Beautiful Reality

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Although it is central to understanding all human experience, we are far from comprehending consciousness.  It’s clear to me, based on the fact that our senses are limited, that rationality alone can’t provide us with all the answers.  And brilliance often comes at a cost.  These were my thoughts after watching A Beautiful Mind.  Having hung around Princeton quite a bit when living in New Jersey, it was nice to see it in a film.  The movie is, of course, a somewhat fictionalized account of the mathematician John Nash’s life.  Although extraordinary in his grasp of math, Nash suffered from mental illness as well.  A Beautiful Mind takes liberties, but then, most biopics do.  The film is well done from a cinematic point of view, and for those of us without any real knowledge of Nash (although we only lived about 15 miles away) it effectively fools you into mistaking reality.

I wanted to see the movie because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia.  Clearly the mental illness—called schizophrenia here—is the source of the darkness.  Academia is obvious.  This biopic genre of dark academia includes a number of films and many of them explore the disjunction between deep thinkers and social life.  It seems that we may be only in the early stages of mapping the intricacies of the human mind.  I was recently reading that psychology is still, after all these years, struggling to be considered a “real” science.  The human mind is a slippery place and emotion and intuition play into making someone really stand out from the rest of us.  And also, their stories have to be noticed by someone.  In Nash’s case, a book that was later made into a movie.

Academics in general aren’t given much notice.  Many operate in the rarified world of extended study.  Those who, like myself, are expelled, often have difficulty fitting in to other lines of work.  Thinkers often have trouble not thinking.  That can get you into trouble on the job.  Movies like A Beautiful Mind have some triggers for me because I often question what reality is.  I always have.  Please don’t take it personally, dear reader, when I say I’m not sure you’re real.  (You may think the same of me.) It’s just the way I look at the world.  I’m no mathematician, though, nor a scientist.  Not even a philosopher, according to the guild.  Academia, however, was my home and seems to have been what my mind was made to do.  At this point, I’ll settle for watching movies about dark academia.

Hearing White

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I really do need to start writing down either the year of movie recommendations or the year of the film.  Many movies share names and I found White Noise on my list and couldn’t remember who or where or when.  I watched the 2005 version knowing in advance that it was panned by critics but it did well at the box office.  Now, I tend to like ghost stories—I’m not much of a slasher fan—but this one was a bit convoluted.  Too much is stuffed in.  So Jon Rivers’ wife dies and he’s contacted by Raymond, who’s been receiving EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) messages from her.  So far, so good.  But then things spiral (including the camera; please, people, hold the camera still!).  Raymond is killed by unseen entities.  Jon finds another client of Raymond and decides to set up his own electronic superstation to hear and see messages from the dead.

A psychic warns him this is dangerous.  He persists, learning that his dead wife is, always cryptically, telling him to go to places where people are about to die.  He’s able to save a baby’s life that way, but he’s getting messages about an abducted woman and wants to save her.  All the while, on the computer monitors three shadowy figures keep appearing—evil spirits, presumably.  Jon discovers that a serial killer has been receiving messages, through a similar tech setup, from these evil spirits and has been torturing and killing people.  The spirits directly attack Jon, killing him, but the police follow the clues Jon has left and catch the killer.  But not, presumably, the three evil spirits responsible for inspiring said killer.  There’s some good ideas here but they aren’t handled very well.  The story is too complicated to really fit into the time allowed.

It is a good example of religion and horror, however.  There are lots of clergy around—there are a few funerals in the movie.  I found a few potential Bible uses, but nothing definitive.  I’m not sure Holy Sequel will ever be written, but the list of potential movies is growing long.  White Noise isn’t a horribly bad movie.  The 2005 version is at least worth watching for the spooky ideas.  The movie’s main claim to fame, at least according to Wikipedia, is that it made studio executives realize that early January was a good release period for horror movies.  If they’d read some history they’d know winter has always been a time for horror films and stories.  As the genre gains some respectability, perhaps those who produce horror will realize that it’s an all season phenomenon.  Even if it tries to base them on electronic voice phenomenon.

Blushing Brides

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Death does strange things.  But first I have a confession to make: I had never seen The Princess Bride before recently.  Since it is a favorite film of many people and since Rob Reiner had been murdered earlier that week, my wife wanted to see it again (for her).  Given the timing, she must have seen it shortly before I proposed to her, or maybe shortly afterwards.  Perhaps I owe a debt of gratitude to the movie.  I entered into it not knowing anything about the story or even the genre.  Rob Reiner was eclectic in his tastes, directing everything from comedy to horror, Spinal Tap to Misery.  As for Princess Bride, it felt like a light fantasy, generally comedic but with no laugh out loud parts.  It’s a sweet story with intriguing characters.  And a cast of big names.  I have to assume that since I may have been the last person on the planet to see it that the plot is already known.

The fact that it is based on a book makes me want to read it, but I understand it is quite long.  One of the debates that constantly seesaws in discussions of pop culture is whether it’s better to read the book or see the movie first.  Typically I fall on the book side (but you already guessed that).  I think that might’ve enhanced my experience here.  I do try to enter movies fresh, without reading about them in advance or watching trailers.  But then again, I tend to watch horror films as a kind of default.  In The Princess Bride, things turn out alright.  Definitely better than they ended up in Game of Thrones.  Fantasy is a genre that I sometimes read, but the sword and sandal scene isn’t my favorite.  The comedic aspect, however, makes Princess Bride work.

I also wonder if the initial impact had something to do with the cultural moment.  1987 stands out in my mind as a year of cultural significance.  It was a formative year in my life: I went to Israel that summer to work on an archaeological dig.  Pop culture was also in an odd place.  In my mind this mostly tracks with music of that year.  U2’s Joshua Tree came out early, and I recall a number of albums I purchased that were formative to me as a twenty-five-year old.  The one that most spoke to me, as a dark fantasy was Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, which I still listen to every October.  I saw a lot of movies that year, but Princess Bride wasn’t one of them.  I feel like I have, in a small measure, temporarily caught up.

In Praise of DVDs

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Streaming has made movies very widely available, which makes my life easier.  Since I’ve been writing books about horror movies and such, being able to see them now that video rental stores have disappeared, helps.  (At least when they’re available.)  But I’m not ready to stop singing the praises of the DVD just yet.  (Or Blu-ray, if you roll that way.)  They definitely have their advantages, at least until the disc goes bad.  When you watch a movie as a form of research, and you haven’t been taking adequate notes, you might need to stop afterwards and watch a scene again.  What I’ve noticed with streaming services that include commercials is that if you rewatch you have to be subjected to two minutes of commercials first.  And if you only vaguely remember where the scene was you may need to sit through four or six minutes of advertising.  Maybe more.

The humble DVD had the chapter menu.  And no commercials that you couldn’t skip.  My books have involved using DVDs whenever possible for that reason.  Quite a few of the movies discussed in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth had to be viewed via streaming.  Going back and finding that exact scene where the question mark lingers can be quite time consuming.  There’s a reason you can only write a limited number of such books!  The DVD was, naturally, an improvement over the VHS tape with its endless rewinding.  Of course, streaming has reintroduced having to scan back through a movie to find a spot instead of picking a chapter close to where you remember the scene.  First world problems, I know, but no less annoying for being so.  It’s the world in which I live.

Then there’s the bonus of extras.  I know some streaming services offer side menus with additional information, but those of us who are focus-challenged need to watch the story.  Extras were for afterwards.  Does anybody else feel old for having grown up with the only way to see movies being either the theater or a grainy black-and-white small rendition on television several years later?  Now movies are whipping past me through the ether all the time.  Landing on devices and beginning to play if your cursor hovers too long on the spot.  I used to avoid going to movies alone—they were a social occasion as well as an entertainment one.  Now I stream alone, often at the price of commercials, and during those interludes I’m thinking of DVDs, and how they were made for research.  A strange thing to say for a guy who used to trust only books.

Togetherness

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Over the holiday break I watched three very good movies and I noticed that Domain Entertainment was one of the production companies for each of them.  The final one I saw (after Sinners and Weapons) was Companion.  I’m going to have to look into Domain a bit more.  In any case, Companion is sci-fi-ish horror with a somewhat comedic twist.  I say sci-fi-ish because we are rapidly approaching the point where this is possible.  What is this?  A sexbot that functions like Siri but who’s better in bed.  Josh and Kat have been planning to murder Kat’s very wealthy boyfriend and to blame it on Josh’s bot Iris.  Iris doesn’t know she’s a robot.  Viewers learn that Josh has tampered with her programing a little, allowing her, for example, to attack a person in self-defense (violating Asimov’s rules for robots).  When Kat’s boyfriend tries to rape Iris, she kills him.

Josh and Kat will blame the robot, with their friends Eli and Patrick as witnesses to corroborate their story.  Since the deceased boyfriend has 12 million dollars in cash lying about his house, it won’t be missed.  But Iris, it turns out, has a conscience.  She escapes.  It turns out that Patrick is Eli’s sex bot, and he is sent to bring back Iris after she kills Eli, also in self-defense.  A police officer who finds Iris is killed by Patrick, complicating matters.  Then, Josh changes Patrick’s programming and he accidentally kills Kat.  Planning to blame all of this on Iris, Josh calls the robot’s maker to have Iris returned.  The technicians see the holes in Josh’s story and one of them restores Iris after Josh shoots her.  Iris then confronts Josh.

This will give you a taste of the story without giving away the ending.  This is a smart, sympathetic treatment of technology, including AI.  From the beginning, before it’s revealed that Iris is a robot, the viewers’ sympathy is with her.  She seems to be the wronged party and Josh is slowly revealed to be pretty much an all-round scumbag.  While not the most profound film of this genre, Companion nevertheless raises many of the issues that merit discussion when technology outraces ethics.  We see this unfolding in real time with artificial intelligence companies deciding on profits over any sense of what is good for society, or people in general.  What makes the movie so interesting is that the robots seem to be far more morally concerned than the humans are.  Although I turn this around the other way, I do wonder if sometimes that may be the case. Especially in the context of a movie that’s barely science fiction.

Being Saved

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Historians of media will have much to contend with now that streaming services, such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon are producing their own feature-length films.  There are movies I’m still waiting to catch up on, but freebies on services already available are enticing, economically.  So it was that I watched Hulu’s No One Will Save You.  It’s an unusual horror film that has, as many recent ones do, a message.  Personally, I find home invasion films and alien films particularly frightening and this one does scare pretty consistently for the first half or so.  For me, anyway, at that point questions start to arise and curiosity about what’s going on starts to overcome the fright.  The movie is heavy on symbolism, almost to the point of being a parable.  The main character speaks fewer than ten words of dialogue in the film, another unusual feature.  The story, with spoilers, goes like this.

In chronological order (not as presented in the film) Brynn accidentally killed her childhood best friend in an argument.  She has remained in the area, living in an isolated house, and making a living as a seamstress.  Then the aliens come.  Brynn, among those in the rural area, is the only one to have successfully fought them off.  The alien home invasion is about as scary as that in Signs.  As the title already warns viewers, nobody is going to save Brynn.  She manages to kill three of the aliens, but they want to explore her mind.  They do so, finding the isolation and sadness because of killing her best friend.  She forgives herself and the remainder of the townsfolk, controlled by the aliens, welcome her back into society.

One of the features that stood out to me was that when the police chief—his daughter was the girl Brynn killed—refuses to help, Brynn goes to the church.  For all its problems, Christianity is based on the principle of forgiveness.  The problem is that the church is locked and Brynn can find no salvation there.  When forgiveness does come, it is through the manipulations of the aliens.  In the end, the people of the town are the ones who have to change their behavior and accept the one who has learned to forgive herself.  This is why it feels like a parable.  At the same time, it works as a horror movie.  It was better than I had anticipated it might be.  Even though it wasn’t on my list of films I need to watch, I’m glad I did so.

In the Yard

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The search for “free” horror has a few more reasonable offerings, it seems, if you follow the reviews.  I try not to read about movies in advance, and I avoid trailers.  The Woman in the Yard had higher scores than several movies streaming on the services I use.  It’s Blumhouse horror, so it has a bit of substance.  Substance but also some confusion.  Trying to make sense of it will involve spoilers.  Here goes: Ramona and David have moved into the country because Ramona found the city suffocating.  Once there, however, she doesn’t take to farm living and becomes depressed.  She tells her husband this and on their way home from a restaurant, he dies in an accident while she’s driving.  Ramona, herself injured, tells Taylor and Annie, her son and daughter, that their father was driving.  She lives with the guilt and is still struggling with depression.

A mysterious woman shows up in the yard.  Draped in black, including her face, she tells Ramona “Today’s the day.”  Feeling threatened, Ramona tells the kids to stay inside, but it becomes clear that this woman is supernatural.  The power is out and no phones work.  The car won’t start and the nearest neighbors are a couple miles away.  The family, alone, grows frightened and the woman’s shadow begins to manipulate items in the house, threatening them all.  Ramona confesses to Taylor that she was responsible for his father’s death.  When the woman’s shadow attacks they have to get into the dark where her shadow is powerless.  Ramona is drawn through a mirror where David is still alive, but frees herself to get back to her children.  The woman tells her that if she kills herself, which she’s been praying for the courage to do, her children will thrive.  Without showing the death, the family is back together and the power comes on, only it is the mirror world.

A few things to note.  There are a few scary moments but the movie as a whole isn’t that frightening.  It is, however, dealing with suicide—it actually has, in the final credits, a note urging anyone contemplating suicide to seek help.  There’s no clear indication of what happens but the ending might be interpreted rather darkly.  Depression is difficult for those of us who struggle with it.  The movie seems to indicate that the woman in the yard is the flip, pro-suicide version of Ramona.  She appears to resist and overcome the depression, but it’s really left open at the end.  Still, this isn’t bad for “free” horror.  It’s thoughtful, if not exactly cheering.  And it gives viewers something to think about.

Weaponry

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For all of its problems, 2025 was a great year for horror films.  And they’re beginning to gain the respect they deserve.  I found an affordable copy of Weapons and discovered that it was as good as the hype.  The haunting image of the children running is, in itself, distinctly creepy.  The film does a great job of obscuring what is happening until the right moment, not making it feel over two hours long.  Weapons never really explains what the monster is, but gives hints that allow viewers to draw their own conclusions.  I’ll try to explain a bit more without spoilers, but the intricate plot may mean that some information might inadvertently be revealed.  The movie begins with a mystery.  One night seventeen children—all but one in Justine Gandy’s third-grade class—disappear simultaneously.  Some doorbell cameras catch them leaving their houses and running into the night.

The people of the fictional Maybrook, Pennsylvania, suspect Justine, their teacher.  Some of the parents, especially Archer Graff, are vocal about their suspicions, going as far as to paint the word “witch” across the doors of her car.  Graff decides to confront her during his own investigations—he thinks the police aren’t pursuing this actively enough.  As he accosts her, the principal of her school, running like the children, attacks and tries to kill her.  This convinces Archer that Justine isn’t responsible, and between them they identify the house of the one remaining student to be at the center of the mysterious disappearance.  The story is told from the point of view of six of the characters’ experience, ending with Alex, the one boy remaining.  His house is the focal point.

We learn that his great aunt came to stay shortly before the children disappeared.  I shouldn’t say any more, I suppose, for fear of giving away the ending.  The story is effectively told with memorable images in the service of the story.  Although it has a kind of justice in the end, the resolution is not a cheerful one.  Like some of the other acclaimed horror of 2025, it makes you think.  Interestingly, while not filmed here, this is another horror film set in Pennsylvania.  Having grown up in this state I’ve always known that odd things tend to happen around here.  Maybe word has gotten out.  In any case, Weapons is a haunting film, well worth seeing.  And while some are reluctant to call it horror, the critics agree that this movie is worthy of note.  Perhaps, someday, horror will be treated with a bit more respect and the critical weapons relaxed a little.

Weird Films

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I’ve read Gary D. Rhodes before and found him informative and enjoyable.  Although I hope his recent offering Weirdumentary moves beyond its ideal readership, I suspect I’m among that class.  I was alive and somewhat aware of cinema during the period under discussion—the 1970s—and I even saw a few of these films in the theater, as well as watching some of the television offerings.  I think Rhodes is correct in pointing out that this genre was a product of its era.  And what a strange time the seventies were!  I grew up watching the series In Search of…, which is discussed at some length here.  But before I get more into it, I should explain that a “weirdumentary” is a pseudo-documentary that has characteristic features such as dramatic recreations, questionable authenticity of at least part of what it covers, and often a famous personality as a host.

The book is handsomely illustrated with pictures that will offer a nostalgic rerun of the seventies for some of us.  It divides the material into eight sections:  the proto-weird, ancient aliens, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, the paranormal, mysterious monsters, speculative histories, and prophecies.  The proto-weird are this kind of documentary from before 1970, and the rest of the categories sometimes bleed into one another.  Not to detract from this excellent book (it’s often quite witty), my mysterious mind thinks a straightforward chronological treatment might’ve worked better.  “Paranormal,” for example, could cover quite a few of these topics.  Still, the organization of a book can be a personal thing and this layout, with “prophecies” at the end, works well.  A number of speculative religious films make the list, including In Search of Noah’s Ark and Late Great Planet Earth, both of which made it to my small-town theater, and drew me in back in the day.

I also admit to having spent some of my summer earnings to see Mysterious Monsters.  And maybe Chariots of the Gods—although I can’t remember for sure.  I certainly read the book.  Rhodes begins by explaining how 2001: A Space Odyssey set up viewer expectations for such films as these.  I definitely saw that one when I was young.  So the ideal readership here would seem to be those born in the sixties who were old enough to see these movies (and television programs) when they were making their initial rounds in the next decade.  Kids suggestible enough to believe the pseudo-science of many of these offerings, who would grow up to look back on them nostalgically.  Written with a light touch, but true appreciation of the subject, this book was a great way to relive one of the strange segments of my early life. 

Surviving Ones

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Slashers aren’t my favorite horror films.  As I’ve suggested in some of my unpublished writing, horror should be dismantled as a “genre” since so many different types of movie are collected together under its rubric.  That having been said, The Only Ones is an amazing low-budget, independent slasher.  For one thing, it references so many other horror movies that it is mind boggling.  Just a few influences: Deliverance, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Blair Witch Project, and just about every movie that has a bunch of young people going to a remote location by themselves.  It’s complex and thoughtful.  A love story and a reflection on religion and horror (only in a minor way, but still).  And piecing together what led to the eight deaths would require an article all by itself.  And it’s a film with heart as well as gore.  A spoiler follows.

The basic idea is that the six young people are primed for a horror movie outcome by one of their number who’s a true crime podcaster.  They’re going to the remote house of the uncle of one of them since the uncle passed away and they are helping settle the estate.  A couple of campers have innocently trespassed in the house and a violent confrontation with them sets the tone for all of what follows.  The movie is also a reflection on how a weapon in the midst of any group leads to violence.  One of the kids has a gun and the threat of that weapon leads to people killing one another without ever really stopping to figure out what happened.  A final girl survives the two nights, and when the police ask her what happened, so honestly says she has no idea.

The movie has some flaws, and early on I was eager to note them all, but the story sucks you in.  The deaths, in the end, are all pointless.  They begin because of a misunderstanding with a violent threat being used instead of trying to understand what happened.  This brings the movie up to the level of actually having a message.  Many slashers seem to settle on “traditional values”—don’t use drugs, have premarital sex, or in any way offend the world envisioned in the 1950s.  Those who are killed have violated some principle that keeps society the same forever.  The Only Ones has something deeper to say.  The characters are self-described outcasts.  The one who survives is the one who learned to love.  And bringing weapons into any situation leads to a Chekhovian resolution.

Sinning

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What can I say about Sinners in five hundred words or less?  This movie requires a book.  I’ll try anyway.  First of all, I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon.  But everyone was saying Sinners was one of the best horror movies of 2025 and it racked up enough awards to prove it.  Still I was blown away.  Fronting and centering religion and horror, this film asks viewers to think about good and evil and to think about it closely.  Twin brothers, “Smoke” and “Stack,” served in the army, left Mississippi to make it big as gangsters in Chicago, then return to Mississippi to open a club for the Black community.  They bring their nephew Sammie and hire their supporters to help a grand opening of their blues bar.  Their pasts won’t let them go, however,  and they become entangled with former lovers.  Then the vampires come.

The brothers’ two lovers, Hailee and Wunmi, come to the opening but Hailee falls victim to the vampires.  Wunmi, who’s Smoke’s estranged wife, practices Hoodoo and make him promise that if she is bit he will kill her with a stake.  The vampires can’t come into the club without an invitation, and one of the bartenders, Grace, decides they need to kill the whole crowd of vampires and invites them in.  Only Smoke and Sammie survive.  The vampires die with sunrise, but Smoke stays around to kill the Klan members who planned to murder the brothers after the grand opening was over.  Smoke gets them all but he’s shot and as he dies, he sees Wunmi and their dead child in an earthly heaven and joins them.  Sammie goes on to become a famous blues player and when he’s very aged, Stack and Hailee, still young vampires come in.  They all agree that the day of the grand opening was the best of their lives.

Both Smoke and Stack end up with their loves in an eternal life.  And this is only scratching the surface of the film.  The movie is about freedom and how African Americans never really have it.  Even in Chicago the system is stacked against them.  The vampires try to convince Smoke and Sammie that they will offer them community.  Freedom and belonging.  Both brothers, however, end up in a kind of paradise, one of them as a vampire, the other as a man who earns salvation by killing the Klan.  Wow.  On a more pedestrian note, the movie seemed to blend From Dusk till Dawn with the more serious elements of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  Including the close attention to music.  But even that sounds facile.  There’s more to say, lots more.  Sammie is the son of a preacher.  The Bible is used and quoted.  Salvation comes, however, by Hoodoo and vampirism.  No, Sinners requires a book to begin to work it all out.

About Demons

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Six college kids in a house where twenty years earlier a group of six young people held a seance and all but one ended up dead.  Demonic doesn’t really offer anything groundbreaking on the horror front, but it does give a less church-oriented possession story.  There will be spoilers here, so be warned.  John is Michelle’s boyfriend.  With a group of friends, including Brian, Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, they decide to hold a seance in the house where a mass murder-suicide took place.  Once they get there, as tension builds between John and Brian, it is revealed that John is the son of a woman who was in the house the night of the carnage, but had escaped.  Thereafter follows a confused set of jump startles and unexplained phenomena.  All but three of the college kids are killed, and one (John) is found and interrogated by police.

It seems the seance summoned a demon that could only be released if everyone died.  Brian, one of the survivors, is found and shot by police.  Michelle, the other survivor, is found alive but as police unscramble the data on the cameras the kids were using, they realize that John was the guilty party.  Beyond that, he hanged himself before the police got there, so they had been interviewing a demon the whole time.  Although James Wan is one of the producers, the film received theatrical release only abroad, receiving a television release in the United States.  Really, given that it doesn’t give much that’s original, or thought-provoking, or really all that scary, the decision makes sense.

The demon movies that really make an impact tend to have a few things in common.  Usually a young woman possessed (this is something Poe understood).  A body out of control that defies religious efforts to bring it back to conformity.  A believable spiritual world behind the threat.  None of these things fits Demonic.  I guess I was looking for a follow-up to Succubus which, although flawed, wasn’t that bad.  Sometimes the group of young people in a haunted house trope works pretty well, but here the unanswered questions outweigh any real fright, or even mood.  Many low-budget horror films involve ghost-hunter imitators with more devices than thought toward the plot.  Things can jump out at you, of course, but this one fails to reach any kind of existential dread.  I guess I really need to start paying more attention to the ratings viewers give before deciding on a demon movie.  Someday I’ll learn.

Discussing Demons

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So I was discussing demons with a friend, as you do, and I was looking for a free movie.  One that my streaming service recommended was Succubus.  There are other movies by this title, so this was the 2024 version.  Knowing what a succubus is, traditionally, and having just discussed what demons are with a friend, curiosity overcame me.  First of all, I have to say that for a Neo-Luddite like myself, the first half of the movie was a blurry slurry of texts while video chatting while watching the baby monitor that I wondered how people really into the internet get anything done in real life.  Sorry, IRL.  I’ve had a few people try to initiate chats with me on the few socials I use, but I only respond once a day in the brief window in which I use social media.  It just doesn’t appeal to me.

Still, Succubus held a number of triggers for me.  But first, a summary.  Chris, having a trial separation from his wife, meets Adra, a succubus, on a dating app.  She traps him by having him kiss her through the computer and meanwhile kills his best friend who visits her location physically.  Meanwhile a physicist, a former victim, is heading to Chris’ house to try to bring him back from limbo, and, failing that, to kill him.  The succubus wants a body, of course, and when Chris realizes this, he castrates himself when he and his wife get back together, to prevent the succubus from inhabiting their children.  The triggers for me had nothing to do with the demonic aspect, but with the fact that Chris at first is concerned Adra is a scammer.  Having fallen for a scam myself, that aspect was scarier than the entire rest of the movie.

As a horror film it kind of works.  I’m not really a fan of movies that take place on devices, but about halfway through that part gets dropped.  What was of particular interest was only briefly suggested and was worth thinking about.  As Chris tries to research the physicist online, he discovers that he’s a researcher in dark matter.  The implication, never spelled out, is that dark matter is demonic.  This could make an interesting trope, if it hasn’t already been done.  Dark matter and dark energy make up a large part of the universe, we’re told.  Think about it.  It also kind of addresses the question of how spiritual beings make their way into a physical form.  Of course, that’s what succubi are all about, isn’t it?

P.S. Sometimes I swear I need a handler. This post was queue up on December 15 but I forgot to click “Publish.” If a day goes by without a post, somebody feel free to poke me…

Final Rites?

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The Conjuring: Last Rites, aka The Conjuring 4, is more of the same.  Reusing tropes that have ceased to be scary, it draws Annabelle back into the story and sets up the possibility of future films by getting the Warrens’ daughter Judy involved.  It is kind of a downbeat to pick up the Smurl haunting since this is widely considered to have been a hoax.  And the movie pulls out all the stops.  Levitation, upside down crosses, and demonic faces suddenly appearing have all been done before.  The conceit that a demon is using ghosts to torment the Smurls is familiar from earlier films in the series.  The franchise, however, remains quite Protestant despite its Catholic trappings.  The somewhat heavy-handed suicide of Father Gordon once again demonstrates the lack of deep comprehension of how Catholicism operates.  It is meant to parallel the suicide that starts the movie, but really adds nothing to the plot beyond shock.

The film tries to do too much and loses any pathos among the Smurls because of the strong subplot, if not the main plot, of the threats against Ed and Judy Warren.  To do this they had to make the real life Judy much younger than she is in real life and cast the unnamed demon threatening the Smurls back to an attack on Lorraine, while pregnant with Judy, in the 1960s.  This allows for a Stranger Things aspect of the 1980s for the action.  It also strangely misrepresents Pennsylvania.  The script seems to presume West Pittston is near Pittsburgh (it’s not, but rather close to Scranton) and it shoots the location in England, obviously for cinematic reasons.

There’s a lot of insider knowledge presumed here—you need to know the fictionalized backstory the series has been building up over eight films.  This comes to a head in the revisiting of actors from the past Warren cases at Judy’s wedding.  Perrons, Hodgsons, and a Glatzel attend, valorizing the often controversial work of the Warrens.  (They were ejected from the Perron house and visited the Hodgsons for maybe part of a day.)  The other movies in the series tend to hang together better but the lack of deep understanding of Catholicism remains perhaps the largest hurdle.  Interestingly, at the box office this has been the highest performing film in the franchise so far.  Since the Conjuring universe is encroaching on 3 billion dollars (2.7 at the moment) gross profit, clearly it strikes a chord.  And there’s every reason to suppose, prequel or sequel, it’s not really the last rites after all.

Oz Undone

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Horror is notoriously difficult to define.  Two friends recently suggested that I watch Return to Oz, which, for them, was horror.  Although rated PG, it does shade into horror at several points.  It begins with an eerie soundtrack and a disturbing idea: Dorothy hasn’t been sleeping and really believes in Oz, so she’s to receive electroshock therapy.  She escapes the gothic hospital during a storm and after almost drowning, lands in an Oz gone wrong.  Any number of scary things happen there, and the story is one of constant tension.  First Dorothy encounters the “wheelers,” which equal blue-faced, flying chimps for terror.  She is taken to the residence of a wicked princess who has a collection of heads and changes them at will.  At one point she chases Dorothy with no head on at all, perhaps referencing the headless horseman.  People turn to stone or sand, depending on whether the Gnome King or the deadly desert gets them first.

Dorothy tries to find the Scarecrow but he’s been captured and imprisoned by the Gnome King, who turns people into objects.  When she frees the Scarecrow the gnomes—scary monsters, not bearded little people—attack.  Dorothy and friends are chased to a point that they’re about to be eaten by the Gnome King.  This is dark Disney.  There’s a minor Halloween theme and a living jack-o-lantern.  Fairuza Balk, who plays Dorothy, would go on to play horror and gothic roles.  Even Pumpkinhead, the jack-o-lantern, would be used as the title of a legitimately scary horror movie.  All in all I was impressed with how well this fits into PG horror.  It’s scarier than some other intentional horror with the same rating.

I missed Return to Oz when it came out in 1985.  I’d graduated from college and began seminary that year, so I was a bit distracted.  The movie has gathered a cult following and was praised by Neil Gaiman.  Interestingly, the writer/director Walter Murch noted in an interview that he’d used the book Wisconsin Death Trip, a nonfiction book of unusual events and deaths in a small section of, well, Wisconsin, to get ideas for the script.  This seems a strange inspiration for a Disney film, and indeed, Murch had a rocky time as the director.  The end result is strangely affecting and fits what might be considered horror for children.  The squeaky clean image that Disney has cultivated in recent decades hides a history of films that can legitimately scare the young.  Return to Oz is one of them.  And it has a fascinating back story.