too much detail, only one guy gets away, who then proceeds to hide out in a run down apartment building with some folks who refuse to hand him over. At that point, it becomes a siege movie (hence the name) as the right wing militants try to get in and kill the guy and everyone else fights back to kill them. It’s tense and rough and kinda great.

Also, it is disturbing how much it feels totally about the world we live in now – I mean, the villains are basically proud boys, and there is a final shot that screams ACAB. I feel that there was a trend of scary-crime-in-the-city movies in the 70s and 80s that were very reactionary, and often more than a little racist, but I feel like this is the reverse of that. Maybe the scariest thing is how ‘normal’ the bad guys are – not visually intimidating “gang members” (ala a Death Wish or Police Academy movie), but just “normal” working class middle aged white guys who are sick of how “woke” everything is (in 1981, when it was filmed) and have assault rifles (it is really sadly familiar). Similarly, while the police strike raises the threat as there is no one to call for help, information revealed late in the film suggests that even if the cops were around, they might not be on the right side.

I could see how someone could object to the representation of the one gay character (everyone else is heroically fighting neo-nazis and he’s hiding in, of all things, a closet), but after what went down in the first scene, I get it. For me, it’s reminiscent of Barbara in the original Night of the Living Dead – she gets criticized as a misogynistically weak representation, but in her circumstances, I expect I’d break much like her and not rise to be some kind of hero…I think most people would. Also, on a representational level, I was surprised at how the bar at the beginning is shown. I would expect a movie like this to go for shock value, but Cruising this is not – the “gay bar” is just a normal bar with gay people in it, just trying have a normal enjoyable evening without getting shot.

Anyway, if you are up for enduring the ugly homophobia of the villains in order to have the satisfaction of seeing them all get got, I really recommend it!

The Black Phone (2022)

A hit in cinemas last fall, I was excited to see this show up for rent on a streamer I’ve got access to and I was really looking forward to finally checking it out. Unfortunately, I must say that this dose of throwback supernatural stranger danger didn’t completely do it for me, but I appreciate it being a weird little movie that really found an audience. A nice success story even if I didn’t love it.

In a small town in the late 70s, young boys have been disappearing. No one knows what’s going on, but somehow all the kids are still totally free to wander about on their own. Finally, our main character, Finney, who we see bullied at school and in fear of physical abuse at home, is abducted and thus we get a glimpse of where all the others have gone before, as well as the mysterious “grabber” (Ethan Hawke) who’s taken them. Finney finds himself trapped in a basement, held hostage by this enigmatic, masked killer who seems to toy with him, while on one wall, there is the titular black phone, periodically ringing and connecting him to the voices of the grabber’s past victims, giving advice, but also sometimes seeming to speak in riddles. At the same time, Finney’s younger sister, who has a degree of precognitive ability, is going into her dreams, trying to find and save him. Throughout, there is a pervasive sense of mystery and implications of the supernatural that may or may not pan out.

Based on a story by Joe Hill and directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister, the first Doctor Strange), this is a movie with some intriguing ideas, which was interesting to track and see how it all came together (and it does come together in a satisfying way, though I’m not convinced it would hold up to scrutiny after the fact). But it just didn’t quite click for me. Maybe part of the problem is that I’d seen a lot of hype about it being “really scary” and while I am really not one to say that a horror movie needs to scare me to succeed, I did go to this one looking for that and didn’t find it. Still, I did enjoy the period and the mean roughness of the world of the kids. And I always appreciate Ethan Hawke’s commitment to keeping a foot in genre – he could have a career exclusively in indie artsy films, so it’s nice to see him make a horror flick every couple of years.  Plus, cool mask.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

I came to this one late. I was tired, but not ready for bed, and my wife was working. I just wanted something low commitment and short and silly, so my expectations were low. But this was really a great little movie. I mean, it kinda has everything: It starts with a really intense, well-choreographed and kinetically filmed schoolyard fist fight. It’s got the campy pleasure of absolute earnestness in its dialogue concerning the volatile juvenile delinquency of the main character, Tony (a young Michael Landon, later of Highway to Heaven). It’s got an amazing song and dance scene at the teenagers’ Halloween party at the old “haunted house.” It’s got an absolutely eeevil mad scientist in the form of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Brandon, who wears a mask of rational civility, but while he is purportedly helping Tony “adjust” to social requirements, really he seeks to regress him to a more ‘pure,’ animalistic state to save humanity from the debilitating weaknesses and vices of modern civilization – you know, by making him a werewolf. And it of course has the promised teenage werewolf – his makeup might not be the best (did the designer ever actually see what teeth look like?), but the couple of sequences of stalking and killing are surprisingly effective – intense and shockingly brutal in their after-effects.

A youth-running-wild picture, filtered through a then contemporary obsession with psychology, mixed with a don’t-play-god – dangers of science run amok flick, and finally, bubbling up into a full blown monster movie, could a film be more of the 50s? Seriously, it’s a lot of fun, with high drama, real horror threat, and a solid dose of unintended humor that manages not to undercut the story’s impact. As I understand, it kicked off a whole subgenre of “I-was-a-teenage-_______” movies (AIP released two more the very same year: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula, which flipped the gender of the main character but is reportedly almost exactly the same story, beat for beat) which quickly fell into self-parody, but this first one is a peculiar little classic.

Smile (2022)

Another cinema hit from last year that I’m just now getting around to, this one is easy to put down as a jump scare filled cash grab, playing lip service to the now omnipresent notion of “trauma” while actually being little more than a shallow exercise in startling the audience.

But I thought it was great.

Is it particularly deep in its treatment of how witnessing or experiencing awful things can really mess us up inside, causing us to, in turn, perform actions that hurt others, perpetuating a cycle of psychological damage, of, shall we say, ‘trauma’? No, it is not, but who cares? It’s a solid premise to build a scary movie around, and the idea does invite scenes and contexts that lend emotional heft to the proceedings, while, yes, also making us jump. There are upsetting moments along the way that land emotionally (justice for Moustache the Cat!) and the concept is woven into a narrative that tracks consistently and makes for an intriguing mystery. And at the end of the day, this is a scary movie that is exactly what it says on the tin. I jumped. I was startled. I then laughed, cause it’s fun to get scared. That’s what I came to the movie for and it’s what I got.

The basic idea is that a therapist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), sees a first time patient who is in manic terror of an evilly grinning visage that is hounding her, telling her she’s going to die. She then proceeds to start smiling maniacally herself before slitting her own throat right in front of Rose. Then, as Rose starts seeing similarly disturbing images, she learns that the patient had seen another man kill himself only a few days earlier under similar circumstances, and that this trail of suicide-witness-suicides goes back and back and back. She therefore comes to understand that she has limited time left before the same fate befalls her…

I’ve read criticisms of how it just rehashes earlier films like Ringu/The Ring or It Follows, but that seems weird to me. I think it’s just that as an entry in a smaller sub-genre (the curse movie), some might only connect its story with a couple other similar films, but it is a concept at least as old as the 1911 M.R. James story, ‘Casting the Runes,’ enjoyably filmed as Night of the Demon (1957) (surely, it is a much older idea –that’s just the first version of it that comes to mind). Passing a curse from one person to the next is a narrative conceit that goes back a ways, and it’s solid. The claims of unoriginality could be similarly applied to any subgenre – just another ghost, just another masked killer, just another vampire – but much of the fun of following a genre is iterative – how does it play out this time?

My only criticism is that it does set up one thread that it didn’t return to. While Rose doesn’t kill herself in front of her nephew, in her terror and madness, she does rather traumatize him, and it seemed that the film was going to go somewhere with that, but never got around to returning to him. It was just a bit of a missed opportunity.  Anyway, I doubt I’ll feel drawn to revisit this over the years, but it was a good watch that delivered what it promised.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

I really did a lot of catching up on fall 2022 releases this week. While sold as a horror-comedy, I can’t say that I found this one especially comic, but it was a cool, energetic mix of an old fashioned ‘who’s the killer’ slasher with something modern, a work of social satire in an era obsessed with surfaces and social media fame.

A work of social-discomfort horror, we largely follow Bee (Maria Bakalova, who made a splash in the recent Borat movie) who is accompanying her girlfriend to a hurricane party with a group of her old, wealthy, very-hip friends. It’s immediately uncomfortable. A working class kid from an immigrant family, Bee clearly does not fit in, but past that, these so-called “friends” clearly detest each other and the notion of spending a weekend with them as the storm rages outside is not remotely appealing. Everyone is cool and pretty and rich, but the passive aggression and sniping is thick enough to cut with a knife. Once the storm starts, they play a game of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (basically identical to “Werewolf” or “Mafia”), wherein one person is secretly assigned the ‘killer’ and everyone has to puzzle out who it is. Immediately the tension of the game brings old grievances to the fore and everyone turns on each other. This is only exacerbated when people actually start dying. And almost everyone dies – it is not a fun party.

Personally, the satirical elements targeting the current “image obsessed, ‘virtue signaling,’ tik tok focused” youth culture didn’t wow me – it’s kind of obvious stuff (also, there’s a late revelation that didn’t exactly surprise, but I don’t know if it was really supposed to or just confirm suspicions with a dark laugh), but regardless, I really liked the film. The core notion of the friends who are not friends thrust into a stressful situation that brings out the worst in everyone is well realized, and the young, vibrant energy of it all is fun. Lots of the early slashers were more in this model of Ten Little Indians mystery than that of the silent masked killer, and this is a nice, contemporary spin on something like April Fool’s Day or Graduation Day.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

On one level, this Spanish-Portuguese co-production from Armando de Ossorio is a creepy, attractively filmed spookfest, working in an atmospheric, slow, nightmarish euro style (which is my jam) – as if combining Romero with Rollin and Franco, but that’s reductive… likening it to work I’d deem superior, but also eliding elements unique to this film, both good and bad.

There were aspects that I’d call great: generally everything about the Blind Dead themselves: Satanic Knights Templar who had been excommunicated and executed, hanged from trees for the birds to peck out their eyes, now haunting an abandoned medieval village that all locals know to steer clear of, ready to rise from their titular tombs, ride horses in spooooky slow motion, and hunt by sound (cause they’re, you know, blind) to devour some pretty young woman who’s made the mistake of wandering by. They have a totally different character from a standard zombie – more akin to the vengeful ghosts in The Fog than most typical shambling corpses – decrepit skeletal figures in rotting robes, moving with intention if not sight, and I rather enjoyed elements like the old train engineer being unwilling to even slow down when travelling through Blind Dead country. It all feels ominously folksy.

There are also aspects that don’t make much sense, but we accept in a movie like this. Why does the first victim we see reanimate in the morgue (these not being infectious ‘zombies,’ but rather cursed ancient knights) to attack the sadistic and seemingly necrophiliac morgue worker and then go after the protagonist’s assistant? Who knows, but it’s cool and scary. What really is the point of the characters spending the night in the abandoned village? It’s not like winning some inheritance depends on surviving the night in a haunted house or something. But if they didn’t do it, the Blind Dead couldn’t attack them; and what would we do then for the whole final act?

Finally, there are some aspects that just don’t seem to go anywhere, which are button pushy, and which at best, feel like missed opportunities. We begin the film with the revelation of a romantic, or at least sexual, history between our protagonist, Betty and her old friend, Virginia. Discomfort about that is what causes Virginia to jump off of the train near the doomed village, thus setting events in motion. We never exactly return to this relationship after Virginia dies, but it is suggested that Betty has been consistent in her sexuality and has never slept with a man. Later there is an implication that, when alive and performing their infernal blood rites, the Blind Dead went after virginal sacrifices. Does this set Betty up as a special target? Nope. Not mentioned again. Then late in the film, Betty is raped by an unsavory character she’d bafflingly chosen to go for a late night walk with to the haunted cemetery. Does this somehow bring us back to the issue of “virginity” in terms of the ghost-knight-zombies? Nope. Doesn’t come up. It feels like these three elements were written to connect somehow, but they never do, and that leaves the relationship between the two women hanging and makes the rape sequence even more unpleasant as it is not connected to anything else in the story – at all. It’s just an ugly thing to be, you know, ugly I guess.

But, it must be said that the subsequent scene of Betty fleeing the carnage and running to the train that never stops in this area, really sings. And the ending is beautifully chilling, probably worth the price of admission. So, it’s a mixed bag.

Though I’d heard of it before, it particularly got on my radar as a podcast I listen to, Gaylords of Darkness, recently did an episode singing the praises of the third installment in this series (four movies in total), and I wanted to start at the beginning. Perhaps out of a sense of completionism, if nothing else, I do plan to watch the other three, and I’ll see what they offer.

The Guest (2014)

Not a horror film per se, Adam Wingard’s (You’re Next) thriller-cum-action movie is dripping with tense horror throwback 80s vibes. Riding on a synthwave groove, I’ve seen it aptly described by a user on Letterboxd as “John Carpenter’s Rambo” – an evocative, synth infused thriller about a soldier who’s returned from war and can’t stop doing what he was trained to do. I’d heard it was cool, but wow. It really is COOL, like – I couldn’t go to sleep last night after watching it cause I was so keyed up.

The Peterson family is still deep in mourning for their soldier son, presumably killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.  So when David (Dan Stevens), a young man who says he served with and was a friend of their son, knocks on their door to relay a final message from the battlefield, they end up welcoming him in. Then, ala some kind of 90s family thriller, he proceeds to seduce everyone, one by one, while some secretive menace lurks beneath his cold, piercing blue eyes. But while he is “seductive,” it isn’t generally sexual – though the whole movie has a really sexy atmosphere – David’s seduction is more personal than that. He sits and drinks with the father who confides about his insecurities; he beats the hell out of the jock bullies who make high school so hard for the younger son and encourages him to stand up for himself; with the mother, he shares warm reminiscences and helps out around the house – hanging laundry to dry, picking the kids up from school. And suddenly, things seem to be improving for everyone. For example, the father’s boss mysteriously dies, earning him a promotion. Hmmm – terrible, but also a spot of luck…

The only one who isn’t pulled in is the daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), whose drug dealer boyfriend gets picked up by the cops after an anonymous tip. Duly suspicious, she calls an army helpline to get info on David, setting in motion the film’s more action oriented second half.

Again, this is not a horror movie, but David is horrific. His human mask can be so warm, so personable, but there are moments where we glimpse what Dr. Loomis would have called “the Devil’s eyes” – cold and empty like a shark’s. But even though we’re privy to those icy, threatening moments, he still seduces us simply by virtue of being really damn cool. There can be such a pleasure in a capable, efficient villain who does what needs doing unhampered by remorse, who when asked if he has the money to buy illicit goods, can simply smile and explain that he won’t be paying for them because he’s just going to kill everybody present. And then he does.

The action is tight. The vibe is killer. There’s tension up the wazzoo. And while again, it’s not horror, it is clearly made by one who loves the genre. The climax happens at a school gym decorated for the Halloween dance, the score really does bring to mind Carpenter, and there is even an Easter egg for Halloween III: Season of the Witch that made me laugh out loud on sighting it. What a blast! Now I need to revisit You’re Next.

—

And there we have it – I’m late getting this post up, but in the last week and a half I did watch 8 movies for the first time that are at least horror adjacent and most of them were pretty great – so I am now that much more learned and experienced, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I just justified letting myself watch too much TV. Anyway, now it’s time to choose something for next week. Gotta keep that wall wet…

For Easter – Jean Rollin Zombies: Grapes of Death and Living Dead Girl

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

It’s always nice to do something seasonal. Christmas has endless options of festive horror to choose from. We’ve had plenty of Leprechaun movies, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, The Wicker Man for May Day, Jaws for the 4th of July, Blood Rage for Thanksgiving, and who knows how many countless movies that take place on Halloween (all of this merely scratching the surface of holiday themed horror). But for Easter, nothing’s all that prominent. I know there are some killer Easter Bunny flicks out there, but none have a high profile, so I thought that it could be fitting to mark the celebration of a fellow rising from the dead with a couple of zombie films (while somewhat thematically following on from last week’s I Walked with a Zombie). And while I’ve written about one of his films before, and have watched a couple others, I still feel woefully uneducated when it comes to the work of Jean Rollin; therefore, this seems a perfect time to check out his two (reportedly good) zombie flicks: The Grapes of Death (1978) and The Living Dead Girl (1982) (from all that I’ve read, I doubt we need to examine Zombie Lake (1981)).

I’ll be discussing them in detail, so if you’d like to see them first and avoid spoilers, I watched them on Kino Cult. They’ve got a great collection of Rollin’s films (among others) and you can watch them free with commercials.  ***Also, as a side note, if you’re looking for a good Passover movie, how about The Abominable Dr. Phibes? Not many explicitly Jewish characters, but it does feature Vincent Price carrying out an excellent series of murders inspired by the Ten Plagues.***

The Grapes of Death (1978)

Released in France as Les Raisins de la Mort, this is regarded as France’s first “gore” film. While the makeup work is a little ropey by today’s standards, it is still effective enough, and even if every application might not come across perfectly realistically, the film is not shy about going for the gross-out (I’ve read that it was so cold at night that the latex was hardening and falling off the actors – which gives you a vicarious shiver for Brigitte Lahaie during her outdoor nude scene). I understand this was a departure from Rollin’s typical lyrical-symbolic style, given the degree to which it really delivers the horror, as opposed to being more of an art-house meditation on eroticism and the death drive. And I must say, it is scary – much more so than other works of his that I’ve thus far seen. One of his biggest commercial successes, he referred to it, perhaps disparagingly, as “conventional,” with its financial returns breathing fresh life into his film career and helping him to move beyond the pornographic films he’d been making at the time to get by.

However, while it may be more “conventional” than many of his other works, and is certainly an effective, scary horror film, I think it is no less artistic, oneiric, or unique. This is a gorgeous and disturbing nightmare that flows with the slow but inevitable momentum of a terrible dream, its straightforward narrative actually contributing to its surreal power. Drenched in melancholy, paranoia, and a deep, sustained dread, this isn’t as superficially ‘weird’ as much of Rollin’s other output, but it is absolutely obvious that it came from the same creator, rich as it is with his recurring preoccupations, and filmed with a characteristic beauty.

Before anyone can object, I will admit that these aren’t exactly “zombies” as we generally understand them, so much as a kind of ‘infected’ – people exposed to a substance which makes them alternatingly placid and murderous as their still living bodies begin to rot. But hey – close enough. I’m happy to embrace a big-tent zombieism – from Voodoo to shambling corpses to rage infected Londoners to leprous, rural, Gallic killers – I don’t feel that splitting hairs in this case enriches the conversation. Do we have a mass of rotting, generally dead-eyed killers and a vibe of the inescapability of creeping death? Yup. Good enough. Zombie movie.

The story is uncharacteristically direct. A young woman, Élizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), is travelling to visit her fiancé, the manager of a remote French winery. Having befriended another girl on the train, they accompany each other to the bathroom to freshen up before arriving at their respective locations, noticing along the way that they seem to now be the only passengers. This mysterious emptiness and their sudden realization of their isolation immediately unsettles, but they continue to chat excitedly about where they are going and who they will meet. Once she’s brushed her teeth, Élizabeth returns to her compartment, leaving her friend to get ready. It takes longer than expected and soon, a new passenger takes a seat and begins staring her down, a young man with a bit of a skin condition – that is rapidly growing worse – that bulges, bleeds through, and bursts. She runs for the exit, where she finds her compatriot dead in the bathroom, but he follows. She pulls the emergency brake and disembarks, finding herself stranded in the middle of nowhere. Finally, she runs off into the surrounding greenery, not noticing that the killer just sits down on the tracks, looking exhausted and broken, not giving chase.

Over the course of the rest of the film, Élizabeth will constantly run from one terrifying situation to the next, no location actually safe, no person able to fully be trusted. There’s the remote farmhouse where the father, his sanity decomposing to match his flesh, impales his also infected daughter with a pitchfork before she and Élizabeth can escape. There’s the man with the putrescent forehead who rubs his yellow pus all over the window of Élizabeth’s stalled car, smashes his head against it repeatedly, and shatters it before she shoots him. There’s the blind girl Élizabeth encounters and walks home across a desolate expanse, who refuses to stay indoors and is subsequently crucified and beheaded by her lover.

And there’s the offputtingly overfriendly blonde woman (Brigitte Lahaie in her first “mainstream” role – she’d previously been in one of Rollin’s pornographic features and would continue working with him, notably in his striking Fascination (1979)), who conceals her bloodlust beneath a mask of sanity and gleefully tries to hand Élizabeth over to the crowd before blowing herself up, her calm composure and the intensity of her happiness, in the face of such horrific events,  ironically suggesting the madness beneath.

It reads like a wild list of disparate events, but like a bad dream, every step leads inexorably to the next. We’re on a train that won’t stop, and we have no emergency brake. There’s plenty of dialogue along the way, but it almost feels non-verbal, like Élizabeth is running through a nightmarish haze, narrowly evading one terrible, logic defying threat, only to encounter the next. Surprisingly straightforward, the film more or less follows the Aristotelian unities: there is really one central action – discovery of, running from, and uncovering the awful truth behind the infected; there is this one stretch of rural countryside, though she moves throughout it; and the events basically unfold over the course of one day – we move into night as things get progressively worse, then must survive that darkness, and in the new light of day, make new, terrible discoveries. Set in bucolic farmland, it’s ‘daylight horror’ at its best.

And also like a dream, nothing actually feels weird when we encounter it. Each moment is true to its own necessity, and what could play as absurd, instead just feels scary, the whole piece suffused with inescapable dread. And sadness. There is a tragic, mournful vibe running through it all.

The infected are not mindless, but seem still aware of themselves and their actions. The farmer pitchforking his daughter looks down at her bloody corpse, asks “What’s happening to me? What have I done?” and calls on Élizabeth to kill him. The lover (and murderer) of the blind girl, who’d stripped her, nailed her to a door and chopped off her head, carries that head everywhere he goes for hours before finally kissing it sensually on its dead, bloody lips, and cradling it, lying down to die himself. And, ultimately, Élizabeth’s fiancé, the one it turns out was responsible for all this (thanks to a new pesticide he’d developed for the grapes, exposing his unprotected immigrant workforce, as well as anyone who tastes the new wine, to infection), knows what he now is and what he has done – he tries to send her away, but she refuses and he dies in her arms. The final shot of the film, with almost everyone else dead or dying, is of Élizabeth, infected herself, looking up at his now lifeless form as his blood drips onto her face – an image of mourning and love and physical need.

The whole film is similarly striking. While it is quite scary, consistently unsettling, and run through with sadness, it is never less than beautiful. The locations, the light, the sense of texture and the presence in the eyes of the actors – every moment is captivating. While it’s still assembled with Rollin’s trademark lack of interest in the traditional rules of a ‘well-made-film’ (notably, in terms of the lack of continuity in editing – at one point, a character walks around a corner and her costume changes – that sort of thing), Claude Becogné’s cinematography is just jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There is a tactile quality to it all, every moment compels you not to turn away, and again, there is a unique quality to the performances. Pascal and Lahaei both stand out in this regard – the former the trembling heart that holds it all together, and the latter a spellbinding emblem of the uncanny.

It’s really a little masterpiece. If you have the patience for its shaky effects, gloomy dreaminess, and inconsistent editing, it is both emotionally and artistically rewarding, as well as legitimately scary and haunting.

The Living Dead Girl (1982)

Released in France under the superior title, La Morte Vivante (simply “the living dead” but with feminine endings), it feels that we’ve come quite a long way stylistically from Rollin’s early, surreal vampire films. If he’d considered our first film today “conventional,” this is actually much more so, unfolding like a “standard” horror film, or even an dramatic art film. With an air of tragic romance and far more realistic gore work than Grapes of Death, this could pass as a straight horror-drama. But don’t let that fool you. While this might not be so dream-like or overtly symbolic, The Living Dead Girl taps into Rollin’s recurring preoccupations with the intersection of the erotic and death, exploring the spectrum between all the consuming need of life-sex-hunger-love-possession and the cessation of all of those things in the peaceful stillness and complacency of mortality.

And in an odd way, in sublimating his ongoing artistic impulses into something so, for lack of a better word, “normal,” Rollin crafts what might be a more moving and disturbing meditation on those themes than in some of his his earlier, more poetic and abstract (and also, to be fair, more fun) work. Unlike “Grapes,” it’s never exactly scary, but the Horror is strong in this one.

When some factory workers/grave-robbers store chemical waste in the crypts below an abandoned chateau, where the 2 years dead Catherine (Françoise Blanchard) is interred, she is revived, and they are summarily consumed. No decomposing corpse, she rises from the grave in the full bloom of youthful beauty, though her mind has clearly not recovered. With arresting impassivity, she goes upstairs and, with her long fingernails which presumably continued growing after death, pierces the throats of a young estate agent and her boyfriend who are using the chateau for a tryst, leaving their naked, rent bodies littering the premises, after stopping at an old photograph of two young girls which sends her into a reverie.

In flashback, we see Catherine and her best friend, Hélène (Marina Pierro), in the passion of childhood, declaring their eternal love for one another, cutting their palms to mix their blood, and swearing to follow one another even to the grave. In the present, though unable to speak, and barely able to order her thoughts, Catherine manages to dial the number of her old friend, opening a music box Hélène had given her as a child. Hearing the music, Hélène knows her friend must not actually be dead and comes running. She washes away the blood from Catherine’s flesh, gently puts her to bed, and hides the ravaged bodies.

Over time, Hélène nurses Catherine back to a greater semblance of life, feeding her new victims to sustain her. Finally, Catherine is aware enough to be horrified of her state and her actions and begs Hélène to let her die, to kill her if necessary. This Hélène cannot do and she practically force feeds her friend, the newly dead piling up in the crypt below, until finally Hélène feeds herself to the object of her affection. The final moments of the film are of Catherine devouring her friend, her captor, her tormentor, her sister, her lover, unable not to, howling and screaming in horror and grief as she does so.

It’s pretty heavy stuff, by turns, tragic and horrific. Hélène fights to do right by her friend, to help her, to love her unconditionally, to follow through on her solemn, if naïve, vow. But in doing so, she traps Catherine in her monstrous state, forcing her to harm innocent people. I had the impression that when Hélène was first called by the recently risen Catherine, she was struck by guilt. Her childhood  love had died two years earlier and she hadn’t followed her – she still lived, and it seems may have not even attended the funeral. Perhaps she just couldn’t face the grief. Or perhaps over the years, the two had just drifted apart, and now that she’s back in her life, Hélène has a second chance to do what she’d sworn.

Catherine, however, only seems to suffer more as she’s brought further back to the world of the living. At first, she is distant, quizzical to find herself breathing, puzzled by her new-found life. It’s as if she doesn’t understand life yet, or herself, and certainly not what she is. The more self-aware she becomes, the more she knows that she does not want this. But Hélène won’t let her go. Late in the film, Catherine tries drowning herself, but Hélène pulls her back, reviving her with her own flesh and blood. It all feels like a parable of the necessity of letting things pass, letting death be. Nothing lasts forever; nor should it. Extending life thus is not only unnecessary, but a kind of evil, a form of cruelty.

Though it begins in a death-like stillness, Catherine’s experience grows only more horrific until she is pressed to destroy her only friend, descending into madness as she does. In the end, she’s left alive, cursed to continue, to carry on as this now animalistic monster – so emotionally and mentally broken by what she’s just done that it’s hard to imagine she might recover. Hélène has sacrificed herself only to doom her paramour to an eternity of hunger, violence, and misery. She only ever acts out of love and loyalty and in so doing, only causes pain.

This was a fascinating film. Considerably more of a traditional narrative than other Rollin works I’ve seen, but uniquely haunting in the way its themes play out, death hangs over it all in both its threat and its lure. And there is a deeply erotic undercurrent, although there’s rather little that’s actually explicitly sexual. Admittedly, there is rather a lot of naked flesh, but it rarely feels sexualized. Rather Eros suffuses the obsession, the devotion, the sense of being in the physical presence of the lover, but not physically acting on that love – all this juxtaposed with the frisson of danger that comes from one’s lover being a bloodthirsty ghoul.

Interestingly, Catherine and Hélène never so much as kiss (not counting a chaste peck on the cheek when putting Catherine to bed). We see them declare a child’s love for one another, and as adults, a romantic attraction is evident, but until the end, they only ever share the physical intimacy of a caretaker and an invalid or a child. Perhaps the sense is that this desire has always been repressed, that Hélène had to keep herself away, and now that Catherine has returned, she has the opportunity to see her desire fulfilled. In the end, she experiences the most complete expression of love and lust imaginable as she is literally consumed by her lover. For her, the promise of passion is met. Sadly, her drive towards romantic-erotic-tragic satisfaction is actually an expression of total greed which only does harm to the one she purportedly “loves.” Revived by chemical waste, you could call this a toxic relationship.

And along the way, of course the film is a visual pleasure, rich in atmosphere (even when things don’t quite make sense – like how are there always torches burning in the crypt – how long do those things last?), and endlessly evocative. Images exist in a more naturalistic vein than Rollin’s earlier work has led me to expect, but they still press themselves into the subconscious, languorous and melancholic, if not feverishly burning, crying out for relief. Sure, there are still some odd edits and a subplot with an American couple that didn’t do much for me, but if you are in the mood for its unhurried pace, artistic aspirations, and characteristic idiosyncrasies, this is a really striking, moving, disturbing work of horror.

—

And so there is a bit of Rollin for you. It had been kind of a joke to choose a couple zombie movies for Easter, but these two, set in this rustic, verdant French countryside do feel appropriate for spring, for a time when nature brings fresh life. Neither of these are actually to do with such a natural and positive return, mind you. But their sad beauty still feels fitting in this often dark, rainy season as trees begin to bud with color, and the air feels fresh in its dampness (when we aren’t getting unseasonable snow from a winter threatening never to leave). I’m still no expert in his oeuvre, but in my limited experience, Rollin consistently delivers such a heady mix of beauty and sadness, touching something so full of life, but therefore also feeling it move towards death. I’m so glad to finally be working through his catalogue and I’m sure I’ll write about him again before too long.

Post-Colonial Post-Life: I Walked with a Zombie (Val Lewton Pt. II)

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Last week I started digging into Val Lewton’s cycle of beautifully produced, artistic B-movie horrors for RKO in the early 40s with Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People, and this week, I’d like to keep going with that exploration. I’d previously seen about half of these films and it is a treat to both revisit those I know and to finally check out the ones I’ve missed. I have a few things going on right now, so I’m only writing about one film this time, but it’s a doozy. So without further ado, let’s look at the second collaboration between Lewton and Tourneur, 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie.

Typical warning: given the prominence of atmosphere, emotion, and theme over plot in this piece, I will be discussing it in its entirety, so there will be spoilers aplenty. I feel they probably wouldn’t really ruin one’s enjoyment, but if in doubt, check it out first. It’s available for rent in all the usual places.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Moody, atmospheric, and chillingly bleak, this entry from the Lewton team centers around emptiness, a lack. Set on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Sebastian (which seems to stand in for Hispaniola), its eponymous “Zombie” is not your modern brain muncher, but rather a traditional folk figure growing out of Haitian Vodou. Rather than a corpse risen from the dead, it refers to a person whose life, whose spirit has been taken from them; and yet they walk. Still the “living dead,” these are not cadavers returned to life, but living people who have already died (a nuanced but significant difference). As I understand, this would traditionally be done to subjugate one to your will – to hollow them out, leaving only a shell, an uncomplaining servant.

I have cited before the old chestnut, “where there’s a monster, there’s a metaphor” (which I feel should be attributed to someone, but I don’t, for the life of me know who – if you’ve any idea, please share), and this central symbol of one who has been robbed of life, self, and personhood, one who has been made an object, one who is robbed of agency and must serve obviously references slavery, and in the case of this film, it is not merely metaphorical. The shadow of the slave trade hangs all over this picture. It is why all of the characters are here. It is what has shaped their society – even the land itself. And just as its memory is very explicitly carried by the Black characters who continue to work for a small group of rich White people (now under the guise of business and industry rather than bondage), the weight of its sins hangs heavy on those currently running the show. There is a decay at the root of their family tree and they have rotted out from within – emptied, devoid of spirit.

Early on, the owner of a sugar cane plantation explains to a new employee why they keep a statue of a Black Saint Sebastian, his body riddled with arrows in the courtyard of their home:

“It was once the figurehead of a slave ship. That’s where our people came from. From the misery and pain of slavery. For generations they found life a burden. That’s why they still weep when a child is born and make merry at a burial… I’ve told you, Miss Connell: this is a sad place.”

I assume that when he references “our people,” he means the Black population of the island who are in his employ, but it really feels like he means himself and his family – they too have come from “the misery and pain of slavery” – it’s why they’re there; it’s why they’re rich; it’s why they’re in charge. And it’s part of why they’re so very lost, why their lives feel so meaningless, why all they can do is betray and hurt each other. From a modern perspective, I can see one criticizing the film for overshadowing the suffering of the slaves by focusing our sympathies on the poor, rich, grandchildren of slave-owners, but leaving aside the obvious explanation that this was made in the early 40s (and what do you expect?) – I think the film is astute in its observations about guilt both personal and generational – some things just can’t be forgiven; some things outlast death.

It’s heavy stuff, and it is a heavy film, though the artistry on display means it is somehow consistently still a pleasure. Similarly to their first collaboration, Cat People, Lewton and Tourneur walk a line between realism and the supernatural, this sensational tale of possession, Vodou, and magic dovetailing with a thoroughly human story of guilt and jealousy under the shadow of unforgivable crimes. Once again, we are uncertain as to what is real and what is magic. Almost everything can be explained away as psychologically motivated actions, and yet the sense is that there is a cultural chauvinism, an unearned arrogance in the way the White characters discount the knowledge, experience, authority, and power of those descended from the people their grandparents had enslaved.

Also, similar to Cat People is the high style and evocative film making on display. Some of the composition is simply breathtaking. Working with a different cinematographer (J. Roy Hunt), Tourneur and Lewton maintain their ‘house style’ and Hunt really delivers. Almost the whole film was shot on a soundstage (the only exception apparently the beach and village scenes), but what Hunt does with light brings the island to life. The shadows of leaves blow in a dry, hot wind; moonlight creeps through the slats of window blinds; soft light frames a body standing among dried sugar cane stalks in such a way that he is both more and less than a man – he is a statue, or a god – both emptied-of and filled-with spirit.

This is Carrefour, which in French means “crossroads,” the most iconic presence of the film. The young protagonist is told by a servant she will find him at a crossroads, but in that servant’s somewhat British accent, it is impossible to tell if she is to find a ‘guard’ or a ‘god. His presence accompanies moments of transition: a young woman passing from the world she knows into the alien world of another culture, possibly one of unknown power; a somnambulant ‘zombie’ guided away from the home she resides in, but does not live in, and strikingly, a climactic sequence of killing and sacrifice as perhaps one enters the world of the dead to reunite with his love, or possibly just murders her and kills himself because he can no longer stand the pain of living; Carrefour is always there, watching, witnessing, maybe guiding…

His first appearance caps the primary “horror” scene of the film as the protagonist leaves the sterile, empty safety of the rich, White space she inhabits to venture out into the dark of night and Vodou magic. Working her way through fields of sugar cane by moonlight, leading her elegant but mentally absent ward, she navigates past tableaus of animal skulls propped up on sticks, a circle of bones on the ground, odd sounds whistling in the darkness, and some kind of animal carcass hanging from a noose. Finally, she comes to Carrefour and thus finally passes out of these shadowlands, into the “other” space she seeks, hoping to find the power to heal her charge.  

Lewton is said to have played a large part in terms of the script, and the writing really is a treat. I’ve read that the original screenwriter, Curt Siodmak (who wrote, among many other things, The Wolf Man for Universal) didn’t click with Lewton, who replaced him with Ardel Wray, instructing her to do more research into the culture and beliefs of what was then referred to as The West Indies, and it shows. I can’t speak to the accuracy of how Vodou is presented, but it feels researched. It feels like a good faith effort was made to feature folk practices with respect and not to generalize. It all seems more authentically ethnographic than work done as late as the 90s wherein Vodou might still come across as racialized malevolence, a sinister relic of people dark in skin and intent (and let’s not get started on 1973’s Live and Let Die – oof). I can’t say that it doesn’t at all exoticize (I mean, Darby Jones, who plays Carrefour, is possibly the main scare of the film, and much of that just comes down to his actual physical appearance), but given the period in which it was made, I’m impressed. I imagine at the time, they could have just told extras to act crazy while banging some drums and the general audience would have accepted it.

Notably, there is one striking scene of high ritual. The music is captivating, the bass so deep and powerful, and the participants so grounded in their practice. The houngan (priest) dances with a sword, his upper body articulating the rhythms of the drums. It is an evocative movement, but it is in no way wild; rather, it is one of great control and precision. Around him are normal people. They sing the song and watch with spiritual focus, but this is no generalized fervor. Eventually, one woman catches a spirit and, in a trance, enters into the central space, coming to the houngan, before collapsing under the power. Finally, two female dancers come out and their work is beautiful and intense, but also feels utterly specific – this is the dance of a real time and place and people, and regardless of any supernatural elements, the music and the dance do have power. This scene alone is worth the price of admission.

But I haven’t even said what it’s about yet. Loosely based on Jane Eyre, we follow a Canadian nurse, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), who takes a job on St. Sebastian to care for the wife of a sugar magnate. We come to learn there had been a love triangle between that magnate, Paul Holland, his wife, Jessica, and his half-brother, Wesley Rand. Wesley and Jessica had wanted to run off together and Holland seemingly prevented them – maybe by driving her mad, maybe by having the denizens of the island turn her to a zombie, or maybe she just contracted a tropical fever that caused permanent damage, leaving her empty, without a will of her own.

Having fallen in love with Holland (for some reason – I mean Tom Conway’s performance is charmingly cynical, but I don’t get the attraction), Betsy, the nurse, desperately wants to return his wife to health and tries taking her to a Vodou Houmfort (the above referenced ritual). There she learns that Paul and Wesley’s mother has been participating in the local rites, feigning possession by the gods to instruct the locals in better sanitary practices. Though her intentions are good, she has still been manipulating the people with dishonesty. But while the two of them are talking, the houngan performs a test on Jessica, driving a sword through her arm, and when the wound draws no blood, he determines that she is in fact a zombie. For all that Mrs. Rand rationalizes the seeming power of Vodou away in service of her own health based manipulations, the wound doesn’t bleed. Something is happening.

We later learn that Mrs. Rand had more faith in the local powers than she had initially let on, and it seems revealed that Jessica has indeed been irrevocably cursed (or again, she just had a fever, went into a coma, and came out having suffered mental damage). Regardless, Wesley can’t bear to see her this way any longer, stabs her to death and carries her into the sea, where he drowns as well while Carrefour watches from the shore. Concurrently, we see that the houngan has made a doll of Jessica and everything we see happen could conceivably be under his control. It rather feels, as with much of Lewton’s work, that both explanations are simultaneously true: the psychological and the supernatural overlaid.

In the end, the zombie has been freed from her liminal state of undeath, but the survivors persist in a state of grief, of suffering, the final shot being that of the statue of St. Sebastian, an image of pain, a symbol of past crimes that can never be forgotten.

This was quite a piece of work: poetic, deeply sad, and visually striking, with lingering images of mystery and exotic power. I must admit that it took me a while to get around to it because I’d felt a film from the 40s about this subject would probably be uncomfortable when it comes to issues of race and representation and that this might sour my enjoyment of an otherwise interesting piece. I am happy to say how mistaken I was. Sure – it does exoticize its Vodou practicing local population in ways that wouldn’t get a pass these days, but at the same time, I feel that population is given honest respect. The Black characters feel like real people, neither infantilized nor animalistic. Though none are granted a protagonist’s agency, they are shown as self-aware, intellectually critical individuals with a clear view of the ugly history that has brought them here, and while they may put on a friendly face for their employers, the film itself sees the ironic distance between that mask and their lived experience and knowledge.

One of the most striking moments comes early on, when the young nurse is being driven to the estate where she is to work. Giving her the island’s history, her coachman describes how the Holland family, by whom she is now employed, had brought his ancestors to the island on a ship with the figurehead of Saint Sebastian:

“The enormous boat brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.”

“They brought you to a beautiful place, didn’t they?”

“If you say, Miss. If you say.”

The simple, straightforward way that he takes in her thoughtless response and answers with a friendly shrug is heartbreaking. This is the world he lives in, and there is no reason for him to expect otherwise. I think it is significant that the film sees him and is on his side. The film is aware of history and understands how it continues to weigh down all involved – how its echoes continue in the present dynamic of who is wealthy and who serves (no one tell Ron DeSantis about this movie).

However, for all of my praise, one element did fall flat for me, but I even wonder if that could be intentional. It just feels like we don’t have much of a protagonist. We follow Betsy’s story, but the moment she falls in love with Paul Holland, so in love that she would venture into the darkness to save his cursed wife, I just disconnect from her. I don’t buy the romance, nor do I particularly care about it, and while she does take one important step in driving the narrative, she mostly just witnesses the dysfunction and misery of the family. In fact, the whole cast of central characters feels detached. There’s a heightened scene with Mrs. Holland, the mother, late in the film, but she is so listless and resigned throughout her whole emotional confession. Both Paul and Wesley are wracked by guilt, but they mostly submerge their feelings beneath a removed veneer of either alcoholism or snide pessimism. And of course the wife, Jessica, is just a silent cypher, an image of loss. But again, I wonder if this sense that the film misses a true central character could be an artistic choice – one more emptiness – one more case of a body missing its soul. The film moves forward with an evenness not unlike Jessica’s, echoing her haunting lack of inner compulsion, contributing to the overall mood of hopeless loss and debilitating guilt.

Finally, let’s talk about horror. So far, my favorite of the Lewton pictures is still Cat People – I just love how it balances its thrilling story with some honest scares and its rich psychological study that can be approached through multiple lenses. I Walked with a Zombie, it must be said, is not ‘scary’ (at least not for me). It is beautiful. It is haunting. It is intelligent and atmospheric and meaningful, and maybe supernatural, but it is not scary. Which brings us to that eternal question of the genre – does horror actually have to be?

This film takes us into another world of sorts, implying powers beyond our ken. It takes a deep, endless sadness and guilt and builds from them a physical space. It maintains a mystery around what is real and what is supernatural, around borders between life and death, around the obliteration of will, the erasure of self. And in its lyrical, guilt-ridden, poetic way, it is horrific if not scary, and I’m happy to include it in the genre (not to mention the myriad ways it has probably influenced later works). Plus, more horror with such artistic inclinations should follow its example of essentialized narrative and theme. For all of the feeling, mystery, atmosphere, and technical prowess it packs, it squeaks by at sixty nine minutes long – it can do so much without feeling self-indulgent, without dragging. In this era of four hour comic book movies, this discipline is refreshing.