Not Handel’s Messiah

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It’s polarizing.  Even now, nearing fifty, Messiah of Evil is either adored or excoriated.  So it was at its release.  I was pointed to the movie by an adorer—a somewhat unexpected New York Times seasonal article.  Suggesting that there’s nothing else like it, the article recommended it for autumnal viewing.  So, what’s it all about?  I’m not really sure, but that won’t stop me from trying.  Arletty is a young woman who wants to find her father (with you so far).  He’s moved to New Bethlehem, California, now known as Port Dome.  She finds his house abandoned, and the locals decidedly unfriendly.  Her father’s diary explains that he’s transforming into something inhuman.  The locals are cannibals, it turns out, awaiting the return of, well, the messiah of evil.  (The title is never used in the movie.)

Although I learn more towards the excoriating opinion of things, this is a great horror and religion film.  The original messiah of evil was a preacher stranded with the Donner party.  He started a new religion and, wanting to spread it, went to California.  Now, whenever a blood moon comes, he arises from the sea and his followers become aggressive.  The movie is set a century following this first appearance, and the dark master is due to return.  His followers await him on the beach, and Arletty is their intended sacrifice.  Elements of Lovecraft are clearly evident—people transforming, old gods, evil emerging from the ocean.  Yet, there are many things unexplained.  Or maybe I’m just naive.

The male lead, Thom, travels with a mini-harem.  He’s in Port Dume because he likes to gather folktales—like the blood moon—and he likes Arletty’s father’s art and came to buy some locally.  The movie features a blind art dealer, cops who apparently know nothing about the infestation of ghouls in their town, and a guy who could drive away from the attacking hordes who decides to run instead.  The directors (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz) were a talented couple, but this wasn’t their best collaboration.  Still, many recommend this as an overlooked horror gem from decades ago.  Others not so much.  I’m glad to have seen it, although I fall into the latter camp.  Mainly because it continues a theme that I’ve tried to pick up at several points on this blog—that horror and religion have a great deal in common.  Even if one (or both) shows its age and fails to impress.

Reflecting Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving, the newest holiday horror movie, was released last Friday.  No, I haven’t seen it—I barely have time to do whatever it is that I do normally.  I suspect, however, that many will object because Thanksgiving is still a quasi-religious holiday.  If we’re giving thanks we must be giving it to someone, or something, that may or may not govern our lives.  Ironically, in many business calendars it is the only annual four-day weekend.  Christmas could come on a Wednesday, so we can’t go giving time away!  Ironically, Thanksgiving was fixed as the fourth Thursday of November (moved from the last Thursday) to ensure about four weeks of shopping time before Christmas.  Me?  I’m just glad to have a couple days off.  2023 has been a challenging year on a personal level and having a couple days out of the office is just what the doctor prescribed.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

It may seem strange to be thankful for horror movies, but I know I’m not the only person whom they help.  I also believe that the genre has been misnamed.  When you think of all the different kinds of films that get lumped under the moniker it really is odd that we have any idea at all what we’re talking about.  What are horror movies, then?  The common equation with slashers is patently wrong.  There’s nothing slash-like in the old Universal monster movies that started the whole thing.  Time and again critics point out that “horror” is generally intelligent, and often funny.  And not infrequently therapeutic.  Yet it has a bad name.  Some even consider it satanic although it produces good.  Being satanic is a matter of how you look at things.

Thanksgiving is a time for reflection.  Reflection without the distraction of work constantly trying to poke holes through our concentration.  The holiday season properly starts at Halloween and sadly ends at New Year.  It’s our reward for having made it through another one.  The holidays that fall into this season all have a great deal in common.  Early Americans celebrated Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and sometimes Christmas and New Years.  We’ve reached the point now where we have a distinctive string of holidays like stones across a rushing river.  We can just make it from one to the next.  From Halloween we can see to Thanksgiving.  From today Christmas is on the near horizon.  New Years follows only a week after.  And it’s a time for reflection and thankfulness.  Even if what we appreciate isn’t the same as everyone else.

Not Quite Christmas

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Holidays have always fascinated me.  Although we grew up poor, I always have cozy memories of childhood Christmases.  It was a combination of things—being out of school for a couple of weeks.  Presents.  Christmas trees.  Time outside ordinary time.  I’d read Penne L. Restad’s Christmas in America: A History years ago.  So many years, in fact, that I forgot that I wrote a blog post on it before.  That was back in 2012, in my early days of commuting to New York City, and early days of blogging.  Sometimes I have to come back to a book, however, and rereading this one reminded me of why.  There’s a lot of good stuff in here.  It mostly focuses on the nineteenth century, but it does go back before that and steps into the twentieth century (when it was written) toward the end.  I’d forgotten a lot of what I’d learned before.

This time through, having worked as an editor for a decade and a half now, I could tell that it was originally a dissertation.  It’s pretty hard to remove that completely from any book project.  Nevertheless, it’s engagingly written and full of facts.  I’d forgotten that Santa’s red clothes were not, in fact, Coca-Cola’s invention.  And that Washington Irving played quite a role in introducing Americans to the holiday.  And just how interconnected Christmas is with Thanksgiving, New Years, and yes, even Halloween.  Of course, no book can be adequately summarized in a brief blog post.  My previous one highlights some of what I found here, but this reading brought out other interesting features.  I spend quite a bit of my energy anticipating holidays.  Some years they’ve been minimized due to circumstances, but they are definitely the fixed points around which my life revolves.

One of the interesting things I noticed this time, introduced literally on the second-to-last page, was that the book mentions holiday horror.  Restad’s focus is on America so she doesn’t really delve into the British tradition of telling scary stories at Christmas.  (I do discuss this in The Wicker Man, I would note.  Although set on May Day, it was released in December, fifty years ago.)  These kinds of interconnections fascinate me.  Our culture reflects who we are and American culture includes Christmas for any who want to take part in it.  In fact, the book makes the point that becoming secular helped Christmas spread goodwill to people of all religious persuasions, or none at all.  It’s not really even a Christian invention.  It’s a blending of traditions that bring light to the darkest time of year.  And here I am like a kid, eagerly awaiting it again.

Nesting Urge

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Okay, I’m going to try really hard to do this without spoilers.  There’s a twist ending here that, in my humble opinion, works.  All I’ll say is that the monster may not be what you think it is.  The only problem is that there are at least eight movies titled The Nest, and you’ll need to find one  from 2019 if you want to see what I’m talking about here.  Don’t read any summaries beforehand because you want to let this wash over you and draw you in.  Although distributed by Universal, this Italian Euro-horror remains relatively unknown.  That’s really a shame since this movie delivers.  A woman, an heiress, has a paraplegic son that she never allows to leave the estate.  She’d training him to run things when she can’t and she strictly limits the people he can see.

Teaching him classical culture, she won’t expose him to anything modern.  Then a teenage girl his age comes to live on the estate.  She was being raised by the same man who raised the heiress, but she knows things.  She knows about rock music, and she understand the way the world works.  The heiress, however, wants her son to experience none of this.  Afraid of what might happen, she sends the girl away.  In the meantime, we learn that the heiress kills those who are sick among her staff.  She employs a very creepy doctor who does whatever she orders, noting that she has saved them all.  The question is, is it best to live in such a bubble?  Is life so isolated worth living?  The heiress brings the girl back, but begins, with her doctor, to alter her behavior using electroshock treatment.

The Nest is one of those movies where you spend nearly the entire thing being misdirected.  When it’s over you think back on what you’ve seen and it does make sense.  Along the way, you know something’s not right.  It’s creepy in a way more than old, castle-like houses can account for.  I like gothic films like this.  There are disturbing moments that punctuate what seems like an idyllic lifestyle.  The heiress knows that survival equates to a cultured existence, but she never tells her son why.  This film shares some territory with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, in fact, they could be next door neighbors at points.  They both have a similar message, at least in part.  Efforts to build a paradise are beyond human capacity.  We need the outside world even if we fear it.

Cute Monster

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Those who make horror films often rely on the cheap and easy tricks to make viewers jump and  scream.  Some of us are more connoisseurs, preferring films that make you think and that don’t show too much, and maybe even too little.  Lamb once again underscores what has impressed me about Euro-horror over the last few years.  Slow, building dread, it’s the kind of story that you know can’t end happily because it’s, well horror.  There are spoilers here but I hope they won’t stop you from seeing this film if you haven’t.  First of all, the film is in Icelandic, and much of the cinematography focuses on the brutally beautiful cold landscape.  Its sense of isolation and the land make this a fine example of folk horror as well.

A couple, sheep farmers, make a reasonable living from the harsh land.  We come to realize that they live in regret for the death of their daughter.  Then, after the unseen visit of an unseen creature during the dark of an Icelandic Christmas, a lamb is born with a human body.  She quickly becomes their ersatz daughter.  This odd situation, we know, cannot last.  They’ve set their happiness on a gentle monster (of the classic description) and such things never end well.  The movie takes its time spelling out the story, knowing full well that viewers know something is about to happen, but are unsure of what.  Since the husband’s brother stops in (after being forcefully ejected from a car), the film only really involves four characters—six if you count the brief appearances of the lamb’s parents.  And that isolated landscape.

Part-human and part-animal generally counts as a monster.  This one is well behaved.  Cute, even.  Dad, it turns out, isn’t so cute or well behaved.  He has his reasons, though.  The film is scary by implication: What happens when the cute little monster grows up?  The movie invites us to consider that question.  Monsters are often cast as evil and dangerous, but maybe they have to grow to become like that.  With loving foster parents, such as the farmer and his wife, who knows?  This is one of those films that makes you ask questions and offers little by way of explanation.  You just have to accept it.  Something led to a monster in the hills, somewhere back along the line.  But even he may have been even-tempered had is kind been treated with civility.  Monsters have something to teach us.  Even, or maybe especially, cute ones.

High Places

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Among the many phobias I experience is acrophobia—the fear of heights.  I’ve had episodes of vertigo and they never really leave me in the mood to reflect upon them.  And yet, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a classic I’d never seen and about which I knew nothing.  Well, very little.  I knew that Jimmy Stewart’s character suffered from vertigo and that Mel Brooks had done a spoof called High Anxiety.  Hitchcock wasn’t a horror auteur, although he gave the world The Birds and Psycho.  He’s often cast in the “thriller” or “mystery” category, but these things all blend into one another and someone of Hitchcock’s interests might be placed in different genres, depending on who’s doing the placing.  So my wife and I watched Vertigo, not knowing what to expect.

The first thing is it was longer than expected, especially given the deliberately slow pacing.  The story, in case you’re behind too, involves a guy looking for a way to murder his wife to get her money.  It involves a convoluted plot of finding a near double of his wife—whom he seems to love (but not as much as money), to trick Scotty (Stewart) into thinking that she committed suicide while he was helpless with vertigo.  Even when the reveal finally came, I scratched my head a bit trying to figure out why all the elaborate trickery was necessary.  It was, of course, based on a novel that might explain things a bit more thoroughly.  But movies are about visuals and Vertigo is full of those.  Lots of green.  A dolly zoom (a film first).  Even some animation.

Although there’s murder and fear—and even an accidental death because of a nun (not the Nun)—it seldom nudges north of drama.  It’s one of those movies that has gained in reputation since its initial appraisals.  Much of this has to do, it seems to me, with its visuals and subtlety.  (Film critics seem to love those.)  Of course, Psycho was still two years away, and The Birds five.  I’m no Hitchcock connoisseur by any stretch.  Indeed, my life has tended to be bits and pieces of this and that.  (It takes a far larger following than I have to be able to opine on any subject and have people take you seriously.)  Vertigo is, however, one of Hitchcock’s better-known films.  Well enough known to have had a spoof made of it.  And to have drawn me in to a movie themed on something I legitimately fear.

Not Making Decisions

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After anesthesia they tell you, “Don’t make any important decisions.”  That’s the excuse I’m using for having watched Llamageddon recently.  That, and it’s free on one of the streaming services to which I have access.  I only found out about it because of such services and I wasn’t in any shape to decide important things like how to spend the rest of the groggy day.  I’m of mixed minds regarding comedy horror.  Or is it horror comedy?  Decisions.  The fact is, quite a few horror movies do involve some amount of fun.  My favorite ones tend to be more serious, but once in a while you find yourself watching movies you know are (or you know are going to be) bad.  I knew this one was.  It’s so bad that it’s got a cult following.  It was, I’m pretty sure, made to be bad.

So a killer llama from another planet is forced to land on earth.  It kills an older couple in Ohio and after the funeral two of their teenage grandchildren, Mel and Floyd, are left to stay in the house.  Mel, who is older and more experienced, contacts all her friends so they can party that night.  Of course, the llama’s still on the loose.  It has laser-beam eyes and it bites and punches people to death and the partiers are picked off, not exactly one-by-one since many of them are electrocuted in the hot tub.  Generally they’re so drunk and/or high that they don’t believe any of this is happening.  Eventually Mel and Floyd’s father arrives and tries to save his kids.  Before dying of llama bite, he kills the quadruped by running it through a combine.

It’s worse than it sounds, but it’s played strictly for laughs.  And, I suspect, it’s one of those movies that’s meant to be watched under the influence.  Since anesthesia is about as close as I’ll ever get to that, I suppose this counts.  Some of the early horror movies have become funny with the passage of time as early special effects age and we become used to better, more convincing fare.     As it is, it’s difficult to find much about Llamageddon apart from IMDb, and the director’s name, Howie Dewin, is a red herring.  I’m fascinated by such films being able to gather a following.  Of course, I confess to enjoying Attack of the Killer Tomatoes when the mood is right.  And a day when decisions are contraindicated, anything can happen.

Double the Trouble

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

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

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

The Jonah Treatment

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A kayak on the ocean might’ve seemed to be a safe place during a pandemic.  In November of 2020, however, two women ended up getting the Jonah treatment.  While it happened some time ago, the story appeared in Slate just in August, so the world is learning about it after a few years.  At least those of us who hadn’t seen the viral videos before.  Julie McSorley tells how she and a friend were paddling out to see some humpback whales along the California coast.  Then, like a scene from Finding Nemo, bubbles started to well up around them and they found themselves briefly in the whale’s mouth.  They escaped unharmed since humpbacks don’t eat mammals, being baleen whales.  Apart from the natural fascination of the story, what caught my attention was the reference to Jonah in the log line.  As Heather Schwedel notes, few people “outside of storybooks and the Bible” have actually been inside a whale.

Image credit: Gustave Doré, Illustrations of Baron von Münchhausen, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The typical biblical scholar response is generally somewhere along the lines of, “the Bible says ‘great fish,’ not whale.”  This may be true but we don’t possess a biblical glossary for the animals, real and imaginary, in the Good Book.  Ancient Israelites were neither great seafarers nor precise describers of nature.  There are many strange references to animals in the Bible with no certain referents in the world we know.  Not being oceanographically inclined, biblical authors wrote “great fish,” a term that was still used to describe whales up to Melville’s time.  But we now know there are other big fish as well.  Whale sharks, for example, and if you’ve ever watched River Monsters you’ve likely seen catfish large enough to send shivers down your spine. 

The funny thing about the book of Jonah is that the point of the story is often overlooked for the splashy action.  There’s a moral to the story.  It’s all about not judging others because they don’t belong to your group.  Jonah has already condemned the Ninevites as godless idolaters.  The book teaches that such judgment isn’t a human prerogative.  But we simply can’t get past that image of a whale, or great fish, swallowing a guy and digesting him for three days.  Like Jonah, Julie was spit back out by the whale.  It took only a matter of seconds since, despite what Pinocchio shows, the interior anatomy of most whales won’t allow living space for a long weekend away from home.  Julie McSorley and her friend emerged relatively unharmed.  McSorley even says it was a transformative experience.  One might even suggest it could be a spiritual one.

Obscure Subjects

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The world is so full of things that require further explanation that I can’t believe there aren’t more universities.  No, seriously.  If you look closely, or even casually, there are so many things under-documented that it’s a wonder we get along.  Instead we focus on criminals who want to be president and deny science is real.  Alas.  What brings this on is that I’ve been working on a book that involves researching pop culture.  Naturally, there are books and articles to read, and even videos to view.  Still, some information just doesn’t seem to be out there.  I’ve run across movies that appear with no explanation.  They’re simply there.  Sure, you can find the name of the writer, director, stars, and such, but how did that movie come to be?  Unless someone (normally a journalist) has followed up the story of its origins, there’s really nowhere to go.  Unless there are extras.

I’m remembering how CDs came with liner notes.  (Does anyone remember CDs?)  Good notes gave you further information on the music.  It was documented.  There was an explanation.  DVDs often lack that.  If there aren’t “extras” on the disc, the liner notes don’t help you much if they don’t exist.  Now that we stream everything a search on IMDb is about the best you can do.  Sometimes Wikipedia helps, but only if the article cites its sources.  We need more information.  I read a lot about movies and I’m always glad when an author has found a source that explains a bit more about why this particular film exists.  Are we that non-curious?

Believe me, I know the world is too full of things already.  On some subjects too much information is already available.  Things like movies, and music—things that really move us—however, are left hanging in the air.  I’m curious about them.  I suppose I could subscribe to trade magazines, but I wonder why those who’re already paid to be professors—professional researchers rather than erstwhile academic hacks like yours truly—aren’t all over this.  Academic respectability can be a real problem sometimes.  I know I didn’t feel like I could explore these things until I’d been ousted from the academy.  You see, I think we need more universities.  Places where the curious can go to learn about even more obscure subjects, but subjects that are really important to people.  It seems a far better use for our ill-gotten gain than spending it on lawsuits just to bring down those that education could take care of as a natural benefit.

Mystery of Poe

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I’ve read my fair share of books on Edgar Allan Poe, but I have to say that Mark Dawidziak’s A Mystery of Mystery: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps the best.  Like Dawidziak, I realize that writers, as well as other historical figures, come to be who we need them to be.  This book, which pinwheels around the unsolved cause of Poe’s death, is probing of his life as well.  His younger years and his likely psychological profile as a child who never felt he received the love and affirmation that he required, really spoke loudly.  This explains much of his behavior, which was often contradictory and didn’t serve his own best interests.  Today Poe is an icon of horror, but as this wonderful book explains, Poe was so much more.

People are often typecast.  We have limited time and our own lives are so crowded with stuff we have to do that, as a matter of survival, we need to “profile” others.  I’m constantly reminded of this when I spend time with people (which is not often), particularly those I know well.  I leave realizing that I don’t know them as well as I think I do.  I’ve only seen the surface, or just below, if I managed to engage with any depth.  My own involvement with Poe goes beyond memory.  As in a dream, I don’t know when I was first exposed to him or his writing.  Still, I know that I’ve had a lifelong “parasocial relationship” with him.  I suspect that many of us who appreciate his writing do.  Well, back to the book.

A Mystery of Mysteries begins near Poe’s death, setting the stage.  The chapters then alternate, going back to a chronological treatment of his early life, and then picking up the narrative of his death.  Along the way, a compelling portrait is painted.  Like the majority of us who write, Poe didn’t find much recognition in his own lifetime.  Of course, he died young, but his lifestyle might well have created that situation, regardless.  Jealous of others who received more attention, Poe knew he had a special intelligence that was unappreciated.  It still is.  Yes, Poe has many, many fans, but many, I suspect, don’t have a good idea of who he was as a human being.  For as much as he wrote, Poe didn’t really give us reliable details of his own life.  Dawidziak ends with some well-reasoned speculation of Poe’s cause of death.  But I won’t tell you what he suggests because I want you to read this excellent book.

Enabling Vampires

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

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

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

November Nightmares

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

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

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

October’s Child

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

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

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

With Spiders

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

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

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