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. 

If You Do

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Folk horror is particularly open to religion.  The powerful Euro-horror film, The Damned, is nearly worthy of Robert Egger status.  Indeed, the movie reminded me of Egger’s work, so perhaps Thordur Palsson is his Icelandic incarnation.  Set in a fishing station in a remote arctic bay in the 1870s, the owner’s widow oversees the operations of six fishermen and the woman who cooks and keeps the house.  Her husband died at sea the previous year, and the fishing has been very poor, threatening their existence.  They need to eat their catches, as well as their bait, trying to stay alive until spring.  Eva, the young widow, sees a ship foundering on the distant, jagged rocks.  The men insist that if she orders them to help, their food supplies will quickly be depleted, and the rescue operation would put them all at risk.  Lured to the wreck by a food barrel that has washed ashore, they encounter more men than they can keep and have to fight them off of their small fishing boat, killing one in the process.

The helmsman of the boat falls overboard and drowns as the survivors try to climb aboard.  The small boat manages to escape, however.  Helga, the housekeeper, warns Eva of the draugr, a monster of Nordic folklore that is a kind of zombie.  If it gets into your head, she warns, it will led to death.  Skeptical of folktales, Eva begins to change her mind as her small group of companions begins dying off.  Helga disappears.  One of the men dies after being stopped from killing a companion.  Eva is now left with only four men.  One of the men insists they are paying for their sin, and begins erecting a large cross as an act of penitence.  After seeing a man in the mist, the new helmsman dies by suicide.  Now convinced the draugr is real, Eva leads an expedition to find and destroy it.  This leads to the death of yet another crew member.  The three remaining people decide to flee by night in the boat.  Eva, however, encounters the draugr in the cabin and destroys him by fire.  A spoiler follows.

The shocking end reveals that the draugr was actually a survivor of the shipwreck and his presence explains the “supernatural” events they believed the monster caused.  Eva, delusional, kills the man.  The story plays heavily on both the isolation of the fishing station and the guilt the characters all undergo after leaving their fellow sailors to die on the jagged rocks.  Their fear transforms fevers into deadly paranoia as they kill one another and themselves off.  This is set against the stunning arctic scenery of the fjord that houses the station in a stark winter landscape.  And the conflict between religious systems is right there on the surface and deep within the minds of those isolated, far from civilization.

Existing Stance

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You know, I’ve referenced eXistenZ several times on this blog without really writing about it.  How rude of me!  Well, the fact is eXistenZ is one of my “old movies”—those that I knew from the days before I started this blog.  I have watched it since 2009, but early on I didn’t review movies unless they had religious elements.  Having recently referenced eXistenZ yet again, I figured it was time to look directly at it.  When I first watched this movie I had no idea who David Cronenberg was.  The film was recommended to me by one of my students at Nashotah House.  In those days there was no streaming so I had to purchase the DVD.  The movie is a science fiction horror film, primarily body horror, which is kind of Cronenberg’s shtick.  It’s also about gaming and I’m not a video gamer at all.  Still, I really like this film.

Perhaps presciently, Cronenberg set the movie in 2030.  Computer gaming has become biological with organic ports that have to be punctured into players’ spines so they can use an “UmbiCord” to connect to the pod.  Rewatching it, this seems almost too plausible.  In any case, as the movie goes on it becomes less and less clear what is real and what is part of the game.  Reality becomes distorted.  eXistenZ came out about the same time as The Matrix (probably why my student suggested it to me).  Given the very high profile of the latter film, eXistenZ never really broke out.  Cronenberg seldom breaks through to the mainstream, but I know a lot of people were talking about his remake of The Fly in 1986.  I even saw that one in the theater with some seminary friends.  In those days I didn’t know enough about horror to know what to expect from a Cronenberg film, which may be why it had such an impact on me.

In any case, eXistenZ remains underrated.  I see more recent films that appear to nod to it.  The horror aspects tend to be the slimy, gooey aspects of the game world which—spoiler alert—is, diegetically, the one in which the viewer resides.  There are indeed a few parallels to The Matrix, but eXistenZ has creatures and horror themes.  Sci-fi horror is a sub-genre that often works.  Critics tend to refer to such things by the older category of “science fiction,” but it is close kin to horror, a genre only separated out in the early 1930s.  Now as AI takes over the world, it might be a good opportunity to watch eXistenZ and ponder just how far you want to let it go.

Hunting Season

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Back when it came out in 1997, I’d heard that it wasn’t a particularly happy movie.  It was a good movie but it dealt with two damaged men.  I was frightened off from seeing Good Will Hunting until it became associated with dark academia.  Will Hunting is a genius but he was born in a bad part of town and earned himself a police record.  He works as a janitor at MIT, but he also solves proofs instantly that professors labor over for years.  The only way he can keep out of jail, however, is with the help of a therapist.  Sean Maguire, who teaches at Bunker Hill Community College, is a psychologist who shares the background of Will’s rough neighborhood, but who recently lost his wife to cancer.  He’s been traumatized by his life and the two come to realize, once Will learns to trust, that they have helped heal each other.

The darkness in this academia is mostly social.  Even today, those of us who grew up in rougher locations don’t easily fit in academia.  We’re blithely ejected from it in favor of those with more proper backgrounds.  And connections.  There were a few personal triggers for me watching this movie, but I had been wanting to see it for some time.  Robin Williams, who plays Maguire, had starred in what may be the epitome of dark academia movies, Dead Poets Society.  In both he plays his part convincingly.  The term “dark academia” wouldn’t be coined, however, until the year after he died.  Education is supposed to lead us out of darkness, but given what humans are, it creates its own form of gloominess.  That’s probably why some of us find the category of dark academia so intriguing.  Compelling enough to get us to watch films that will perhaps come with their own brand of trauma.

Children born into similar, or nearly identical situations may react to it quite differently.  Although both in academic settings, Will and Sean have different experiences of it.  With his life experience as a war veteran, and an educated world traveler, Sean invested his life in love and helping others.  Will struggles with his fear of rejection to finally try to love someone more than upholding his own walls of self-protection.  There’s some real depth here.  It’s no wonder that the screenplay won more than a couple awards.  It would take another couple decades, however, until the category of dark academia would be named.  And if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have risked watching this amazing movie.

Woodwork

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It’s not often that I get to see a new horror movie on opening day, but I managed to swing The Carpenter’s Son with a screener, courtesy of Horror Homeroom.  I’m not going to say much about the movie here, because you should go there to read my response—I’ll let you know when it appears.  But I should try to whet your appetite a bit.  Among those of us who read and write about horror and religion this was a much anticipated movie.  A horror movie about Jesus.  Such things have been done before, but this one is played straight with an interesting premise.  It’s based, loosely, on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.  This isn’t to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas.  Early Christians, it seems, favored the doubter’s point of view.  The Infancy Gospel is the story of Jesus’ miracles between the ages of five and twelve.  Even among early Christians these accounts weren’t taken as gospel truth.  They make for an interesting movie, however.

I think about horror and religion quite a lot.  Since the late sixties the two appear together frequently and, according to many surveys, make for the scariest movies.  Religion deals with, not to sound too Tillichian, ultimate concerns.  In the human psyche you can’t get much larger than death and eternity.  These are the home turf of religion.  Of course, death can be handled in an entirely secular way, but there’s a reasons hospitals almost always have chapels in them.  Eternity may be slotted in cosmology, but what it means comes from religion.  Forever seems pretty ultimate to me.

One thing I didn’t give in my Horror Homeroom piece about The Carpenter’s Son is my thoughts as to whether it’s a good movie or not.  Did I like it?  To a certain degree, yes.  Although I’ve been impressed with Nicolas Cage in horror movies lately—he can really rise to the occasion—sometimes, as in The Wicker Man, he just becomes, well, Cagey.  This happens once in a while in The Carpenter’s Son too.  When he’s questioning Mary about where “the boy” came from, his voice gets the wheedling, whining, kind of mocking tone that doesn’t set him as his best.  Likewise, when he tries to instruct young Jesus in various ways, it seems far too modern to fit the palette of a period drama.  I watched it a couple of times to write the article and I have my doubts that I’ll watch it again.  I did think the portrayal of Satan was good, and appreciated some of the dialogue about evil.  It wasn’t my favorite horror movie in recent weeks, however, even though I saw it before it opened.

Witching Season

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

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

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

The Prom

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

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

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

More Morons

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

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

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

Louder

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

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

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

Writing Ghost

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

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

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

Old Horror

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

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

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

Little Girl

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

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

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

Halloween, Disney Style

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

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

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