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.

Sun Cut

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The Severed Sun is an independent folk horror film, written and directed by Dean Puckett, that hasn’t received enough attention.  I wish this blog had a greater reach so that it might create some buzz for it.  The movie has some shortcomings but overall it is quite strong and it shows just how horror can be based on religion.  Scenes of modern conveniences, such as nicely paved roads, electrical wires, and modern-ish farming equipment suggest that the setting is post-apocalyptic.  A small band of people have gathered around a preacher whose religion is unclear.  It seems to be some form of Christianity, but he doesn’t quote the Bible and says nothing of Jesus.  There are crosses, however.  In any case, the people live in marginal land where they work communally and where each family has its own house.  They believe in marriage and male headship of the house.

Magpie kills her abusive husband.  She’s the daughter of the pastor of the community.  She has a son and an adopted son.  There’s an actual monster of darkness in the woods.  It’s unclear whether Magpie conjures it or not.  Magpie reveals the abuse of another father who’s been molesting his daughter.  The beast in the woods kills him.  The community turns on her, claiming she’s a witch.  Her father, however, saves her from immediate danger.  The pastor’s chosen acolyte, John, is in love with David, Magpie’s adopted son.  Magpie is also in love with David.  The pastor, although he shames and publicly humiliates his daughter, protects her when he can.  He doesn’t believe in “the beast,” but he uses it to get his followers to conform.  Realizing that his own heavy-handedness is problematic, he decides to kill David and the wife of the molester so that they can blame it on the beast and maintain control of the community.

Magpie escapes from the confinement where she’s being kept and kills John.  The pastor, not realizing it’s his daughter, mortally wounds Magpie and the beast kills him.  There’s a lot going on here.  The land is clearly part of the threat with which the people live, a telling folk horror element.  The religion that holds them together oppresses women and homosexuals.  And it does seem that Magpie has some influence over the monster.  Not all the details are spelled out, but enough information is given to appreciate what’s happening.  At its best moments it’s like a Robert Egger movie, but the language is clearly that of the present time, although the community lives without electricity or modern vehicles.  No farm animals appear.  Enough is strange to be unsettling, and it would be great to see more discussion of it.

Gothic South

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Southern gothic has a certain appeal even to northerners.  Casting about for a weekend movie included in one of our streaming services, A House on the Bayou suggested itself.  I hadn’t heard of it before, but it bore the Blumhouse brand, so I gave it a try.  In this age of digital production, it is the equivalent of a “straight to video” release.  The story is a bit confusing but the atmosphere is creepy and most of the acting is good.  Spoilers may arise from this point on.  John is having an affair with a younger woman and Jessica has found out.  She insists that if John wants to save their marriage he has to agree to a vacation with her and their daughter Anna.  Down on the bayou.  Once they get there both Jessica and John’s passive aggression towards each other is on show.

A couple of locals, eighteen-year-old Isaac and his Grandpappy, stop over.  It’s pretty obvious from the beginning that there’s something off about the pair.  Isaac clearly has supernatural powers and soon begins to threaten the family.  It turns out that John, knowing Jessica would insist on coming to this house, had pre-hired Isaac and Grandpappy to kill Jessica and make it look like a robbery.  Thing is, Isaac and Grandpappy have moral fibre.  They lock John in a hidden room with a demonic coyote that eats him.  And they burn his lover to death.  Jessica and Anna, who still love John, want to save him and after Jessica kills Grandpappy and Isaac, goes to the police.  It turns out that there is no house on the bayou and they all know about Isaac and Grandpappy, who are still alive, because they’re beings who kill evil-doers.

While not a great movie, this is one that’s heavily invested in religion and horror.  Morality is defined, according to Isaac and Grandpappy, by the Bible.  There is some confusion in the plot, however, when Grandpappy denies Isaac is his grandson and the locals seem to say he is.  Isaac implies that he’s the son of the Devil.  Grandpappy says Isaac never ages, but he tells John he’s 21 and has been in the Army (he tells Anna he’s 18).  Although he protects morality, Isaac attempts to abduct Anna to “marry” her, although she’s only 14.  There’s a good attempt to integrate religion into this horror, but as often happens, the religion is inconsistent with what it claims to be.  I’m not sure how many viewers pay attention to such things, but some of us do write books about it.  Overall, it is passable southern gothic for a rainy afternoon.

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

Shy Incubus

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Shelby Oaks is one of those horror films that benefits from more explanation than the camera gives.  Or maybe I just missed some things.  Yet another religion and horror movie that utilizes demons, which are legion these days—paging Nightmares with the Bible—it goes like this: Riley, along with three friends, is a YouTuber.  (I sincerely think my life would’ve been different if that were a career option when I was in high school.)  They run a channel under the name Paranormal Paranoids.  While investigating the Ohio ghost town of Shelby Oaks, they disappear.  Many think it’s a publicity stunt, but the three friends are found murdered and Riley is still missing.  Her sister Mia can’t rest not knowing the fate of her sister.  She’s interviewed by other YouTubers, but after a man (Wilson Miles)  shoots himself in the head at her front door, she becomes an investigator herself.  Her husband is less enthused by the idea.  There will be spoilers below.

Throughout, it becomes clear that Mia and Riley were close and that Riley, and once Mia, saw a demon looking through her second-floor bedroom window at night when she was a child.  The demon, Tarion, it turns out, is an incubus.  The man who killed himself was Riley’s kidnapper/rapist.  It turns out that Tarion, unlike the usual incubus, doesn’t perform the sex himself.  Mia finds Riley alive, but her child is dedicated to Tarion—a step removed from Rosemary, whom the Devil himself raped—and Riley tries to kill the boy.  Mia accidentally knocks Riley through a window where hellhounds consume her.  Tarion had planned, since childhood, that Mia would watch his progeny that Riley would bear.

There are some creepy things here.  The use of Wilson Miles’ initials to form the sigil for Tarion brings Blair Witch elements to she story.  The use of the sisters’ initials to show their connection was a nice touch.  And the found footage aspects are done pretty well—the camera doesn’t move excessively, making viewers ill.  Overall, however, the movie has trouble hanging together.  This is a demon without a Bible, a shy incubus who sends others to do his work.  Ideas aren’t fully developed, leading viewers to wonder a number of things—why didn’t Mia wash the blood off herself until after watching the video Wilson had in his hands?  Why did Wilson kill himself in the first place?  This isn’t a bad horror film, but the religion in it could be further developed.  The two naturally go together.

Freedom

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This year has been marked by small clusters of holidays.  I wrote about Friday the 13th, St. Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day occurring the same weekend back in February.  Then in March, I noted we had a second Friday the 13th, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day.  Here in June we find another cluster as today is Juneteenth—an important holiday finally recognized—and Sunday is both the summer solstice and Father’s Day.  Now, Father’s Day is always a conflicted day for me.  My father was largely absentee, and an alcoholic when present and accounted for.  For many of my childhood years we didn’t know where he was.  I always have difficulty feeling mad at him, though, because his self-sabotage wasn’t malicious in any way.  He was a man overwhelmed by what life threw at him.  Besides, mothers, it seems to me, give a lot more of themselves than fathers do.  But today’s Juneteenth.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Those with skin darker than pink folk have a more difficult time in the society we’ve built.  With open racism in the White House the struggle has been set back many years.  One thing I sometimes feel personally, having grown up poor, is that disadvantage of any kind is difficult to overcome.  Who, after all, seeks to make friends with someone who’s poor?  What’s the advantage in that?  Sometimes capitalism seems to be the ultimate evil where even people are commodities to be sold.  Human Resources, we call it.  Human capital.  Human assets.  Meanwhile our economic system has birthed us all a new trillionaire just a few days ago.  Juneteenth is an important reminder.  Human beings are not chattels to be bought and sold.  How people who’d ever read the gospels could allow that, I simply can’t fathom.

These holiday clusters occur now and again, like the alignment of the planets along the ecliptic.  They give us time to pause and ponder.  Are we really going the right direction?  Are we lost and unwilling to admit it?  Deep down, all but sociopaths know that all people deserve fair treatment.  Some people are unable to take care of themselves.  Juneteenth reminds us that simply seeing them as some “other,” some “not me,” and steeling ourselves against their needs is a high moral infraction.  It’s close kin to murder.  We are the ones who built this system.  We have the power to change it.  Juneteenth reminds us that anyone who openly, or even discreetly, believes that one race is better than another has no business telling others what to do.  The longest day is coming, if only we’d use it to consider what we’re doing.

Missed Movie

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It has been years since I read H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”  I’d never seen this original movie made from it, often cited as being a reasonable adaptation of a Lovecraft story to film.  The visuals are sometimes impressive, but it is a slow moving, plodding movie.  It does, as far as I can recall, follow Lovecraft in general terms.  This is one of those movies that would’ve fit into Holy Horror for two basic reasons: it begins with a quote from the Bible and it has its own alternative sacred book, the Necronomicon.  In one scene the latter is explicitly compared to the Good Book.  Since religion didn’t enter horror in any kind of direct way until about 1968, this movie is an early example of how the two interact.  It came before The Exorcist.

The point is made at several junctures that the religion of the Whateleys is the antithesis of Christianity.  Indeed, the point of all Wilbur Whateley’s shenanigans is to raise the old gods.  Lovecraft, famously an atheist, used gods to set up his cosmic horror.  He’s also notoriously difficult to capture in movie form.  While Roger Corman was the executive producer he was not the director, and that may answer for the pacing.  Daniel Haller, the director, had worked with Corman before on some of his Poe Cycle films and had directed Die, Monster, Die, also a Lovecraft adaptation.  Lovecraft wasn’t a terribly cinematic writer.  His stories contain ideas that feel like they might fit on film, but executing them well is difficult.

For this movie, the house used for the Whateley residence is fitting.  It helps create a sense of dread.  The basic idea of the flick is that Wilbur needs a virginal victim to help summon the old gods.  He lures Nancy Wagner to his house where she falls under the influence of drugged tea.  There’s an intriguing glass sculpture that is never fully explained.  As Nancy begins to lose her will, her friends come to find her, and one of them is killed by Wilbur’s inhuman twin that had also killed their mother during birth.  Once released, this monstrous progeny begins killing locals (the locals hate the Whateleys) and is poised to take Nancy until a guest lecturer at Miskatonic University bests Wilbur in spells recited from the Necronomicon, saving the girl and dooming the last Whateley.  The family line ends.  Until it is rather heavy-handedly shown that Nancy is pregnant by Wilbur, so the unwholesome Whateley genealogy continues.  The visuals aren’t bad, but the story is lacking.  Still, it’s part of the canon, so I needed to see it and it used religion to intrigue me.

Coming for You

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Skimming through the freebies on a streaming service I came to Serpent’s Lair.  Having written a book about demons, I try to keep an eye out for possession movies I might’ve missed and that may add something new to the discussion.  This one turned out to borrow quite a lot from other films, most noticeably, The Omen.  Tom Bennett and his wife Alex buy a unit in a house that could’ve stepped from Rosemary’s Baby.  I kept wondering what the unnamed city was where they worked.  It turns out that the entire film was shot in Romania, so that’s why identifiable landmarks were missing.  In any case, their unit had been inhabited by a college professor who’d been dabbling in the dark arts.  Some of his stuff was left behind.  By the way, there is a lot of religious imagery in this film—maybe not directly Bible (so not Holy Sequel material), but plenty of religion.

Their kindly next door neighbor is a doctor who smokes a lot for his profession.  The couple adopts a stray cat in the courtyard.  The cat turns out to be a kind of conduit for a succubus.  Naturally, the cat takes a dislike to Alex, finally causing her to fall down the stairs and end up in the hospital.  When she’s out of the house the former resident’s sister comes to close his estate.  I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I say she is the succubus.  While Alex is away, she coaxes the faithful Tom into a torrid affair.  Tom really loves Alex and is reluctant, but succubi can be very persuasive.  Meanwhile more cats move into the building.  When an archaeological colleague of the former tenant arrives, he notes that said tenant had no sister.  Research indicates Tom is dealing with a Bast succubus.  Of course, the colleague is killed.  Spoiler alert:

It turns out the the doctor next door is Satan himself.  The only way to get rid of a succubus is to set it on fire.  Alex has already left Tom, so the next time the demon shows up, he lights her up.  Satan, next door, sees the whole thing and laughs.  Roll credits.  While a low budget film for its time (1995), it isn’t a cheap movie.  Serpent’s Lair at least tries.  The story is a touch weak because much of this has been done before.  It takes advantage of something that had been discovered a couple of decades earlier—religion is a great setting and source for horror.  Even if the explanation doesn’t really satisfy.

Old Passion

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Something I find inherently fascinating revolves around used books.  I buy used books and I always examine the overlooked scraps of paper that get left between the pages.  Mostly it’s random ephemera, but it is the window into a stranger’s life.  They had this bit of paper lying around to mark their place.  Had I the time I’d piece together the puzzle.  Recently, while preparing to donate some books to the local AAUW book sale, I found a scrap of paper in one of my own books.  This was from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on the date in my wife’s handwriting: 3-19-04.  It’s an Associated Press story from Statesboro, Georgia, involving a dust-up between a married couple after watching The Passion of the Christ.  That makes it interesting in its own right, but what’s especially striking is the couple battled, including a pair of scissors, over whether “God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic.”  Things got out of hand.

For context, I was still teaching at Nashotah House at the time.  Theological debates, sometimes heated, took place there on a regular basis.  People get very fired up over what they believe.  This may set our species apart from other thinking animals, or perhaps it’s part of the price we pay for abstract thought.  You almost want to step between the warring spouses and say, “let us handle this, we’re professionals.”  Of course, the species of specialist that has studied theology is dying out.  Universities are cutting religious studies departments.  Churches are losing members.  Better hide the scissors.

“Passion” is the operative word here.  We get quite attached to our views.  So much so that no amount of logic or rational discourse can dislodge them.  We see this with the utter devotion to political leaders and on-screen personalities as well as to religious beliefs.  Some of us were curious enough to study where these ideas came from and how we know that they’re “true.”  This is not for the faint of heart.  Testing your core assumptions can lead you into some very unfamiliar, unmapped territories.  And since religion deals with ultimate concerns, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Our couple felt silly after the police had been called and the bail paid.  Passion is very much what drives our species, and perhaps others as well.  We feel we need what we believe to be true, and we’re willing to fight for it.  Even if it means, as the chief sheriff’s deputy remarked, they seem to have missed the point of religion in the first place.

Lights On

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Poltergeist horror movies are a touch difficult to make convincingly.  Part of that, I suppose, is because the actual phenomenon is already scary and dramatizing it often ameliorates rather than increases the fear factor.  When the Lights Went Out is a “based on a true story” movie about a poltergeist in Yorkshire in the 1970s.  One of the problems is that none of the adults are really sympathetic enough to care about, with the exceptions of Rita and Mr. Price, the teacher.  All of the other “grown ups” are so mired in their own problems that you just can’t empathize.  Part of that is probably an attempt to show the life of the poor—it isn’t easy, I know from experience—but there are a lot of good people of humble means.  Not all of them are mean, self-centered, and unsympathetic.

In any case, an elaborate backstory is built to set up the plot.  A monk, from before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, rapes and nearly murders a young girl.  He cuts out her tongue so she can’t tell what he did.  She is educated enough to write, however, and the monastery collectively hangs the monk to preserve the honor of the church.  We’ve got religion and horror here, obviously, but a very poorly understood Catholicism.  In the nineteen-seventies the Maynards move into a council house haunted by both the girl and the monk.  The poltergeist activity begins but nobody will believe Sally, the young daughter.  Instead they blame her.  Until the activity happens to her parents as well.  They try to get a Catholic priest to help, but he’s too busy banging his cleaning woman (and besides, he needs the bishop’s permission for an exorcism).  The Maynards call in a medium who is, predictably, attacked.  The priest is blackmailed into an anticlimactic exorcism.

But the evil monk isn’t gone.  After life returns to normal, he attacks again but is driven off by the girl he murdered, or almost murdered.  In real life, apparently, the poltergeist was much more low key.  The dramatization makes it very much like other horror films we’ve all seen.  I do find the lack of research on how the church operates of interest.  Unfortunately, sexual abuse of the young is, and has been a problem with enforced celibacy from pretty much the beginning.  The priest from the seventies is much more concerned with his reputation than plight of the family.  The movie does do a good job of isolating poor Sally, and you can’t help but to feel sorry for her and her friend Lucy, who just don’t fit in.  That’s where the real horror lies.

First, Kings

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Recently I sat down to read 1 Kings.  Of course, I used to teach Hebrew Bible so I have more than a passing familiarity with it.  This time, though, I was reading it through the lens of Game of Thrones.  I wonder how much George R. R. Martin drew inspiration from the biblical book.  Indeed, a movie could be made from it—sex, conspiracy, battles, deception, it’s all there.  Perhaps someone should novelize it.  If you read it without knowing that it’s holy writ, you might be surprised to learn that it is.  Of course, having been edited by the Deuteronomists (so it’s supposed), it’s a bit preachy, but the action is pretty much the same.  In fact, Game of Thrones has quite a few biblical tropes in it.  And 1 Kings, if excised from the Bible, with its chapter and verse format, is pretty gripping itself.

Another thing that occurred to me is how little politics has changed over the millennia.  Powerful families want to retain power and privilege.  They aren’t too concerned with religious niceties but they rely on the backing of religious authorities.  (The priesthood and monarchy were always a tag team for keeping power in “the proper place.”)  And a number of the characters are quite colorful, even if you wouldn’t want them in the Oval Office.  Outside that context they can be quite loved, or at least people love to hate them.  Immature boy kings, seductive queens, and armed conflict at the slightest provocation are parts of the story across the ages.  The truth of power in powerful families plays out even in democracies.  Consider father and son presidents from the Adams and Bush families, husband and wife (nearly), in the Clintons, and countless powerful families represented in the senate or in the house.

Politics never change. Image: Saul threatening David, by José Leonardo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed.  Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem).  Alas, poor Uriah.  The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.  People still believe in magic.  Widely so.  This belief drives much of politics in two related nations far apart but bound together by a book.  Reading 1 Kings is a useful spiritual, and practical exercise.  We can learn much about how people behave.  The Good Book isn’t shy about the motivations either.  Sex, power, and fame drove leaders of antiquity even as they continue to do so today.  The Bible tells me so. 

Accidentally Backward

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I watched Regression by accident.  “How is that possible?” you might ask.  Well, I don’t read up about movies before watching them.  These days I try to save money by streaming on services I pay for anyway, such as Amazon Prime.  I had identified The Tractate Middoth as a movie that I could see without knowing anything beyond that it was based on an M. R. James story and that it was only about half an hour long.  I clicked on it.  It struck me as strange that it began with a “based on true events” intertitle, but people will do anything to sell a movie, including saying fiction is fact.  Then I noticed that the production values were pretty substantial.  I began to wonder if there were two movies by that title.   About forty minutes later, I’m needing to take a restroom break and I’m thinking, this movie should be done by now but it feels like we’re in the middle of things.

After I flushed and clicked back in, the title “Regression” flashed across the top of the screen.  Well, that explained a lot.  I didn’t recall having read any M. R. James stories like what I was seeing.  Clearly my initial click had been off and I’d hit the movie next to, or above or below, the one I wanted to see.  With that level of investment, I figured I might as well watch the rest.  It wasn’t bad but it took me a while to reassess my expectations.  Regression is about how the Satanic ritual abuse scares of the 1990s were fueled by, well, regression therapy.  A girl in Minnesota is identified as having been ritually abused.  Her story convinces police, who use a therapist to do hypno-regression to uncover what “really happened.”  Soon even the cop in charge is seeing Satanists coming after him in his own house.

The movie isn’t great, but it’s not bad either.  It has enough Bible in it to have made the cut for Holy Horror (or Holy Sequel).  And it is religion-based horror.  It wasn’t what I was expecting to see, of course, but that can’t be blamed on the movie.  The Satanic panic was real and unfortunate.  The movie is probably more of a thriller than horror, and yes, I can accept that it was based on real incidents because the panic is well documented.  There is no Devil here.  There are also no Satanists.  The real culprit, the film implies, is the fundamentalist minister who first suspected the abuse.  It is something to think about, but it was no Tractate Middoth.

Oh Deere

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Strange Harvest seems to have impressed a number of viewers, but for someone attuned to religion and horror it rang false.  The Lovecraftian elements appear with the idea of a serial killer who’s the devotee of an unfamiliar god.  The story is presented as a documentary, interviewing the detectives who resolved the case, intercut with crime scene footage—often quite graphic and gory—and trying to get to the bottom of this case.  So a guy named Leslie Sykes has been killing people in San Bernardino county since 1995.  He took a hiatus in his killing spree to go to Jerusalem, after seeing something in a cave while out hiking and experiencing a religious mania.  From Jerusalem he goes to Damascus and then into Europe, learning about religions, apparently, before stealing a grimoire from a bookshop in Germany.  He’s pretty clearly trying to raise an unorthodox deity, but the police don’t connect the dots.

After his years’ long absence, he starts killing again in order to have his last sacrifice ready when a rare triangular alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible with the naked eye.  He is stopped from his final murder attempt by the police, but witness cameras captured some strange cosmic event starting to unfold as the final victim is about to be immolated.  I’m not a fan of this kind of movie but what really made it seem less authentic was the stitched together nature of this religion.  It is never spelled out, it is true, but what is shown does not seem to add up to any coherent system.  The movie does an effective job of creating a scary sociopathic killer, but it implies that the religion responsible is real.  A religion of one, however, isn’t really a religion at all.

Again, critics seem to have liked this but I found the actions of the police inscrutable and the grotesque methods of torture and execution unequal to the task of suggesting how these might be connected into even a psychotic religious outlook.  The only thing that seems to connect them is an occult symbol left behind at the crime scenes.  The letters from the killer to the police are read only in part, and that by some kind of synth voice that’s probably meant to make them sound sinister.  This kind of horror can work, but in general, creating new religions is not as easy as it looks.  Lovecraftian isn’t a bad choice, but drawing the threads a little more closely together could’ve helped a lot.

Spells

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I suspect the reason Incantation was recommended to me is that it is an intimate blend of religion and horror.  A Taiwanese horror film, the highest grossing ever for that country, Incantation is in found-footage format.  Fortunately the camera motion isn’t excessive, so I was able to watch it all.  The story involves a woman ghost hunter who accompanies her boyfriend and his cousin to a site with a reputedly haunted tunnel that they plan to film.  The tunnel is on the property of the boyfriend’s great uncle.  The movie, by the way, isn’t presented in chronological order, so piecing it together may take some afterthought.  In any case, the woman is pregnant when she visits the shrine and the family, who perform strange rituals, do not welcome her.  Nevertheless, the young men persist in exploring the tunnel and discover a curse at the end of it that leads those who see it to die by suicide.  There will be spoilers to come.

The movie begins with the woman reclaiming her six-year-old daughter from foster care.  After the event at the shrine, she had herself committed to a psychiatric hospital, but now that she’s recovered, she wants to raise her daughter.  Unfortunately, the curse remains.  The girl sees bad entities and can’t make friends.  The mother grows increasingly distressed and kidnaps her daughter when she is hospitalized.  She then takes her to a different shrine but the religious master is killed by unseen forces.  She then returns her daughter to the hospital and takes the camera back with her to the original shrine.  The idea, like Ringu, is that if you see the video you will be cursed.  The important difference, however, is that if the curse is widely dispersed it will be weakened.  The viewer is, in the diegesis of the movie, cursed.

This film is of interest for a number of reasons.  One is that the deity is malevolent and only by worshipping it and obeying strict rules can anyone who encounters it be safe.  In the western world there are no malevolent deities beyond Satan, and he’s not really a deity.  The family that worships this god want to be freed of it, but the god is in a tunnel on their land.  They inherited it.  There’s an element of possession at play as well.  Those who watch the video kill themselves because the deity possesses them.  There is also no way to completely destroy the curse—it can only be passed on and diluted.  The movie is quite well done although some aspects of it are familiar from other horror offerings.  Its relationship with religions of east Asia make it a particularly intriguing example of T-horror.

That House

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In this season of deportations, thinking about what it means to be a refugee couldn’t be more important.  The horror film His House makes you do just that.  Bol and Rial are fleeing war-torn South Sudan with their daughter.  After a mishap on the overcrowded boat from France to England, their daughter drowns.  Kept in a refugee camp for months, they are finally allotted a council house in poor repair and a meager income.  If they violate any of the rules, which include living anywhere else or trying to earn their own money, they will be deported.  Bol tries to assimilate quickly while Rial is more tied to her traditional ways.  Then the ghost of their daughter, and other dead from the war and the crossing, begin to haunt them.  All the while they face the threat of deportation.  Some spoilers follow.

Rial recognizes the ghosts come from an apeth, a kind of witch that demands repayment for the crossing.  Bol sees the ghosts too, but denies it.  They will not go back, he insists.  When the social workers come to inspect the house, after Bol asks for a different place, Rial tells them a witch is causing the problems, causing the Englishmen to roll their eyes.  When Rial tries to escape, an alternative reality back in Africa shows that when Bol was denied a place on the overcrowded refugee bus, he grabs a random girl—their “daughter”—to get a place on board as the soldiers begin shooting.  The girl’s mother is left behind, screaming for her child.  The apeth is demanding Bol’s life for that of the girl he used to gain his freedom.  Rial, realizing that Bol will die for trying to make their life better, attacks the apeth and lets go of the image of their daughter.

This is a sad and thoughtful kind of film.  We seldom stop to think that refugees, in culture shock already, are stripped of everything familiar and made to feel as if continuing to live is itself a special favor.  They have their own ghosts too.  The real horror here comes through seeing the world through the eyes of someone who has experienced a high level of trauma.  To do so while Trump’s storm troopers are once again separating families, killing people at will, and deporting refugees, is not an easy thing to do.  Horror can be an instructive genre, and although the threat here is supernatural, as it often is in folk-horror, the real fear is all too human.