Bible Movies

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I’ve noted elsewhere that no database exists, that I know of, where every movie showing or featuring the Bible is catalogued.  I used clips from films that had the Bible in one of my Rutgers’ Jan Term classes (four hours is a bit long of a stretch to talk).  The years have worn away some of the memories, but while thinking about The Sheep Detectives I thought of Nell.  Not because the movies are similar at all, but because they both use the Bible.  I’m not discussing horror here, since I do that plenty elsewhere.  I single out Nell because I remember it.  Since I tend to keep things, my notes from the class—probably on some unreadable disc—may preserve the movies I used.  Absent the notes, I’m having trouble with my recollection.  I may have discussed them on this blog but even the search function grows weary with so many posts.

It was in that class, however, that the seeds for Holy Horror were planted.  Two of the movies were Sleepy Hollow and An American Haunting.  Those I remember.  (It helps that I met the author of the novel on which the latter was based while at Rutgers.)  I do wonder, apart from Nell, which non-horror movies I used.  There was a good handful of them.  Since that class was over 15 years ago, instant recall is lacking.  For purposes of understanding how the Good Book is understood, however, having a comprehensive list would be useful.

I excluded movies based on the Bible.  These are the kind of thing that make a web search useless.  All they bring up is The Ten Commandments and its ilk.  What struck me at the time was that the Bible occurs quite frequently in movies.  Typing this out reminded me that O Brother, Where Art Thou? was also among the cohort.  Who can forget the cyclops Bible salesman Big Dan?  But what were the others?  Constantine was probably among them.  And Pulp Fiction.  I’m sure a couple more weren’t of the scary sort.  Ah yes, Muppet Treasure Island had to’ve been among them.  Was Footloose?  Probably.  I may not remember all the movies whose clips I used, but I do remember doing web searches even then and finding them frustrating.  The Bible appears in tons of films.  As far as I’m aware, nobody has thought to catalogue all of them.  Were I still a professor, I’d be suggesting a research project for some eager doctoral student.  And, of course, I’d still have ready access to my notes.

Hollow Singing

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Since it’s Sleepy Hollow season I suggested to my wife that we watch the Disney version of the movie last night, rainy weekend evening that it was.  I discuss in my book Disney’s strange pairing with “The Adventures of Toad,” but one of the points I emphasized in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that Disney is largely responsible for making the story what it is in our culture.  It doesn’t stand alone, of course, but most people I’ve asked learned of it through the Disney film.  Except my wife.  She learned of it through the Disney record based on the Disney film, released in 1971.  My wife didn’t grow up with monsters the way that I did, but her parents got their kids the vinyl version.  She found it online to play for me—I’d more or less overlooked it in my book, which deals primarily with movies and novels.

First of all, the record more naturally pairs Sleepy Hollow with Irving’s other hit, “Rip Van Winkle,” on the B side.  Narrated by Billy Bletcher, it includes two songs from the film, “Ichabod Crane” and “The Headless Horseman,” the latter sung by the formidable Thurl Ravenscroft.  A shortened version of the story is narrated and, of course, the showcasing of Bing Crosby is missing.  The cartoon itself is only half an hour, and the record cuts the telling to twelve and a half minutes.  As my wife read the comments of others who’d rediscovered the recording online, I pondered how many people might’ve discovered “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” through Disney’s record.  The story as written by Washington Irving isn’t aimed at children.  Despite its early nineteenth-century language, it’s kid friendly, but not the kind of thing children seek out.

I don’t want to give away too much of my book, but I would point out a couple of things.  Disney borrowed the idea of making a movie with Sleepy Hollow from Ub Iwerks, the co-inventor of Mickey Mouse, who began his own cartoon studio after working with Walt Disney.  The second point is that Disney made it an explicitly Halloween tale.  Whenever autumn and its pumpkins roll around thoughts turn to Sleepy Hollow.  The Disney song “The Headless Horseman,” by Don Raye and Gene DePaul, does most of the heavy lifting for inventing a new mythology of said Headless Horseman.  Even though my book was published last year, there’s more digging to be done around the origins of America’s ghost story.  I’m reading another book about it right now myself.

Burton on Mars

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Tim Burton’s aesthetic falls outside of my own by only a matter of degree.  Some of his films I really enjoy—Sleepy Hollow remains his best—while others leave me in an uncanny valley.  Mars Attacks! came out when I was just starting my teaching career at Nashotah House and before I’d really knew much of Burton’s work.  I’d seen Batman and Edward Scissorhands, and probably Batman Returns.  These I felt were all good, but were outside my scope of films that really did it for me.  I found Mars Attacks! on a streaming service on a rainy weekend and was immediately surprised by the level of the ensemble cast.  These were big names!  Why wasn’t the movie more talked about in the day?  I guess because the story fails to impress.  I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be funny or not.

PœN

Like Burton, I grew up with the B movies of the fifties and sixties.  I still have a soft spot for them.  The mean and deceitful Martians of this movie were mostly fun to watch, but the human actors failed to elicit much sympathy.  The invaders experiments on the bodies of captured humans evoke Burton’s fascination with disturbing mixtures, but it’s the aliens themselves that stay with you long after  the credits roll.  Reading about the film afterwards, clearly some cinematic import clings to it, and its many head-nods to other movies are numerous.  Coming out the same year as Independence Day, however, meant that it faced a contender taken more seriously.

The plot is fairly simple: technically superior Martians surround the Earth with flying saucers.  They broadcast messages of peace but zap the party out to greet them.  They issue an apology and when they come to meet the president, attack again.  They kidnap some high-level people and experiment on them.  The movie focuses on Washington, Las Vegas, and rural Kansas.  A bullied teen in Kansas figures out, with the help of his grandmother, that a Slim Whitman song makes aliens’ heads explode.  That part was actually pretty funny.  The integration of computer-animated aliens and people is pretty well done.  The movie feels like maybe one of the cylinders isn’t firing properly, but it’s the kind of film I could see myself coming back to on another rainy weekend, if the mood is right.  Of course, Tim Burton’s next movie hit it out of the park and I did watch seven of his next eight productions after that.

Thriller or Horror?

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Shutter Island is a movie my wife often suggests when a kind of autumnal day puts you in the mood for a certain kind of film.  There are surprisingly few of them (films, that is).  What I call “October movies.”   I’ve written about Shutter Island before.  It’s not really horror.  “Psychological thriller” fits better, although, if it were horror it’d be in Holy Sequel.  More on that soon.  So the movie—spoiler alert!  The following gives away the ending!  So the movie follows an inmate at Ashecliffe Hospital on the eponymous island.  He has delusions that he’s still a US Marshal investigating an escaped patient who is really an anagram for his dead wife.  His partner is actually his psychiatrist.  Andrew Laeddis, the patient, is really there to find himself.  Thinking he’s Edward Daniels, another anagram, he’s on the island when a hurricane hits.  The staff play along with a massive role play to try to get him to face the truth that he killed his wife for drowning their kids.

So far, so good.  I’ve seen the movie probably half-a-dozen times.  In the most recent viewing I finally spotted the Bible in it.  In the scene where Laeddis is really coming to grips with what he did to his wife and she did to their kids, when he arrives home the television is playing in the background. Someone’s saying, “rise, take up your bed, and walk.”  (Or similar; I didn’t quite catch it—it’s in the background, after all.)  The quote is from the gospel story of Jesus healing a paralytic.  That got me to thinking about how the warden tells Laeddis that violence is God’s gift.  That God loves violence.  A former military man, he says, “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It’s what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices, and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.”

We’re pretty far into Holy Sequel territory here.  Some of the movies discussed in Holy Horror were perhaps better labeled as psychological thrillers rather than horror.  The line is thin.  Although I’d watched Shutter Island in time to have included it, that quote from the Good Book eluded me until I watched the film to fulfill the need for an October movie.  It doesn’t feature the fallen leaves and pumpkins I like in my seasonal films, my October movies.  But watching it again brought something to the surface like an island newly rising in the sea.

Found Unfound

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I think I need to swear off found footage films.  My first horror attempt this October failed with Hell House LLC.  I was watching at the behest of a friend.  Hopefully one who isn’t aware of my very low dizziness quotient.  Extreme camera motion!  I was determined to try to make my way through because the Bible was introduced early on, earning it a place in Holy Sequel, but I could only make it half-way through by watching about half of that first half out of the corners of my eyes.  Even that wasn’t enough to help.  I understand they’re going for “authenticity.”  I know that walking with a camera makes it difficult to keep still, but hey, Steadicam was invented for a reason.  But instead of enjoying my weekend, I’m lying absolutely still in a darkened room.

I’m guessing demons are involved, from what I’d been able to see.  Demons that move a clown dummy around.  From the Wikipedia summary it sounds like I’m not far wrong.  So let’s step back a bit: Paul, with his girlfriend Sara and a staff of three, are setting up a haunted house attraction for Halloween at Hotel Abaddon.   The property is a fixer-upper, but sufficiently creepy that they don’t need to do a ton of work on making it unsettling.  Since it’s a hotel, they stay on site while getting it ready.  They hire scare actors and things are progressing, but the cameraman (especially) is getting freaked out, mainly at night.  That’s as far as I got.

The framing story is that a mysterious accident occurred on opening night leaving 15 people dead.  The “found footage” explains what happened.  They do make reference to Abaddon as a demon who guards Hell.  The Good Book actually uses the term as a reference to Hell itself also.  One of the scare actors informs Paul that the hotel really had the reputation for being haunted before they started setting it up as a haunted house.  Of course, the movie spawned a franchise.  Perhaps my condition is getting more acute as I age—I watched Blair Witch without any trouble—but as I write this a few hours later I still have to be careful about moving my head too much.  I can scratch it, though.  And I wonder as I do so if a little less camera motion would’ve ruined the effect they were going for.  To me the most frightening aspect is being nauseous for the remainder of the day, especially when weekends are precious free time.

B’s and Q’s

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A friend who read my review of The Stuff recommended Q: The Winged Serpent.  The former was the first Larry Cohen movie I’d seen, one that I stumbled upon while looking for something free to watch.  I was favorably impressed—it was a comedy horror that worked.  Q was earlier and was more of a low-budget horror, but with elements of satire in it.  As well as social commentary.  If you can handle stop-motion animation, and you want to see the inside of the Chrysler Building dome, you might enjoy this monster flick.  And there was a good deal of theology in it.  It’s certainly worth talking about in the context of horror and religion.  One warning in advance: if you’re like me, all the camera motion—many aerial shots of Midtown Manhattan, it might make you a little woozy.  It did me.

The movie follows a petty criminal who discovers the lair of Quetzalcoatl inside the Chrysler Building.  Meanwhile, a priest of Quetzalcoatl is sacrificing willing victims in Manhattan to bring the deity back.  A cop who’s willing to believe (Detective Shepard) researches beliefs in the Aztec god and tries to connect the sacrificial murders with people who are disappearing—often from Manhattan rooftops.  The question arises: is this a god or just a monster?  That’s a freighted question these days.  This idea is that if it can be killed it’s just a monster.  If not…

The story has its shortcomings and the direction isn’t great, but overall it’s not bad.  A creature-feature with some thought.  As Shepard chases down experts he starts to understand that even if this is just a monster, there are devotees of Quetzalcoatl in Manhattan killing (willing) victims.  At one point Shepard says, upon seeing a victim with his heart cut out, “All we have to do is eat the bread and drink the wine,” or something similar.  This is fairly sophisticated coming from a B movie.  Religion is also behind some of the humor as well.  When the Aztec priest comes after the petty criminal he can’t kill his victim unless he says a prayer.  The criminal refuses, and in doing so saves his life.  Interesting thought.

While having the trappings and feel of a B movie, Q gives the viewer of religion and horror movies something to think about.  The movie doesn’t reference the Bible or quote it, so it can’t make Holy Sequel, but it’s worth a lazy weekend afternoon to give you something to think about.

Demons Amok

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Not all low budget movies are bad, but some really struggle.  Demon Hunter perhaps more than most.  Not only is the script poorly written, the overall story fights for comprehension.  The basic idea—Jake, a half-breed demon, hunts and kills demons for the church when exorcisms fail—is contrived.  It doesn’t help that many aspects of the Catholicism it portrays it simply gets wrong.  And the common issue that most demon-monster movies can’t seem to overcome, that demons are incorporeal, makes this into a slug-fest rather than really having any kind of film with a statement.  Okay, let’s step back a second: Jake is hired by Cardinal White to stop Asmodeus, the demon of lust.  Asmodeus had made it to the earthly dimension and is trying to populate the world with his spawn.  The Cardinal sends a nun, Sara, with Jake but she just can’t kill demons.

When Asmodeus tries to rape Sara, she is revealed to be a half-breed demon as well and she kills him.  Jake tries to rescue her but has no choice but to kill Sara.  The Cardinal, who has tough-guy priests blocking his door, reveals that they knew about Sara all along and knew that Jake would end up killing her too.  Feeling betrayed for the set-up, Jake goes and keeps on killing those who’ve been seduced by demons.  Bad storytelling can be bearable if some aspects are believable, such as the religious elements.  The problems begin from the opening scene, which is an Exorcist knock-off.  The priest is reciting Latin prayers from a Bible instead of the Roman Rite.  He’s also not dressed for an exorcism, but this is California and it was perhaps a warm night.

Cardinal White walks around wearing a stole all the time.  One of the priests attending him is packing heat.  Demons can’t tell demons, or at least half-demons, from human beings.  And Jake can’t seem to respond to anything without a snappy comeback.  Demons are killed with crosses (not crucifixes) with the bottoms whittled down into points.  Although they have inhuman powers they fight to the death with fisticuffs.  I kept looking for something, anything, to hold onto to that might make this movie make some sense.  The story, which is mercifully brief, is padded out with driving sequences that take a little too long.  A few scenes in the movie weren’t too bad, but there weren’t enough of them to redeem this one.  But it does end up in Holy Sequel, for what it’s worth.

Eating Sin

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Although a good example of religion and horror, and a member of Holy Sequel, The Order isn’t a great movie.  For a plot that delves into Catholicism, it doesn’t have a great understanding of religion.  It misuses the term “theosophy,” to boot.  So, Fr. Alex is a Carolingian priest, one of two remaining.  He says the mass in Latin with his back to the congregation.  Then he’s sent to Rome by a corrupt Cardinal to investigate the suicide of his mentor.  Before setting off for Italy he invites his last fellow Carolingian, Fr. Thomas, to come.  A woman who escaped a mental institution after shooting him during an exorcism also comes.  Once the investigation begins, Fr. Alex determines a sin-eater killed his mentor.  The Cardinal gives him a special, ritual knife that is needed to kill the sin-eater.  His associate, Fr. Thomas, knows how to get underground Catholic knowledge leading to said sin-eater.

The sin-eater convinces Fr. Alex to seek what he wants.  The priest wants the girl who tried to kill him, so he renounces his vows to sleep with her.  The sin-eater wants to die—he’s been at this for five centuries and is weary.  He attacks the girl, making it look like suicide, so Alex has to eat her sin to get her to Heaven.  He then kills the sin-eater.  The corrupt Cardinal had made a deal with said, dead sin-eater, that if he arranged for the sin-eater’s release, he’d become Pope.  Alex, who has now taken over as the sin-eater, foils this plan and decides to use his now power for just causes.

All fairly convoluted.  Of course, the sin-eater idea would be picked up a few years later in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.  That’s where I was first exposed to the concept.  A sin-eater is a folkloric concept going back at least to the seventeenth century, mainly in the British Isles.  It has been under-explored by academics (it has “history of religions thesis topic” written all over it).  It’s an interesting idea but isn’t handled well in this movie.  There’s the trope of esoteric Catholicism at play, and interestingly, The Da Vinci Code came out that same year.  Dan Brown’s novel played into the Zeitgeist regarding things the Catholic Church didn’t want laypeople to know (supposedly).  The novel sold an obscene amount of copies.  For all that, we’re no closer to learning the actual history of sin-eaters.  Thesis topic calling!

Not Really

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Some horror films just have trouble finding their way.  Blessed is one such movie.  The writing is one problem.  The misunderstanding of religion is an even larger issue.  Samantha and her novelist husband Craig can’t have children.  When he gets a large advance for his first book (dream on) they visit a fertility clinic in upstate New York where Samantha becomes pregnant with twins.  The lake scenery in a light winter (actually in Romania) is the best part of the film.  It’s quite evocative.  The clinic, in any case, shares facilities with a cloning company.  And Craig gets introduced to a tycoon who works in multiple industries, including publishing and, hmm, cloning.  As Samantha grows visibly more pregnant Craig becomes more focused on his writing, neglecting her and visiting the tycoon in the city whenever he can.  It’s implied that they have an understanding, but that doesn’t hold with the ending.

An Italian priest starts to warn Samantha about the evil at the clinic.  Not only that, but the tycoon tells her about his fascination with saints, including Ambrose who killed an angel—Lucifer—whose blood was sealed in a vial recently stolen from the monastery in which it was kept, as per the Italian priest.  That blood made its way to the cloning clinic and so, yes, Rosemary, Samantha’s carrying twin children of the devil.  The priest kidnaps Samantha and prays with her, insisting that she take poison to banish the evil.  He then tries to burn her to death and he also drives into the clinic and sets it on fire.  Samantha survives the fire and her twin girls kill another child at a Halloween party a few years later in Manhattan.

This is one of those movies that tried to improve on Rosemary’s Baby and although some of it is eerie, it’s not really scary and many elements are simply dropped or stuck in for no apparent reason.  The novelty was twin Antichrists who were both girls.  They, like Adrian, appear only late in the movie and the visual cues for what is happening are off.  It’s an interesting attempt to bring science and religion together in horror, but it has trouble understanding the religion it represents.  Quite often in horror, and perhaps other genres, a veneer of religion is used without any kind of research into what any tradition actually believes and/or does.  The, presumably, Catholicism here is strange.  There maybe a scene with the Bible, so I’ll add it to Holy Sequel, in the maybe category.

Wooly Sleuthing

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The Sheep Detectives is a family-friendly movie (for the most part) and a sweet story.  I’ll try not to reveal whodunit.  George is a vegetarian shepherd.  He raises sheep for wool, not meat.  He lives just outside the small village of Denbrook, in England.  One night he’s murdered.  The local policeman (singular) doesn’t seem very bright and has to be shown that it’s murder.  The sheep, who loved George, decide to investigate.  (The sheep talk, among themselves.)  George used to read them detective novels in the evening, so they get quite good at deducting things.  Led by Lily they investigate.

One day the sheep head to town.  They can roam freely with nobody suspecting them.  They initially decide on the wrong suspect.  They help the detective come up with a method of investigating by leaving hints for him.  Lily was George’s smartest sheep.  Sebastian is the most world-wise.  And Mopple is the sheep who never forgets anything.  As Sebastian leads Lily and Mopple into the churchyard for the first time, they have the following conversation:

Sebastian: This is the church, where someone named God lives.

Lily: Who’s God?

Sebastian: It’s a bit confusing, God is a shepherd.

Mopple: So he could be our shepherd?

Sebastian: No. Because he’s also a lamb.

Lily: What?

Sebastian: And he’s also invisible. And he’s made of bread. And he damns things.

Lily: Dams things? Like a beaver?

Sebastian: Yes.

Lily: So God is a big invisible lamb beaver, made of… bread?

Sebastian: Yes. And they eat him on Sundays.

The movie is a comedy, of course, but this passage should be exegeted.  Many people believe God lives in churches.  The 23rd Psalm is invoked (“the Lord is my shepherd”), but is complicated by Jesus—the lamb of God.  Of course, God can’t be seen and is therefore invisible.  Made of bread?  Communion, of course.  And the homonymous nature of “damn/dam,” which confuses kids, lead to the conclusion that God might be like a beaver.  This is a fair bit of theological humor for a lighthearted movie.  

The film was based on a novel, written originally in German, but I’m tempted to read it to see if this conversation comes from the book.  In any case, the movie is about acceptance and finding your place in the flock.  And learning not to be mindlessly led to your slaughter—one of the darker themes in the story.  I even enjoyed the good-natured use of “vegetarian” intended as slander.  A fun movie that leaves you with green pastures, it seems to me.  And a message worth considering.

Who’s Calling?

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I learned of this movie from Victoria Jaye’s Hell, Horror and Despair.  (She discusses several movies that I’d missed.)  The Calling immediately went into Holy Sequel.  Not because it was a great movie, but because it uses the Bible.  Indeed, it begins with a quote from “Revelations”—the plural is always a sign that someone hasn’t done their homework—and concerns the birth of the Antichrist.  It goes down like this: a young American woman falls in love with a wealthy British television personality and they get married on the Isle of Man.  She gets pregnant on their wedding  night, the same day a young boy is murdered.  As their son grows, he excels at speaking backwards and has an ability to harm others he dislikes without touching them.  And he’s cruel to animals.  Kristie, the mother, is sent away on business to London a lot so the boy, Dylan, is left with her husband Marc.

Kristie notices that Dylan is very close to Marc and she is being excluded from the family.  On her way home after missing Christmas with her family—when Marc crucified Dylan upside-down to prepare him—the taxi driver starts to reveal that Dylan’s father is Satan, not Marc.  Kristie thinks he’s crazy but soon learns her best friend was murdered while she was away.  (Man is an island with a population well below 100,000.)  She begins to suspect something’s not right.  By discovering a piece of another Bible—this is so Holy Horror!—from the taxi driver, she learns that Dylan is not what he seems.  The taxi driver convinces her to kidnap and drown this son of Satan before he becomes the Antichrist.  A spoiler follows.

When she emerges from the Irish Sea after drowning Dylan, Marc shoots Kristie.  In the hospital (she survives) she tells the story to a priest.  Then on television they see that Dylan, three days after his death, and not coincidentally Easter Sunday, is resurrected.  The news tells of how both the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury are becoming convinced Dylan may be the second coming of Christ, but Kristie flees with the priest as they know he’s the Antichrist.  Now, this isn’t a great movie.  It came out just at the millennium, capitalizing, as Jaye suggests, on the end of the world mania.  Nevertheless, despite the poor acting and inexplicable elements (a parish priest willing to miss Easter Sunday mass to sit with a possibly insane woman in the hospital?) it is a very good example of the way the Bible appears in horror.  I should’ve watched it years ago.

Child Snatcher

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Folk horror, like folklore, is a commonplace of the human condition.  We are afraid and some of our fears are deeply rooted.  Some go back to traditional monsters.  The Moogai is an Australian folk horror film.  It’s based on the fact that from the turn of the twentieth century until the seventies indigenous children were taken from their parents to integrate them into white society.  The moogai is a character like the boogeyman that comes to steal children.  Set in present-day Australia with an adult child of one of these stolen children, the movie concentrates on a parent’s fear of losing her own children.  It also sets up modern medicine against folk wisdom.  Sarah is embarrassed by her birth mother Ruth.  She doesn’t like the ideas she puts into her own daughter’s head about the moogai.  At the same time, Sarah’s unable to sleep and has been seeing things not easily explained after the birth of her second child.

This leads to her husband and others questioning whether she’s experiencing from postpartum psychosis or whether something real is happening.  Then her husband sees the moogai while Sarah’s restrained in a psych ward.  When her husband is arrested for breaking her out of the hospital, Sarah realizes that she has to get to her birth mother to destroy the moogai since no “rational” people will believe her.  Using traditional methods, Ruth and Sarah confront the moogai and rescue her children.  In the process, Ruth dies.  Belief comes at a price.

As a horror film this was recommended by the New York Times.  The moogai is shown perhaps a little too clearly to be scary, but his two faces are creepy.  The really valuable part of all this, however, is the folk tradition.  And the “social programming” that stands behind the horror.  The white men stealing children are the real moogai.  It’s a movie with a conscience.  Similar assimilation efforts were made with indigenous peoples of the Americas.  There’s a horror is being told, “Assimilate or die.”  Capitalism, of course, can allow no other systems to survive.  How can you get rich if everyone doesn’t agree to play along?  Movies like The Moogai ask that trenchant question: what if native peoples know something that the power-hunger interlopers do not?  What if there really are monsters out there?  Of course, in the movie the moogai is symbolically white, just as are the government men at the beginning who come to snatch the children from an indigenous settlement.  Heavy lifting by folk horror.

Love and Jealousy

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Obsession is one of those horror movies that surprised the industry by becoming super-successful last year.  It seems that those who work in movies just can’t accept that horror can be good.  No matter.  Obsession was discussed a lot and I had it on my list for quite some time.  The premise is fairly simple: wishes can come true.  Those who make them, however, often wish they hadn’t.   The idea isn’t new, but it’s the execution here that makes it compelling horror.  The story follows four young adults who work in a music store.  Baron (Bear) is secretly in love with Nikki, while Sarah—the daughter of the store owner—likes Bear.  Ian is Bear’s best friend and he can talk to him without the pressure of sexual tension.  Ian encourages Bear to confess his feelings to Nikki, but he’s too timid to do so.  Instead he buys a One Wish Willow from a New Age shop and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world.

The wish comes true.  The four friends are destabilized.  Nikki, who’d been occasionally going with Ian, suddenly becomes obsessed with Bear.  She spends the night, and then won’t leave.  This might be okay, but she acts in very creepy ways, both when she’s obsessed and when elements of her true self break through.  Their friends soon don’t want Bear to come over because Nikki’s always with him and she’s acting very weird.  One night, when the Nikki under the spell is asleep, actual Nikki asks Bear to kill her.  Bear, in the the meantime, is conflicted.  He finally has the beautiful girlfriend he’s always wanted, but she scares him with her strange behavior and her utter obsession with him.  Her jealousy leads Nikki to kill Sarah.

Since it’s only one wish per customer, Bear buys the last One Wish Willows and asks Ian to undo his wish.  He doesn’t and Nikki shoots him.  Since death is the only thing that can break the wish, Bear is left with an uncomfortable choice.  I’ll leave it at that.  The movie is an intelligent and thoughtful reflection (with some light elements) on relationships.  Human emotions are tricky to navigate and both love and jealousy are quite common in our species.  Many of us experience relationships with uneven levels of love and commitment and, if we’re honest, there’s an element of horror to such situations.  If wishes did come true, we all know, the world would likely not be a happier place at all.  Something to think about.

Waking Up

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Moody, gothic, and intriguing.  These are words that might describe The Awakening.  It’s also an ambiguous, somewhat confusing ghost story.  To discuss this some spoilers will be necessary, so please be advised.  When you’re on the lookout for a movie to watch on an afternoon when staying awake is a struggle (which, in all honesty, is just about every afternoon), on a weekend I’ll open my long list of movies to see and compare it against what’s streaming for free on the couple of services I pay for.  Seldom do the list and offerings coincide at all.  In any case, when I find something off-list that looks intriguing I usually check IMDb to see how many stars it’s earned.  On some streaming services four out of five stars will translate to three out of ten on IMDb.  The Awakening had 6.5, which is pretty good.

So, set just after the First World War, Florence Cathcart is a seance buster who doesn’t believe in ghosts and who’s written a book debunking the whole thing.  She’s then invited to a boarding school where a ghost has been frightening the boys, one of them to death.  Her own past is deeply repressed, however.  So deeply that she has a screen memory of an event that never happened to mask it.  After setting up all her equipment she does find evidence of the inexplicable.  Robert Mallory, a teacher and wounded veteran, believes in ghosts.  He says that those who went through the war see them.  He and Florence fall in love—her fiancé was killed in the war—and during the school holiday, she’s left alone with him, Maud the housekeeper, and one student.  Here come the spoilers…

The one boy left behind is the ghost of her step-brother.  Florence grew up in that house and Maud was the housekeeper, and mother of the boy.  Her unhinged father killed Florence’s mother and was trying to shoot her as well but accidentally shot his son by the housemaid.  He then killed himself.  Florence has to remember her past to realize she’s been seeing ghosts she doesn’t believe in.  It’s an eerie film but the plot is bit confusing.  It brings religion into the story, and even the Bible.  The tale of Holofernes’ beheading from Judith is represented in a painting.  Her debunking book is kept next to the Bible.  By the end we’re asking ourselves if Florence is a ghost.  This is a good, spooky film.  A bit ambitious, but it gets more stars than the usual freebie on a sleepy afternoon.

Annabelle yet Again

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Over the past decade, sometimes with years between, I’ve been viewing the original Twilight Zone episodes.  In the way that firsts so often do, it influenced much of what would come after.  Recently when my wife was out of town, I was going through season five in the evenings.  I reached “Living Doll,” an episode I never remember seeing before.  The haunted/possessed doll/dummy has a long pedigree, of course.  I’ve discussed it several times on this blog; memorably it occurs in Dead of Night.  An earlier Twilight Zone episode, “The Dummy,” raised the specter in season three.  And, of course, Child’s Play took the idea and ran with it.  And ran.  And ran.  The highest grossing horror series in cinema, of course, is The Conjuring franchise.  It features, in more than one installment, the doll Annabelle.

The story behind Annabelle, purportedly, goes back to the 1970s when Ed and Lorraine Warren took the demonic “conduit” from the hands of a nursing student.  She was concerned that the doll moved on its own.  The student and her roommate had a psychic tell them the Raggedy Ann doll had belonged to a girl named Annabelle.  Of course, the Warrens saw this as a demonic case and famously locked the doll in a glass holder in their occult museum.  Annabelle, apart from having her own spin-off series, appears in the very first Conjuring film.  Since the Warrens passed on, the doll circulates in tours, drawing in those attracted to this particular kind of thrill. 

The Twilight Zone episode “Living Doll” is aptly credited with giving us the creepy doll Talky Tina as a blended family struggles to integrate.  The unsympathetic step-father, Erich, seems unsympathetic to the fact that his young daughter Christie is feeling rejected.  Her mother buys her a Talky Tina and Erich immediately complains about the expense.  The doll famously tells him it will kill him.  And it does.  The interesting thing is the girl’s mother’s name is Annabelle.  This gets me to wondering if some psychic a decade later had seen this episode and, perhaps subconsciously, drew the name from Jerry Sohl’s ghostwritten episode for Charles Beaumont.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  The Twilight Zone was an immensely influential series.  In the late fifties and early sixties, television had seen nothing like it.  Of course, haunted dolls, dummies, and puppets already inhabit those first steps into the uncanny valley where we know they’re not really human (AI, anyone?) but they look like they could be.  Only Annabelle knows for sure.