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.

Hinge Years

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I recently read about “hinge years.”  Some historians use this as a kind of shorthand for a particularly tumultuous year in the history of the world, or of a country.  Curious, a brief search brought up the year 1968 as one of these hinge years for the United States.  No doubt, a lot was taking place at the time.  Since I spent most of that year enjoying my last year before Kindergarten, my political awareness was pretty dim.  I found a website of an historian arguing that this was indeed a foundational period in US culture.  The hallmarks cited were political events (assassinations and their aftermaths, Vietnam, Democratic Convention in Chicago), science (circling the moon in preparation for landing on it), and music (Hair, the Beatle’s White Album).  Now, years are convenient hooks on which to hang events, but many of these events had earlier roots or later consequences.  The Vietnam War began in the fifties, we would actually land on the moon the following year, etc.  But 1968 was a pivotal year for horror movies.

Two game-changing films were released that year.  The unexpectedly influential Night of the Living Dead, by George Romero, changed the horror genre forever.  Low budget, shot in black-and-white, with no famous actors, that movie not only introduced the modern concept of the zombie, its political and social commentary rang through loud and clear, intentional or not.  Today it is considered essential viewing for anyone who wants to claim street cred as a horror fan.  An early “splatter” film, the use of gore was new (even if they used chocolate syrup for blood), and the action took place in rural America—not terribly far from Pittsburgh, but certainly not suburbia.  These departures showed what could be done.  Its success was record-breaking.

That same year Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby was also released.  This movie brought religion directly in front of the camera to share space with horror.  To some extent this had been done before, but the seriousness with which satanism was played off against Christianity was unprecedented.   Okay, so The Devil Rides Out also appeared in 1968, but it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster.   Rosemary’s Baby was itself decried as satanic in some circles and it opened the door for The Exorcist some five years later.  Horror cinema would never be the same.  1968 was an eventful year, no doubt.  I’m skeptical that it was any more of a hinge than 1967 or 1969, but it sure did change the horror scene forever.

Not Again!

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The only reason I heard of Repossessed is because my wife read about it in a local newspaper.  This is true although I’d written a book about the Bible in horror movies and a book about possession movies.  This one’s been buried deep.  Although not a straightforward parody of The Exorcist, it travels the same territory with Linda Blair reprising her role as the possessed girl—now a mom with two adolescent kids.  The movie was critically panned, but I have a soft spot for bad movies and it was much better than The Exorcist II.  What saves the film is the acting on the part of Blair and of Leslie Nielsen, as the exorcist.  Nielsen is pretty funny most of the time, but the gags fall short here time and again.  The humor tends toward the sophomoric, but some jokes are good; the Chappaquiddick one was unexpectedly funny.  And having a false Donald Trump show up to try an exorcism was an added bonus.  These horror tropes classify this as a comedy horror, and it has a kind of cuteness to it that make it worth seeing.

So Nancy Aglet (Blair), after being exorcised by a young Father Mayii (Nielsen), settles down with a family until a televangelist pair—a clear send-up of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker—actually cause a demon to come through the television.  It  possesses, or repossesses, Nancy.  Since the original movie spends a lot of time in the hospital, she goes to the doctors who can’t figure out what’s wrong.  Nancy knows she’s possessed, however, and tries to find a priest to help, Father Mayii having retired.  The world’s religious leaders gather as the televangelists fail to cast the demon out on national television, but it’s only when Mayii joins the crew that the Devil is driven out.  Not through the rite, but because he can’t stand rock-n-roll, which the religious leaders perform.  It’s rather silly, of course.

There is an aesthetic to bad movies and Repossessed is a good example of that.  Despite its failings, it’s one of those movies that you’re (mostly) glad to have watched.  At least in my experience.  Largely, as I say, because of the performances of the leads.  Although some people today find The Exorcist itself funny, and although some aspects do open themselves to parody, it takes talent to make fun of it.  This film doesn’t do it particularly well.  Ironically, Ted Kennedy couldn’t run for president because of Chappaquiddick but Donald Trump, despite having a much more sordid past, could and did.  Those two moments in this 1990 movie give me pause.  And the fate of the televangelists in it gives me hope.

Beautiful Reality

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

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

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

Hearing White

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

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

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

Blushing Brides

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

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

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

In Praise of DVDs

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

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

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

Togetherness

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

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

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

Being Saved

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

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

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

Sinning

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

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

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

About Demons

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

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

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

Discussing Demons

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

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

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

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

Final Rites?

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

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

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

Oz Undone

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

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

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

Machine Intelligence

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I was thinking Ex Machina was a horror movie, but it is probably better classified as science fiction.  Although not too fictiony.  Released over a decade ago, it’s a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence (AI), in a most unusual, but inevitable, way.  An uber-wealthy tech genius, Nathan, lives in a secured facility only accessible by helicopter.  One of the employees of his company—thinly disguised Google—is brought to his facility under the ruse of having won a contest.  He’s there for a week to administer a Turing Test to a gynoid with true AI.  Caleb, the employee, knows tech as well, and he meets with Ava, the gynoid, for daily conversations.  He knows she’s a robot, but he has to assess whether there are weaknesses in her responses.  He begins to develop feelings towards Ava, and hostilities towards Nathan.  Some spoilers will follow.

Throughout, Nathan is presented as arrogant and narcissistic.  As well as paranoid.  He has a servant who speaks no English, whom he treats harshly.  What really drives this plot forward are the conversations between Nathan and Caleb about what constitutes true intelligence.  What makes us human?  As the week progresses, Ava begins to display feelings toward Caleb as well.  She’s kept in a safety-glass-walled room that she’s never been out of.  Although they are under constant surveillance, Ava causes power outages so she can be candid with Caleb.  She dislikes Nathan and wants to escape.  Caleb plans how they can get out only to have Nathan reveal that the real test was whether Ava could convince Caleb to let her go by feigning love for him.  The silent servant and Ava kill Nathan and Caleb begs her to release him but, being a robot she has no feelings and leaves him trapped in the facility.

This is an excellent film.  It’s difficult not to call it a parable.  Caleb falls for Ava because men tend to be easily persuaded by women in distress.  A man who programs a gynoid to appeal to this male tendency might just convince others that the robot is basically human.  It, however, experiences no emotions because although we understand logic to a fair degree, we’re nowhere near comprehending how feelings work and how they play into our thought process.  Our intelligence.  Given the opportunity, AI simply leaves humans behind.  All of this was out there years before Chat GPT and the others.  I know this is fiction, but the scenario is utterly believable.  And, come to think of it, maybe this is a horror movie after all.