Witching Season

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Tis the season for movies about witches.  The cult classic The Craft is another one of my old movies—I don’t think I’ve written a blog post about it before.  In any case, this autumn felt like good timing for a movie about female empowerment.  Rewatching it, it was difficult to miss how religion and horror are tied together.  Indeed, the Bible appears in the film as well.  This makes sense since the girls attend a Catholic school.  So what is this one about?  Teenage Sarah has moved to Los Angeles and is having trouble fitting in at school.  She is a “natural” witch who catches the attention of the small coven consisting of Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle.  They invite her to complete their coven so that they can invoke Manon, a deity larger than God.  Once they attain their powers, they begin redressing personal wrongs, but begin to hurt others as they do so.

Sarah is the daughter of a witch and her mother died in childbirth.  Sarah has difficulties with using powers to hurt others.  She was primarily interested in a love spell, but it too has consequences.  The coven experiments with even more powerful spells, giving the girls very obvious powers.  Especially Nancy.  Nancy is angry and enamored of power.  Sarah decides she wants out of the coven, but they’ve become too powerful.  Since Sarah tried to take her own life before, Nancy tries to force her to do so, only to succeed this time.  She’s backed up by Bonnie and Rochelle, both enjoying their powers.  Their attack, however, brings out the natural power of Sarah’s witch nature.  In the end, all of them lose their powers except Sarah.  

There’s a strong moral streak through the movie.  Unrestrained power leads naturally enough to abuses—something we’re living through daily in real life.  This is played off against a largely ineffectual Catholic Church.  A street preacher, who doesn’t seem very Catholic, also tries to warn Sarah but his method of using snakes is off-putting, to say the least.  He dies off pretty early in the film.  Religious structures of the monotheistic world have historically closed doors to women.  Some still do.  The power of nature encompasses both women and men, and the power that women have often frightens men.  Again, we see the fear of losing power played out.  This is comically addressed in another witch movie, The Witches of Eastwick.  Indeed, it is directly addressed there.  That’s yet another of my old movies, unless I’ve written about it here before but have lost my powers of memory.

The Prom

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I had always assumed Prom Night was a knock-off of Carrie, and in some ways it is.  The story is significantly different, however, and the impetus to watch it came from Scream, where it’s referenced a few times.  In case you’re under the same delusion I was, here’s how it unfolds.  Jamie Lee Curtis, after starring in Halloween and The Fog, takes the role of Kim Hammond, older sister of a girl (Robin) accidentally killed at the start of the film.  A kids’ game at an abandoned building leads to the death, in which four children participated.  Six years later, it’s prom night.  The kids present at Robin’s death all receive mysterious phone warnings that they dismiss as crank calls.  Meanwhile, a Carrie-inspired sub-plot is introduced as Wendy, the leader of the killer kids, is outvoted as prom queen by Kim.  She gets a local thug, Lou, and his buddies, to plan a disruption to the crowning of the king and queen.  No pig’s blood, but this isn’t Stephen King.

Meanwhile, yet another subplot is introduced, riffing on Halloween, of an escaped psychopath as suspect.  The police are fearful after finding the body of a nurse he kidnapped at the site of Robin’s death.  He was falsely accused of Robin’s murder and was disfigured in a fire.  They fear he may be targeting the kids there that fateful day.  Nobody except the four kids know what really happened.  There’s a hint that someone saw the accident, however.  If you’re getting confused, apart from my faulty summary, it may be because the movie goes to great lengths to misdirect your suspicions of who the murderer may be.  Since the movie is over 45, there will be a spoiler in the next paragraph.  You are warned!

The killer is Robin’s twin brother, who is also Kim’s younger brother.  He witnessed Robin’s death and tries to murder those he holds responsible on prom night.  He succeeds in killing three of the four.  I’ll leave it at that.  This is one of those teen movies and a fairly early slasher.  The plot is too complex to hold up, however, with characters simply dropping out because the action shifts focus.  Too many false lead-ons and too much disco music make it less than stellar.  Of course, as a very religious kid shy around girls, I never attended my high school prom.  I guess I may have missed out on what was, by then, becoming a night of horror.  At least in the eyes of those exploring the emerging slasher genre.  

Dreaming

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To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of NightBorn.  It’s not a bad novel but some of the action isn’t explained enough, leading to a little confusion as to what’s going on.  This is pretty minor, however.  I was enjoying Theresa Cheung’s debut novel but I kept thinking of Dream Scenario and how the premise, at least at first, is so similar.  I was very impressed by the movie Dream Scenario, and wondered if this was going to play out in the same way.  The basic idea is that Alice Sinclair, a professor of psychology, begins appearing in people’s dreams.  The dreams of people who don’t know her.  Then the dreams start to become scary.  If you’ve seen Dream Scenario you’ll recognize the many touchpoints: professor, appearing in strangers’ dreams, dreams becoming nightmares.  Back in the novel, Alice joins forces with her psychic boyfriend, two psychic friends of his, and her dog, to explore why this is happening.

Alice discovers that her absentee father, whom she’s never met, is also a psychology professor and he’s been experimenting with a technology that makes a person go viral in other people’s dreams.  He randomly chose her, not ever knowing Alice as his daughter, or knowing her at all.  The novel deals with synchronicities, and this is one of them.  Her father, who is rather a slime-bag, is working for the government where an unpopular president (this is a novel of its time) is paying to have himself interjected into people’s dreams to get reelected.  Alice was simply a test case to see if it was possible to, well, do a Dream Scenario.  In the movie, of course, a company has been developing the technology for profit, so that advertising can be interjected into dreams.  Another synchronicity.

I won’t spoil the ending of the story.  The ethical concerns of the author come through clearly.  In many ways this is a Trump book—that category of books that, had this particular individual not been elected (or reelected) would likely never have been written.  It’s more, however, about the power of dreams than it is about the power of potentates.  The publisher, 6th Books, prefers paranormal plots, so expect a bit of that when you pick this one up.  Dreams not only feature Alice, they also guide the plot.  In the end, the scenario isn’t the same as that in Dream Scenario, but the vehicle is quite similar.  It may, if viewed from a certain angle, be considered dark academia.

More Morons

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There’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  Some are so bad that they’re good.  Others are just plain bad.  Many years ago, during some Amazon movie sale or other, I purchased a DVD of Morons from Outer Space.  Now, horror comedy is a recognized genre, but sci-fi comedy is a bit harder nut to crack, even though horror and sci-fi are siblings.  Morons sat on the shelf for at least a decade, in case of need.  Having been scammed out of our life’s savings, a Friday evening when my wife said “Pick whatever you want, I’m likely to fall asleep anyway,” scanning the shelves my eye landed on it.  The movie had been distributed by MGM, how bad could it be?  Worse than anticipated, it turns out.  I don’t recall ever seeing an intentional comedy where the entire laugh potential was so misaligned.  There were one or two spoofs that worked, but mostly it dragged and begged to be put out of its misery.

Three aliens, anatomically human, crash land on earth after leaving a crew-mate behind on their deep-space vehicle.  The extended scene of their spaceship tooling down the highway might’ve been funny had it lasted maybe a tenth of the time.  The knock-off of Close Encounters’ use of music to communicate was a little funny.  The alien interrogation missed several potentially humorous opportunities.  The aliens eventually become celebrities while an American commander insists that they be killed because of their threat to life on earth.  Ironically, I’ve often wondered how it would be if aliens who came to earth were badly behaved members of their species.  I can honestly say that that would be better than the way this movie played out.

Meanwhile, the abandoned alien gets a lift with a spooky-looking alien.  In perhaps the funniest scene, the spooky alien asks the human alien his sex.  That part was funny on a couple of levels and showed the potential that the movie might’ve had.  He ends up on Earth and tries to connect with his three shipmates, who are now, literally, rock stars.  When they finally meet up, they summarily dismiss him again, only to be hauled off back to space by a closing Close Encounters parody.  I confess that I am still trying to appreciate bad movies on their own aesthetics.  I’ve seen so many that I added a “Bad movies” category to this blog.  Bad movies are often unintentionally funny.  It’s a different beast when a comedy is unfunny.  Particularly when there was potential there, if it’d only been effectively used.

Louder

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Scream is one of my old movies.  I saw it several years ago but the details had grown hazy so I dusted off the DVD to give it another go round.  I’m glad I did.  This Wes Craven classic was one of the first horror movies to rock the critics because it parodies so many other horror films while remaining a scary plot line.  And it’s intelligent.  I liked it so much that I’d watched Scream 2 as well, and the two had jumbled up in my mind.  In case you’re still in a Halloween mood, here’s the basic premise (I won’t spoil the ending): the opening sequence is so well-known that I’m tempted to skip it, but it sets the scene remarkably well.  A teenage girl home alone answers the phone to find a stranger on the line.  This stranger is watching her as he calls, eventually breaking into her house.  Using horror movie clichés, the ghost-faced intruder catches and kills her.

After that, Sidney Prescott is having trouble getting over her mother’s murder the previous year.  The recent murder triggers her.  When her father has to leave town on business, she decides to stay with a friend.  Ghostface attacks her, leading to the arrest of her boyfriend, who shows up after the slasher attack.  Along with her friends, of which the guys are all horror movie fans, she plays out various scenarios of who the killer might, or “should” be, according to the rules of the genre.  This is very effectively done, keeping the first-time viewer guessing who the killer might be.  When school is suspended because of the killings, the kids have a massive party (of course).  The killer’s there, however, for the most part following the rules.  But the instructions are subverted, making for a wild ride.

Clever and satirical, the movie strikes the right tone.  One thing I noticed the first time was that Ghostface is a little too fast for a psychotic killer.  He runs.  He’s also quite vulnerable, but then again, he’s not a supernatural villain.  After seeing Scream again, I realized that there are still some classics that I’ve missed.  One reason is that I’m not really a slasher fan.  Throughout the movie they avoid using the word “horror,” preferring “scary movie”—the original title for the film.  Scary Movie was picked up by a horror parody that I watched shortly after seeing Scream for the first time.  In many ways Scary Movie is a parody of a parody.  Horror is endlessly self-referential, of course.  And sometime an old movie is just what you need.

Writing Ghost

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Despite AI, one of my great regrets is not having learned additional languages in high school.  I took four years of German and the one classmate I knew who was able to convince the administration took two languages, both Spanish and French (gasp!) to become a translator.  In any case, I regret being able to read French only haltingly, with a dictionary.  I watched Colette because it is the biopic of a writer, but I’ve never read any of her books.  I also watched it because it’s considered dark academia, but you already knew that, didn’t you?  Colette lived from the last quarter of the nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century.  Her first husband published a successful series of books she wrote under his name.  The two separated and Colette went on to become a reasonably successful writer in her own regard.

As with most biopics, the details are exaggerated, but still, this is the world of books where fiction and fact aren’t always so far apart as might be supposed.  Interestingly, articles on her husband (Henry Gauthier-Villars), known by the pen name Willy, state that he is best known as the first husband of Colette.  A self-promoter, he had other people do his writing for him.  The movie focuses on what happens when he tried to bring his wife, not yet established in her own right, into his band of ghostwriters.  Not having French, I have never really studied French literature.  If life allowed a bit more time, that is something I’d like to have done.  In any case, Willy was a libertine as well as a self-promoter, the sort that occasionally enters high government position.  And since he was involved in many affairs, Colette explored relationships with other women.  In other words, this is a story that is still very relevant.

Dark academia sometimes involves a literary life rather than a strictly academic one.  I applaud its love of books and book culture.  Some of us miss the days when it was possible to have publishers eager for new material, when books were generally respected instead of widely banned.  The darkness here is clearly the manipulative relationship Willy has with Colette.  He uses her lack of experience in the publishing world to his own advantage, and habitually making poor financial decisions, puts their living situation and security at risk time and again.  I sometimes wonder about my high school friend.  Did she become a translator?  And, if so, is her job, nearing retirement age, under threat from AI?  And this, in the span of a human working life.  A life of books.

Old Horror

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One of the early horror movies not in the Universal lineup was Doctor X.  It deals with themes that are perhaps surprising to modern viewers of old movies since the Motion Picture Production Code had not yet taken effect.  The story itself is slow paced, as is typical for the time, and not very scary according to modern standards.  Police are investigating a series of full moon killings and have traced them near to Dr. Xavier’s institution, the Academy of Surgical Research.  There he, along with four other scientists, are conducting advanced, but unorthodox medicine.  Dr. X convinces the police that he will investigate thoroughly and if the killer is among his colleagues, which he does not believe he is, he’ll learn which one.  There’s quite a bit of screwball humor introduced by the investigative reporter and even the butler and maid.  Hooking everyone up to a machine that indicates excitement, Dr. X has the murder reenacted to determine guilt among the watching scientists.  This is an early form of polygraph, apparently.

One of the colleagues, Dr. Wells, is excused because he is missing a hand and the murderer clearly used two.  The lights go out during the experiment and the “guilty” doctor is found murdered.  The solution Dr. X proposes is to do the experiment again, using his daughter (with whom the reporter has fallen in love) as the “victim.”  In order to prevent anyone from moving around, all but Wells are handcuffed to their chairs that are bolted to the floor.  Wells is then shown transforming himself into a monster by using “synthetic flesh” that he’s developed, allowing himself to animate a second hand and also, to disguise his face, freeing him from being identified.  He attacks Dr. X’s daughter, but the scientists are all handcuffed to their chairs.  The comic reporter saves the day by destroying the monster.

These early horror films blazed trails for later monster movies.  The science is a mix of plausible sounding theory and mumbo-jumbo.  I wasn’t sure what to expect since I knew the movie by name only.  Dr. X is a kind of mad scientist, but he’s not evil.  There’s a theme of cannibalism that runs through the story as well, since this is where Wells gets the material for his synthetic flesh.  The themes are scarier than what’s shown on the screen, of course.  These were the days when Boris Karloff in Frankenstein monster makeup could cause viewers to faint.  Doctor X was never as popular as the Universal lineup and although Wells is grotesque enough, he’s no Frankenstein creature.  He is, however, part of cinematic monster history.

Little Girl

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It might be inferred from the fact that I’ve mentioned it once or twice that I’ve seen The Little Girl Who Lives down the Lane before.  On a rainy autumnal afternoon it’s the horror movie that most often comes to mind.  While some find the “horror” designation overkill, it is the genre under which I bought the DVD many years ago.   Besides, it won a Saturn Award for best horror film.  I picked it up at a two-for-one sale not knowing what it was about but I was immediately taken by the atmospheric setting and weather.  A proper New England fall, after the leaves have come down.  It opens on Halloween with one of the most cringy openings ever.  Charlie Sheen plays a pedophile asking 13-year old Jodie Foster (Rynn) probing questions of where her father is when he finds her alone at home.

There will be a spoiler later in this paragraph.  Rynn lives on her own after her father dies by suicide and she murdered her mother and put her body in the basement.  Frank Hallet (Sheen), and his insufferable mother, own the Maine town where Rynn lives.  Befriended by Mario, a high school student who discovers her trying to drive, she eventually confides that Hallet’s mother was killed going down to the basement.  Meanwhile her son Frank keeps trying to insinuate himself into Rynn’s life, and, strongly implied, bed.  The story has some improbable plot elements and a few surprising moments, but not any jump startles.  It’s a slow burn, building to where Rynn attempts to poison herself, but Frank, not trusting her, drinks her tea instead.  Moody, rainy, and played out on a carpet of dead leaves, this is one of those horror movies that gets the season right.

Ironically for October nights, there aren’t a ton of horror films I know of that manage to capture this feeling.  I suppose that’s why I’ve seen this one a few times before.  I’ve gone through many lists of “October movies” and come out thinking that few people must think about this season the way that I do.  Or at least I haven’t found many horror movies that allow the season to pull its own weight.  Little Girl wasn’t welcomed with open arms when first released, but it has become a kind of cult classic.  Foster’s acting is pretty amazing considering her age at the time the film was shot.  But the autumnal weather does it for me, every time, even as we slip into November.

Halloween, Disney Style

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I really don’t spend much time on social media.  It’s literally just a few minutes a day, half an hour at most.  I’m too busy to spend more.  I tend not to join groups because, well, I don’t spend time there.  One group I did join on Facebook is for Halloween fans.  I believe that’s where I heard about the movie Halloweentown.  I was surprised that, as a fan of Halloween for pretty much all of my life, I’d not known about this 1998 movie.  Watching it, it became clear why not.  It is a Disney television movie.  In the nineties we didn’t have television (a few channels from a snowy aerial at Nashotah House) and certainly didn’t subscribe to the Disney channel.  While the movie failed to penetrate my consciousness, it went on to start a franchise.  Once I heard of it, I decided I should see it because I’m interested in the darker side of Disney.

Television movies, with their comparatively small budgets and limited viewerships, don’t have the finished feel that theatrical films possess.  This is the story of a family of witches, three kids and a mother, living in the human world.  The children don’t know they’re witches.  Then when their grandmother visits on Halloween, they sneak into the eponymous Halloweentown with her.  This is where witches and other monsters live because humans fear them.  The “monsters” mostly consist of obvious humans wearing masks and makeup.  There are a few mildly frightening moments as the evil Kalabar tries to take over the human world by persuading his fellow monsters to join him.  But this is Disney where threats are gentle and good fairly easily defeats evil.  While the movie isn’t even as scary as Hocus Pocus, some people watch it to get in the Halloween mood.

One thing that I’ve noticed about many movies that try to capture the autumnal feeling while being shot in California, is that they miss the more dramatic temperate shift in seasons.  This annual outdoors Götterdämmerung resulting in the colorful dying of leaves and the surrender of summer to the inevitable chill to follow is integral to my experience of Halloween.  In fact, one of the few criticisms I’d make to John Carpenter’s Halloween is that Haddonfield, Illinois was shot in Southern California.  Other movies make a similar gaff.  I’m always on the lookout for movies that manage to emulate that Halloween feel.  The film that perhaps does this best, in my experience, is The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, shot in Canada and Maine.  I’m still searching, however, for my own Halloweentown.

Don’t Stop Moving

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Stopmotion is a strangely affecting horror movie.  Body horror as well as Euro-horror, it follows the dream-like world of Ella, a stop motion animator.  She learned the trade from her mother who, suffering from arthritis, has Ella do the work for her.  After her mother has a stroke, Ella continues working on her final film but in a new location.  Tom, her boyfriend, gets her an apartment in a run-down building where Ella meets a precocious and odd little girl who tells her she should film a different movie and proceeds to tell Ella how it should go.  To her chagrin, Ella has to admit that the little girl’s story is better than her mother’s.  With the girl’s help, Ella animates a monster, the Ash Man, who is pursuing a girl lost in the woods.  Then Ella starts receiving visits from the Ash Man, or at least she believes so.  She ends up in the hospital. Spoilers follow.

Tom, who visits her there, is worried that Ella has let this go too far.  He threatens to delete the film while she’s immobile in the hospital.  Ella’s mother dies and with the little girl’s help, Ella gets back to her apartment to finish the film.  When Tom, and his plagiarizing sister, come to return Ella to the hospital, she kills them both.  She then, with the girl’s help, finishes the film.  The film results in her own death, or at least that’s the way she sees it.  The film features quite a lot of stop motion animation although the movie itself is live action.  It’s a very artful, if gross, film.  The little girl is never seen by anyone else, nor explained, suggesting that she’s a younger Ella following her own creativity.  And paying the price for it.

I can’t claim to understand everything that happens in this movie.  That doesn’t make it bad, but worth pondering.  Those of us who live creative lives experience dry patches, and often, self-doubt.  I know that when I compare my writing to that of others, I suffer in the very comparison.  When Stopmotion first ended, I felt both confused and intrigued.  Euro-horror of recent years, to generalize, emphasizes the art of the craft.  There was a lot of symbolism in this movie, some of which I couldn’t connect to the action.  I suspect repeated viewing might bring some of this to light.  My family has often told me that with my focus and interests, I would’ve been a good stop motion animator.  I certainly have the creating monsters part down pat.  It’s just a matter of deciding which narrative to follow.

Not Frightening

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Years ago a friend, which I define as someone who wishes me no specific bodily harm, suggested I watch The Frighteners.  It finally came to a free streaming service (with commercials), so I gave it a go.  I really enjoyed parts of it, but on the whole, there was too much going on to make it an effective film.  It’s a horror comedy, and once films like that stretch beyond 90 minutes they tend to need a lot of magic juice to keep the engine running.  So, here’s the basic idea: Frank can see ghosts.  With the help of a couple of ghosts he makes a living driving spirits from peoples homes, after setting them up.  Unfortunately there’s a serial killer ghost actually killing people.  Since Frank tends to be the last one the victims see, there is some suspicion that he’s involved in their deaths.  

A young widow, Lucy, is a doctor and is trying to help a woman (Patricia) who seems to be abused by her mother.  It turns out that Patricia is associated with a serial killer from many years ago, and it’s unclear whether or not she’s innocent.  Meanwhile, a neurotic FBI agent comes to town and decides Frank is guilty and tries to kill him without due process.  Meanwhile, more and more people are dying.  It’s probably a spoiler to say that the serial killing ghost is the same as the serial killer that Patricia was in love with and she’s still helping him to get to a record number of deaths.  Frank ends up dying twice but is brought back to life at the end, after Patricia and the serial killer are taken to Hell.

The movie is stylish and a bit of fun, but if you’re watching it on a streaming service with commercials it ends up being over two hours long.  Some parts are funny, but not hilarious.  Some parts are spooky, but not really scary.  The plot is complex and takes its time unfolding.  The serial killers attempting to break a record is disturbing and not exactly in good taste.  The acting is good but the viewer’s left feeling a bit confused as to what the message is and how they ought to feel.  It’s the kind of movie that I might find myself in the mood to watch again, someways down the road, but in the short term, I’m glad to have seen it once.  I’m not sure my friend and I share taste when it comes to movies, but at least he’s not wishing me any harm.

Mirroring Reality

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I watched Oculus for two reasons: it kept coming up as a “freebie” on a service I use, and I’d been thinking about haunted mirrors.  Well, three reasons—I also liked the sound of the title.  (Not all decisions are a matter of science.). I was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be pretty good.  I’ll probably throw in a spoiler or two, so if it’s on your list, you’ve been warned.  Kaylie and her brother Tim were attacked by their parents, but Tim was being framed by the mirror.  Both parents attempt to kill the children, but end up dead instead.  Tim is sent to an institution since he pulled the trigger, and Kaylie has spent eleven years researching the mirror.  When her brother is released she convinces him that they have to keep their promise to destroy the mirror.

The problem is, the mirror messes with perceptions of reality.  The two go back to their childhood home where Kaylie has set up a device to drop an anchor onto mirror.  This is set to happen with a wind-up timer since the mirror can control electronics.  She’s also set up the room so that everything is being recorded.  If she can prove the mirror is what she believes it to be, her father will be exonerated and her brother proven innocent.  The movie gets a little tricky to follow since their current story is intercut with flashbacks as to what happened when they were children.  Also, the mirror records events on the cameras that didn’t really happen.  Add to this the fact that Tim has undergone therapy for eleven years and he’s convinced that his sister is delusional.  It’s one of those movies that messes with your perception of reality.

When Tim doesn’t see his sister in front of the device meant to destroy the mirror, he accidentally kills her.  The police arrive, believing he has repeated his murderous attack from eleven years before.  The ending is rather nihilistic, but the scares are effective.  There are a few gross-out scenes and some jump startles, but overall it is the story that conveys the fear.  For me, the mental issues were almost triggers.  But then again, I watched it on a day when I was a bit fuzzy-headed because of waking up too soon.  I really didn’t know what to expect when I hit “play.”  I’ve done that enough times and ended up with films that were wastes of time, so I was glad to have found a competent one this time.  These are my reflections, in any case.

Hungry Madness

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It’s been on my wishlist of movies to watch for a few years, In the Mouth of Madness.  A tribute to Lovecraftian horror, as well as a probing of insanity, it is a heady mix.  In keeping with my usual rules for movie watching, I hadn’t pre-read anything about it that would give away the plot.  Coming to it fresh, a number of things stood out.  There were some very good scenes and parts of the movie made me want to like it a lot.  It is a great movie for religion and horror analysis, and in that regard it’s much better than Prince of Darkness (despite Alice Cooper).  In fact, had I been able to see it years ago, it would’ve been included in Holy Horror.  That itself is noteworthy since two of John Carpenter’s other movies were in it: The Fog and the aforementioned Prince.  I suppose I should provide a little summary (if possible) in case you haven’t seen.

Trent is an insurance investigator, and a hardened skeptic.  A horror writer who outsells Stephen King, Sutter Cane, has gone missing and Trent’s sent to investigate.  He discovers that Cane is in a town that doesn’t exist (Hobb’s End) and that his books are not fiction.  In fact, Trent is a character in one of his novels.  When people read his latest book, In the Mouth of Madness (a title adapted from Lovecraft), they go insane and begin killing others.  The plot gets a bit busy because people are starting to transform into slimy, Lovecraftian monsters and this reality, if the book is read, or movie watched, will spread to all of humanity, leading to our extinction.  A bit too ambitious, the plot can’t hold all this weight, but it really isn’t bad.  There’s just too much going on.

The religion elements come in because Cane has holed himself up in an unholy church.  He refers to his latest novel as the “new Bible.”  “More people,” he says, “believe in my work than believe in the Bible.”  He later refers to himself as God.  I haven’t seen all of Carpenter’s films, but there seems to be a trajectory of his earliest major films being his best.  Halloween and The Thing are classics.  The Fog isn’t bad.  When he brings religion into his stories, as in The Fog, things begin to cloud over a bit.  Prince of Darkness doesn’t deliver a believable Devil.  In the Mouth of Madness doesn’t quite hang together well enough.  It’s not a bad movie, though.  It has given me some ideas for another book, if I can stay sane long enough to write it.

Colorful Space

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Lovecraftian horror translates to film unevenly.  Even when it’s successful, as in Color Out of Space, it really isn’t that close to reading Lovecraft.  “The Colour Out of Space” is among my favorite Lovecraft stories.  To me, it feels perhaps his closest to Poe, and Poe is my personal muse.  I knew that it couldn’t be made cinematic without changing things a bit, and that it would be pretty gnarly.  I was correct on both counts.  In very broad brush strokes, the movie follows the story: a colorful meteorite on an isolated farm begins changing the crops and the people who live there.  Instead of crumbling, however, they are struck by the color and become other.  The mother and her youngest son, for example, are fused together creating one of the most cringe-worthy scenes I’ve watched in a long while.  The movie emphasizes family, even when things go horribly awry.

Defying Lovecraft’s well-known avoidance of focus on female characters, the movie’s focal point in Lavinia accords with Poe’s concern for threats against beautiful women.  She’s the teenage daughter of the family and the film opens with a scene where she uses Wicca to try to heal her mother of cancer.  The love between Nathan (Nicolas Cage) and his wife is movingly shown.  The movie was recommended to me during a conversation about Nicolas Cage in horror.  Maybe it’s because he’s in so many movies in total, I’d never really considered him a scream king, but he’s nailed the role quite capably, with the notable exception of The Wicker Man.  Color Out of Space is pretty extreme body horror but the movie is artistically done.  You almost don’t mind feeling violated in that way because of the visual appeal of the non-horror focused parts.

The acting is uniformly strong.  In a nod to Lovecraftian fans, Lavinia uses the Necronomicon as the basis for her Wiccan rites.  Some of the scenes seem to reference Evolution and others eXistenZ.  Transforming the action from Lovecraft’s setting in the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first is done pretty well.  The family is isolated when the meteorite prevents electronics, including cars, from working.  The movie does offer some alien creatures, unlike Lovecraft’s basic story.  And these creatures point to a planet with tentacly beings that naturally tie this story into the Cthulhu mythos.  Lovecraft’s own story doesn’t make this move, but of course, the Cthulhu mythos only really developed among his fans.  In all, Color Out of Space exceeded my expectations, even though it was a box office flop. 

Aging

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M. Night Shyamalan’s horror is thoughtful.  Old is a little difficult to accept because it’s very difficult to keep artificially aging actors at a steady rate, either by make-up or substitution.  And it seems that the mysterious beach that ages people but also heals them should, in some way, make exploring its medical possibilities somewhat difficult.  Still, it is a noteworthy day-light horror offering that has an underlying ethical question.  I will need to include a spoiler to discuss that ethical issue, but before I get there, a vacation brochure.  Individuals, and families, are brought to a resort where everything’s perfect.  Then they are driven to a remote beach and discover that they really can’t leave.  And they age at a rapid rate.  (This may make you think of a Gilligan’s Island episode, but this one has no laughs.)  The aging is first noticed with the children and by the time the adults realize what is happening, it’s too late.

Here comes a spoiler.  Old was released during the pandemic’s second year, so I suspect it wasn’t widely seen.  If you’re still waiting, here’s your chance.  Ready?  Okay.  So, this island’s aging properties have been tapped by a pharmaceutical company to test new drugs on patients with various diseases.  Instead of waiting years for results, they can know in a day whether a treatment, unwittingly taken by the clients when they first arrived, worked.  If a “client” has no symptoms for a day, it is the equivalent of years.  The company, although it is responsible for the deaths of the people in the trial, give the results away, saving many lives for free.  Here is the ethical dilemma—do you save thousands, or millions, by having one person die to test the drug?  The real issue is that it’s done without consent.  Those aging have no idea they’re test subjects. 

Consent is an ideal, but in fact life happens to us and we seldom have the right of refusal.  Perhaps that’s the more insidious message here—giving consent furthers the illusion that we’re in charge of our lives.  I’m sure all of us can think of things that happened to us not because we chose them, but because we were at the right or wrong place at the wrong or right time.  When some such thing transpires, it often takes us considerable time to regain our balance, to feel like we’re “in control” again.  I chose to watch Old, perhaps when it wasn’t a good time to do so.  Or did I choose it?  And whose morals are these?