A Century of Horror

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I’m not a magazine reader.  When I go to a waiting room (which is quite a bit lately), I tend to take a book.  The October issue of The Christian Century, however, caught my eye.  As a more mainstream/progressive Christian periodical, CC used to circulate in the office of one of my employers since it features books, the way progressives generally will.  This October, however, it featured five articles on “faith and horror.”  I had to take a look.  I know three of the five authors, one of them without realizing he was a horror fan.  An article by Brandon R. Grafius, “The monsters we fear,” discusses the commonalities between fear and religion, ground that he treats in Lurking under the Surface.  “The wisdom of folk horror” was written by Philip Jenkins—I didn’t know his horror interest—and it engages, briefly, The Wicker Man.  He’s making the point that folk horror is often about somebody else’s religion.

It was “Horror movie mom” by Jessica Mesman that really hit me.  Mesman was traumatized in her youth, and like many of us who were, has turned to horror for therapy.  This is a moving piece and is worth the cover price of the magazine.  Gil Stafford’s “A theology of ghosts” also gave me pause.  Stafford is an Episcopal priest who considers ghosts to be more than just woo.  In this very personal piece he thinks about what that means.  The last feature, “God’s first worst enemy,” is by Esther J. Hamori, one of the colleagues who talks monsters with me.  The piece is adapted from her recent book, God’s Monsters.  Taken together these pieces are quite a mouthful to chew on.  While numbers in mainstream Christianity are declining, Christian Century is still a pretty widespread indication of normalcy.

When I wrote Holy Horror I only knew about the work of Timothy Beal and Douglas Cowan as religion professors writing on monsters and horror.  That book admitted me to a club I didn’t know existed—the religion and monster crowd.  Since I’m not welcome in the academy, I’m particularly drawn to pieces like Mesman’s since she’s writing from the heart (as is Stafford here).  I’m just glad to see this topic getting some mainstream coverage.  I know I’m a guppy in this coy pond, but I do hope they’ll consider, over at the Century, turning this into the theme for their October issues in coming years.  If they do, they can count on at least one extra counter sale.

Double the Trouble

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A down-on-his-luck writer (I’m with you so far) vacations on his wealthy wife’s money in a resort in La Tolqa.  La Tolqa is a brutal, very religious, but poor country.  They need tourists.  As the writer, James, discovers, their laws are very strict for a reason.  If a tourist commits a crime they are executed.  However, if they have enough money they can buy a “double,” essentially a clone of themselves, that can be executed for them.  Needless to say, this happens to James.  The name David Cronenberg evokes body horror.  Infinity Pool is the work of his son Brandon Cronenberg and although body horror’s part of it, there’s an even deeper existential fear at work.  Once James’ double dies, his wife insists they leave this horrid place immediately.  James isn’t so sure.

The trouble is that he’s befriended another couple, and the wife, Gabi, has been making no-so-subtle advances on James and he’s intrigued.  This couple sets him up so that he’s likely to break a law, which leads to the killing.  But they’re not finished.  Along with another group of Americans, they travel to La Tolqa every year to commit crimes so they can watch their doubles being killed.  “Murder tourism,” as one reviewer calls it.  They want James to become one of them.  They start putting him into positions where he has to kill his own double.  You can see the existential horror pretty clearly from this vantage point.  Finally realizing that they’ve been mocking him, James tries to escape, but can’t.  As long as the penalty for a crime can be payed by buying a double, they can commit outrageous crimes with impunity.

I have to admit that I envy those who have a family business.  (Mine was alcoholism, so I chose a different career path, such as it is.)  If your father is a well-known, even if often castigated, horror director, you have some guidance on how to get started in the business.  My sense of Infinity Pool is that it’s quite effective, almost at art film at some points.  Like some of his father’s films, it involves both sci-fi elements and horror.  Budapest and Croatia are evocative shooting locations.  The story, while not entirely satisfying, intrigues.  It raises too early the question of whether the double, which has all the memories and thoughts of the original, is really watching the death of the person who actually committed the crime.  Are these copies their own death sentence?  This isn’t resolved, but it’s strongly implied that they’re not.  Still, I’m not inclined to vacation in La Tolqa, which is no place for struggling writers.

Unexpected Gifts

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Sometimes horror movie therapy doesn’t go the way expected.  (No surprises there, so no snarky comments, please.  No therapy is “one size fits all.”)  This was brought home to me when watching The Gift.  I was attracted to the speculative aspect of the premise and although it came out over twenty years ago I hadn’t heard of it before.  Although there are speculative elements—at least two ghosts—it is largely a human drama and one that hit me unexpectedly.  As a public service for those who also practice horror movie therapy, I thought I’d consider it here.  (Then call my regular therapist.)  Annie Wilson is a psychic in rural Georgia.  She gives readings for donations to help supplement Social Security since she’s a widow and she has three young sons.  I don’t know why this didn’t start the warning bells a-jangling, but when it was over I realized her situation was like mine, growing up.  (My father was alive, but nobody knew where he was, otherwise I’m on board.)

A violent neighbor, scarily played by Keanu Reeves (forever Neo in my mind), keeps threatening the family since he’s a wife-beater and Annie recommends his wife leave him.  Then a woman is murdered and her body is in his pond (or better, bayou).  Annie realizes that this threatening bully, who’s convicted of the crime, is actually innocent.  Her lawyer, however, doesn’t see the problem—the guy was a menace to society and he’s locked up.  Annie, however, insists on finding the truth.  I have to say that this movie genuinely scared me.  I almost stopped watching.  It wasn’t the speculative part, though.  It was the human part.

Religious locals accuse Annie of being a witch and a Satan-worshipper.  She is, however, simply trying to get by in a society that has failed her.  Having an unstable neighbor threatening her kids doesn’t help.  What’s so scary is that this isn’t far from real life.  For those of us who grew up poor, safety nets are few and the weave is very, very loose.  And you’re made, even as a kid, to feel the social stigma of the crime of being poor.  Annie has a good heart.  She tries to get a man wrongly accused released from jail, knowing that he’ll probably begin threatening her again, if not actually harming her.  Society, however, doesn’t really care.  Raising three small children on welfare on your own isn’t easy.  And, in fact, those kids may well grow up needing therapy.  Even if it’s watching horror to try to make sense of life.

Enabling Vampires

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I was skeptical at first.  Nicolas Cage as Dracula?  How could this possibly work?  Nevertheless, Renfield works.  A box office flop, I suspect that audiences may not be ready for a comedic treatment of Dracula, but this is a smart, savvy take on a classic, combining superhero films with vampire lore.  Let me take a step back here.  Renfield is a bit of a slippery character, shifting places with Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s original.  He is Dracula’s servant, but here he’s presented as becoming aware that he’s a codependent enabler.  In his seeking victims from the narcissists who cause pain in the lives of a church support group, Renfield comes to realize that he’s also a victim.  He teams up with the one honest New Orleans cop who’s not on the payroll of the local mob, and together they rid the Big Easy of both vampires and organized crime.

Overly ambitious?  Yes.  But the comedy actually works here.  This is a funny movie with several laugh out loud moments.  Maybe it’s CGI, but in several shots Cage actually looks like Bela Lugosi.  Nicholas Hoult does a wonderful interpretation of Renfield, the madman of the original movie, as well as factotum to the dark prince.  Those who know and appreciate vampire lore will find many subtle insider jokes here.  And Cage undertakes a campy, yet compelling version of Dracula.  Endlessly self-referential, the movie is a skillful blend of vampires, self-help wisdom, and even social commentary.  I’d heard that my expectations shouldn’t be too high here, so I was pleased when they were exceeded on almost very point.  

Horror comedy is difficult to pull off so that viewers feel satisfied that they haven’t wasted their time.  Renfield manages to do this with style, action, and even a bit of drama.  I have an inkling that over time this will become one of those movies that appreciates with age.  The story is convoluted, but this is in service of the comedy.  Everything is so wildly improbable—from eating bugs to gain super powers to Dracula’s blood bringing the dead back to life—and hilariously overblown that it overcomes the difficulties attending such a mashup.  It’s as if Cage knows viewers don’t always take him seriously, and yet he rises to the occasion.  With nods to The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as the vast library of Dracula films, Renfield is the result of homework done and boundaries crossed.

The Good Lurid

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It takes a lifetime to make a reputation.  In high school my teachers and classmates knew mine well: religious and full of integrity.  Going on to do three degrees in religious studies confirmed all that (at least the former).  Something that nobody seemed to pick up on was that I liked watching monster movies.  I did less of it in college, but still watched some heavy-duty fare (including David Cronenberg) when I was in seminary.  Once I married life looked more optimistic and I really didn’t feel the need to watch what is called “horror” any more.  Sure, we occasionally saw films everyone was talking about, but in general I moved away from the genre.  It took Nashotah House and its aftermath to bring me back.  In any case, my reputation seems to be such that now when people who know me see religion and horror together they think of me.  I’m touched.

A regular reader of my blog sent me an article from The Guardian titled, “Schlock horror! Meet the family who made lurid movies for the Lord.”  It should be pretty clear, if my integrity is intact, that what I’m trying to do is figure out how these things fit together, religion and horror.  That they do is obvious, but how?  In any case, this article plugs a book by journalist Jimmy McDonough, The Exotic Ones.  The book explores the Ormond family and their odd filmmaking.  The father, mother, and son triad, made a living producing cheap, questionable films.  After a plane crash, which they survived, they became religious only to find their minister wanted them to keep making their bad movies for evangelistic purposes.  The films they produced for the church had religious themes, but used well recognized horror tropes, anticipating, if you will, Left Behind and its ilk.  Like a Thief in the Night scarred many of my generation.

I’m probably not alone in not recognizing any of the movies the article discusses.  If I’m reading correctly, Tim Ormond, the son and sole surviving family member, stopped making these films after the death of his parents.  In any case, I have been developing a fascination with bad movies.  The fact that they’re even made and released is incredible to me (mostly the released part).  Many of us end up reacting to life rather than following the plans we had for it.  Fate—call it what you will—has a way to stepping in.  For one family, however, fate led them to a church that paid them for what they wanted to do.  Many of the rest of us find just the opposite and we end up watching horror to try to understand.

November Nightmares

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Music videos weren’t really a thing then.  And “Welcome to my Nightmare” was theater as well as rock.  I knew a movie of it existed, but I only made an effort to see it as October was slipping through my grip.  I have a strange, one-sided history with Alice Cooper.  We listened to the radio back when we were kids and we all knew Cooper from “School’s Out,” an unofficial anthem of the seventies.  We didn’t have much money when I was growing up (some things never change), but I had a copy of the album Welcome to my Nightmare.  I couldn’t recollect how I’d got it until my brother clued me in.  We were at Jamesway just outside Franklin one Friday night.  My mother, frugal to the day of her death, saw that Alice Cooper’s new album had a song called “Steven” on it and she bought it for me.

Now Mom knew full well that my official name is “Steve” (she named me).  There’s no “n” in there anywhere.  Yet still, even as I knew this, I found that song spoke to me.  Like the Steven on the album, I was prone to nightmares.  And the sequence of “Years Ago” and “Steven” on that concept album never left me.  Mom would not have approved of the movie version—I found the misogynist parts difficult to watch myself—but it did answer a question I always had: how did he perform these songs in concert?  They seemed too big for that.  They weren’t the snippets I always assumed rock stars did.  (I never attended concerts, so what did I know?)  Alice Cooper is still the only rockstar I’ve ever seen in concert, but the theatrics were brought way down and his back probably ached like mine did after that event.

I’d been looking for a horror movie to finish out the month, you see.  I keep a list of movies that, apparently, are never free on Amazon Prime or Hulu.  It ended up taking nearly all the little time I allot myself for such indulgences to try to find something.  Then I remembered Alice.  It was raining outside and I had caught up on my emails for the moment.  This step into a yesteryear I never knew made me realize just how creative people can be.  We have to get someone to pay us for doing something, and if you can sing and strut, well, you might consider sharing your nightmares.  Something many of us have in abundance, even in November.

October’s Child

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The thing about films is that there are so many of them, and they come into existence in so many ways.  Back when I was a kid, you learned about movies through the newspaper, or television or maybe radio ads.  Sometimes word of mouth, or, if you were lucky enough to see a film in a theater, through previews.  These days the internet has billions of pages and many streaming services and movies are produced faster than we can watch them.  All of which is to say Pyewacket, in my opinion, should be better known.  It’s an effective, thoughtful, and seasonal movie that caught me off guard.  It’s a Canadian independent film, not the product of a major studio, so it didn’t get the notice that massive advertising budgets provide.  I found it by scrolling on Amazon Prime.

Pyewacket is a teen angst movie (I wasn’t an angsty teenager—it came a little later for me).  Leah Reyes and her friends are into the occult.  Leah’s father has died and her mother’s having a difficult time coping.  She has decided to sell the house and move away.  Leah, who has a small circle of close friends, doesn’t want to move.  After mother and daughter are in the new house they fight, with her mother insulting Leah’s friends.  Leah goes into the woods and summons Pyewacket to kill her mother.  After this, mother and daughter make up and the tension builds.  Leah doesn’t want her to die but she’s set something in motion that she can’t control.  There are some really scary scenes in this movie, often without showing anything explicit.  In fact, views of Pyewacket are brief and indistinct, which really works.

This is an October movie.  Moody and evocative, it raises some very real questions.  Not all of them are resolved.  The occultist Leah consults informs her that Pyewacket is very deceptive and she can’t believe what she sees.  This leads to a tense resolution and somewhat abrupt ending.  It is very well done.  The point about deceptive spirits raises one of the truly potentially demonic facets of human society.  Deception throws truth off balance.  (Some of the more cynical politicians know and use this for their own ends, as we sadly know.)  Deception is dangerous and that seems to be almost the moral of this movie.  There are no villains here, but extreme actions can’t be taken back.  If you’re in the right mood, and the dark is just right, this is the kind of movie that delivers.  And I only found it by chance.

With Spiders

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It gets October right, but Cobweb leaves quite a few unanswered questions.  One of the queries I always bring to movies is “where did it happen?”.  This isn’t, of course, the same thing as where it’s filmed.  Cobweb was filmed in Bulgaria—that certainly gives it an atmospheric feel.  It’s set, however, somewhere in the United States.  License plates aren’t shown long enough to really help, but a refrigerator magnet in the shape of Pennsylvania may be a hint.  In any case, the story’s a bit of a stretch, and it has some continuity issues, but I may come back to it in a future October.  The acting is pretty good, but the direction could be tighter.  So what’s it all about?  (There will be spoilers.)

A young boy, Peter, is bullied at school.  His parents are odd and they never believe Peter when he hears noises at night.  Or so they say.  As with much horror, things are not what they seem.  Peter’s parents had a somewhat Poesque solution to what turns out to be Peter’s older sister.  Born deformed, they made a pit in the basement to house her.  She gets out into the walls of the house, and talks to Peter at night.  We all know you should never listen to creepy voices in the dark, but she tells her brother he should defend himself from bullies.  And when he gets expelled from school for doing so, she suggests he give his parents the “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” treatment.  In support of this, she points out where he can find the body his parents buried in the back yard.  Now, there are many pumpkin-sized holes in the plot, but for a movie embodying October, I’m willing to let it pass.  Spooky rather than outright scary, the film does have some fairly tense moments.

Rescue comes at the hands of a teacher—and this is always a heartening development.  The name, “Miss Devine,” awoke hopes that maybe some traditional religious elements might appear, but no.  It seems to have been from the lineage of Miss Honey from Matilda.  She does read Poe’s “The Raven” to her class, though.  Overall she’s a teacher who has her students’ best interests at heart, particularly those who are sad.  The message is a little more difficult to discern.  Other than Peter and Miss Devine, pretty much everybody else is unlikeable.  Parents are murderers, sister a manipulative monster (even if made so by said parents), and all the other kids pick on Peter.  A good October effort, Cobweb is a story that needs some direction.

Halloween Tale

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Halloween movies are hit or miss. Anthology movies are the same. My interest in holiday horror keeps me coming back for more nevertheless. Tales of Halloween has been fairly well reviewed over the years. As intimated, it’s an anthology film. There are ten separate stories squeezed in, leading to an average of nine minutes per episode. To make matters more interesting, each story has a different director. The end result is kind of like a pillowcase after trick-or-treating, you get some good stuff and some you’d rather not have received. The movie’s also a comedy horror so you’re meant to laugh throughout. Kind of like Halloween itself, I suppose. At least for some people. The movie didn’t do anything for me. There were no takeaways, and nothing really memorable.

Halloween is an unusual holiday.  For one thing, the way it’s celebrated is fairly recent.  Childhood memories of costumes and trick-or-treating and ghosts and goblins are all pretty new.  Well, maybe not the ghosts.  For some of us it’s a spiritual time.  A reflective season.  I’m not sure how anybody can not try to figure out what life’s all about.  Some of us have steered our lives (in as far as we actually steer them) in the direction of trying to figure these things out.  For me, Halloween is a time of spiritual growth.  Not exactly fun, but enjoyable nevertheless.  I know it’s different for different people.  Some people live for the fun and the partying.  It’s like that pillowcase all over again.  There is, at least in my experience, no perfect Halloween movie.  I won’t stop trying to find it, however.

John Carpenter’s Halloween is the movie that really kickstarted films based on this particular holiday.  Although I’m no fan of slashers, I do enjoy this one from time to time.  It’s a well-made movie, moody like autumn.  In Tales of Halloween, the background movie in two segments is Night of the Living Dead, a classic by any standards.  Carnival of Souls is shown in another episode.  Horror is a notoriously self-referential genre.  Last year I watched Trick ‘r Treat, another such anthology film.  It likewise made little impact.  On me, anyway.  Perhaps Halloween isn’t about horror after all.  It’s a time for reflection.  And pretending.  Since we all pretend most of the time it is perhaps the most natural of holidays.  Pretense on other holidays, although it happens, is considered in bad taste.  At least on Halloween we can be honest about it.  Some day someone may actually capture that in a movie.

Witching Season

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I can’t be sure I understood White Is for Witching, but Helen Oyeyemi’s novel grew on me once I started to piece together what was happening.  A long sit in a waiting room finally got me hooked.  This is an odd story that’s quite a bit about atmosphere.  Miranda Silver and her twin brother Eliot, live in the Silver family house (through her deceased mother’s side) with their father.  They run it as a bed and breakfast, but Miranda’s ill.  She suffers from pica—a disorder where a person eats indigestible items rather than food.  Her mother, who died young, and her mother, and grandmother, continue on in the house, but not as ghosts proper.  They are more a controlling presence guiding the way for the lost daughter who, it seems, is destined to join them.

Miranda’s not an unreliable narrator because she’s never the narrator.  Sometimes it’s her brother, other times it’s her girlfriend, and other times it’s the house itself.  Oyeyemi’s writing is compelling, and she’s great when she takes the narrative thread and runs with it.  The fault is entirely mine, of course, but I prefer a straightforward story where I’m not confused from the start.  I recently put a book down because I was confounded about the issues raised.  I’m flummoxed enough by life itself so that when I want to sit down and read I prefer something that makes sense.  Or that I can follow.  The novel has a wonderful gothic atmosphere and the tragic young woman definitely has shades of Poe.

My compulsion to read appropriate books in October led me to White Is for Witching.  It’s set in England, however, and having lived in the United Kingdom for three years I know autumn there is not the same as fall in North America.  That’s not the fault of the story, of course.  The tale is textured and complex, exploring avenues of madness and isolation (it’s set in Dover and Cambridge).  The part where Miranda falls in love with Ore, at college, becomes quite gripping.  There’s some confusion as to why her twin brother acts as he does, with one of the narrators suggesting that he’s unreliable.  There are speculative elements but no ghosts seen clearly.  And race is obviously an issue.  It’s not the central issue (beyond the author perhaps suggesting something by the title).  There’s a lot going on here.  Normally I don’t read synopses before reading fiction, but this is a case where that might be helpful before indulging in this moody, thoughtful tale.

Learning too Late

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Threads of this, crumbs of that.  My life has been a grasping at small bits.  I know the things I like, but which circumstances keep me from.  Nobody is paid to read only, and writing brings in so very little money.  I’ve read Edgar Allan Poe since I was a child, but I haven’t read all of his written works.  (The same is true of the many other writers I admire.)  When I wrote Nightmares with the Bible, I tried to tie the theme of demons to Poe.  I began a chapter with an epigram from “The Raven”—“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.”  At this point in my life I had not read, or if I had I’d forgotten, “Alone.”  Not published in his lifetime, Poe wrote the poem at 21.  It ends with words that would’ve been appropriate for my Nightmares venture:

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass’d me flying by—

From the thunder, and the storm—

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view—

Some printed editions end the poem with a period.  The ambiguity of that final em-dash, however, would’ve made particularly well the point I was struggling to convey.  Demons are not what we think they are.  As I continue to read about The Exorcist and its impact, it becomes clear that media mediates reality.  That view of demons has become canonical, but many, from Poe both backward and forward, have wrestled with them.  Not every entity with which we struggle through the night ends up blessing us in the morning, disjointed hip or not.  “Demon” is a very slippery word.  And concept.  In a materialistic world we boldly claim there are no such things.  As Poe wrote, “Of a demon in my view—”

There’s more going on beneath the surface than most people would be able to guess.  This is perhaps why I have a penchant for staring at the ocean.  Misunderstood, certainly.  But never, I hope, shallow.  There are great depths to be explored, but as the ocean teaches us, humans can’t stand the immense pressure at the bottom of the sea.  No, our lives are more like the bits and pieces of seashells plucked from beaches.  We don’t have the whole picture.  All writing reflects a stage on a journey.  Those who embark must earn their keep as they go.  And finding validation after the fact is one of the small joys of life that keep the traveler moving forward.

Ginger Wolves

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I’ve known about Ginger Snaps for years but the reason I finally watched it was a rainy fall weekend.  The kind of day that suggests imminent winter and you wish that you had a fireplace instead of waiting on the furnace guy to check everything out for another year.  Surprisingly, in my experience, there aren’t many movies that capture that mood very well.  The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is one of the best.  But movies new to me give me topics for blogging, and so I watched Ginger Snaps.  It’s not a typical werewolf movie.  It’s become a cult favorite over the years since it didn’t get much of a box office boost.  It’s smart, and sad, and moody.  And, as is becoming more important to me, well acted.

Brigitte and Ginger are teenage sisters, 15 and 16 respectively.  They share a room and morbid interests.  Their affluent, suburban parents just don’t understand them.  They’re ostracized at school.  Then Ginger gets bitten by a werewolf.  The plot is a coming-of-age story for women, and it has attracted feminist interest over the years.  The sisters are devoted to each other because both are pariahs and, well, sisters.  This begins to change when one of them becomes a monster.  But only to a degree.  Brigitte is determined to stick with her lycanthrope sibling, and tries to cure her.  There’s quite  bit of dark humor along the way but this is pretty effective body horror.  Making it about growing up adds an emotional poignancy to the story.

Werewolves have always been my favorite classical monster.  Ginger Snaps made me realize that it’s almost always a guy problem, however.  Men are the ones struggling to keep the beast inside.  Having this apply to a young woman throws into relief all the uneven standards society harbors.  Some exist for pretty obvious historical reasons, but others are matters of convention, often religious in nature.  Religion is pretty much absent from this movie, however.  Lycanthropy is transmitted like a virus and you don’t need silver bullets to stop a werewolf.  This is a world, in fact, where teens have to try to figure out their own way because parents are too distracted with their own problems.  It is a kind of modern parable, but without a religious angle.  The girls are conflicted about what’s happening to Ginger.  She enjoys the power but fears the consequences.  It is a good Halloween movie, but mostly it’s about growing up, whatever that may be like.

Not Grant

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Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic,” is undoubtedly his most famous work.  The image is so evocative and suggestive that countless interpretations have been offered for it.  The idea of debilitating isolation suggests itself.  An unhappy self-reliance that has taken its toll on an aging couple (some say the woman is his daughter) often comes to mind.  For some it suggests a movie.  Normally I like horror films from the seventies and eighties.  There’s almost an innocence to them that gets lost in the new millennium.  On a rainy weekend afternoon when I couldn’t be mowing the lawn I found American Gothic on Amazon Prime and it had received four stars and even IMDb showed it as better than average.  The longer I watched the more I was inching toward “bad movie” territory, but I had to see how it ended.

Six young people, four of whom are distinctly unlikeable, have plane trouble and get stranded on a lonely island in the Pacific northwest.  They discover a house furnished from the twenties and it turns out there’s an older couple there who don’t really cotton onto strangers.  As the plot unfolds it turns out they have three adult children who think they’re still adolescents.  And—this is the good part—they are a very religious family (in part.  Again, as often happens in such films, the writers really don’t understand religion).  In any case, the predictable killing off of the kids starts to happen when they continue to be rude and insult the family.  Since we’re in slasher territory here, there’s a final girl—one of the two sympathetic women—who ultimately takes over the house.

Part of the problem with the film is the utter paranoia with which it treats mental illness.  The family clearly has problems and, in a way typical for the genre, they turn toward killing.  Ironically, Pa, when he finds his family has been killed by the one mentally ill visitor (everyone with psychological problems in this movie turns to murder), renounces God and sells himself to Satan.  Interestingly, he doesn’t survive long enough to do anything about it.  Reading about this movie after watching it I came across a new word: hixploitation.  Exploitation movies are familiar to anyone who watches much in this genre, but I’d never considered that Deliverance and company exploit “hicks.”  It’s all about how others look at you.  And, as a movie made in Canada and the UK, it shows us what others see when they look at us.  There’s some ground to explore here in a sequel to Holy Horror. 

What Message?

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The search for autumnal horror movies is a never-ending one.  Can it really be that auteurs just don’t—drenched in the California sun—get that October feeling?  There’s something in the turning of the leaves and the appearance of pumpkins that changes everything.  And it works every year.  So it was that I thought of The Messengers.  I’d watched this years ago but found it somewhat unremarkable.  I seemed to recollect that, being based on a farm, it was autumnal in character, so I decided to try it again.  I remembered once more why I hadn’t watched it for years.  It’s a serviceable movie, but it is really set in summer (short sleeves the whole way through) and although August farm visits put me in the fall mood, this one is incoherent enough to prevent that feeling from catching on.

Jess is a girl with a past.  Driving under the influence, in Chicago, she was in a crash that rendered her baby brother mute.  In response her parents decide to move to a sunflower farm in North Dakota.  There the crows (actually ravens) attack them.  A stranger arrives and offers to help out.  Of course the house is haunted because of some past murders, but when the crows attack the hired help, it spurs him into a relapse—he’d lived here before and had killed his family, and so he decides to kill this new one too.  Being PG-13, they survive and the house swallows up the murderer from the past.  It’s never quite clear what the crows (the presumed messengers) really want to convey.  Are they trying to warn the family?  Are they trying to awake a killer’s memory?  What do they want?

This is an early Kristen Stewart movie—she’ll go on to more sophisticated horror films.  William B. Davis, with only cameo appearances, offers echoes of The X-Files.  Casting the generally congenial John Corbett as a killer is a bit of a stretch, however.  More intriguing, in this more global world, are the directors—the Pang brothers.  Known for their east Asian movies, including award-winning horror, they took on this American-themed, shot in Canada, project.  It had the backing of a few production companies and a reasonable budget.  Still, it struggles to be memorable.  I seem to recall that the prequel might’ve been a bit better.  But was it autumn-based?  I can’t recall and it’s that time of year when seeing falling leaves and a pumpkin or two make for essential viewing.

Something Wicked

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There comes a morning each year, pre-dawn, that it happens.  I crawl out of bed and things feel slightly chilly.  The furnace hasn’t been turned on yet, and ever sensitive to cold, I put on long sleeves and slippers to do my morning writing before the sun.  I start getting a powerful hankering to watch my autumn movies.  This year when that happened, in September, I finally watched Something Wicked this Way Comes.  Now, Disney isn’t a studio known for its horror films.  Over the years, however, they’ve produced some family-friendly efforts toward the scary end of the spectrum.  I tried to make the case in Holy Horror (and a list on IMDb agrees with me) that Pirates of the Caribbean falls into that gentle horror category.  I’ve read established writers on horror claim that The Watcher in the Woods was the movie that frightened them most.  I don’t think Something Wicked falls into that category, but I can say I liked it better than the novel.

And that’s saying something, because it was written by Ray Bradbury.  Bradbury’s stories were an integral part of my childhood.  In fact, much of my fiction writing is modeled on his work.  I didn’t really care for the novel Something Wicked this Way Comes, which I read last year.  The film is an improvement.  And it had a tortured way to the silver screen.  It began as a short story.  Bradbury himself adapted it into a screenplay anticipating a role for Gene Kelley.  This was in 1958.  When that didn’t pan out, he wrote it as a novel.  Filmmakers began to show an interest in the early seventies, but the movie didn’t come out until 1983, after Disney bought the rights and took over production.  The screenplay is mostly Bradbury and the soundtrack rips off Star Wars more than once.

Bradbury could get a little too nostalgic about boyhood.  His yesteryears seem far too innocent to me.  Although, having a few scenes where Jim shows curiosity about sex was a bit racy for Disney, I should think.  Jonathan Pryce does a fine job as Dark, and the mood isn’t bad for family-friendly fare.  I was never much of one for carnivals.  I can’t do rides and it’s easy to see through the games you can’t win and even if you do your prize is cheap.  Other entertainments always appealed to me more.  Still, the film sets a mood, and that’s generally what I’m after when the mornings begin to feel chilly and I’m looking off into another winter.