Incidental Ghosts

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Although it’s a bit too close to torture porn for my liking, Incident in a Ghostland does feature strong female characters.  And it deals with dissociation in a somewhat intelligent way.  The film, by the way, is also known as simply Ghostland.  I don’t remember where I got the recommendation for it, but I would warn off those who are squeamish (and I include myself in that number).  It begins with a dedication to Lovecraft, but the story resembles a different kind of horror.  It begins with a mother moving to an isolated house with her two daughters.  The night they move in, they are attacked by two psychopaths.  Beth, the sister who wants to be a horror writer, has to witness her sister being raped and her mother being stabbed before she wakes from the nightmare many years later.

She converted this childhood incident into her bestselling novel, Incident in a Ghostland.  She’s happily married and has a young son.  When her sister calls her, clearly in the midst of a fit, Beth goes to visit only to find that Vera, her sister, is still living that horrible night over and over.  Things get pretty creepy but Vera manages to snap Beth out of her fantasy of having become a successful writer.  They are both still in the situation where they’re being attacked.  Their mother is dead and the psychopaths dress the teens up as dolls while one of them fondles them, torturing them if they don’t play along.  I’ve stopped watching movies for less.  By this point I was pretty far into it and decided to see it through.  I’m not sure I’m glad I did.

The film has its share of creepy dolls.  It’s also quite scary.  The violence is extreme and unrelenting.  As I’ve noted many times before, I try not to read about movies before I watch them.  I rely on recommendations quite a bit but I didn’t use to write down the recommender, so I’m not sure who, or which website, suggested this one.  I might think twice before following them again.  Cinematically, the movie is well made.  The nod to Lovecraft is a bit of misdirection.  The dissociation seems real enough.  Beth slips back into believing her future as a famous horror writer when present reality overwhelms her.  This seems to be what actually happens when real dissociation occurs.  You keep hoping that the imagined future is the real one.  It may be, but only after getting through the horror of the past.

Horror Lite

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Since movies are endlessly referential among themselves, Death Becomes Her brought to mind other films.  The last time I watched it, over three decades ago, it didn’t stay with me.  Looking for something to fit the autumnal mood, and seeing that it was listed, in part, as body horror, I thought to give it another chance.  In my mind I’d confused it with, of all things, Beetlejuice.  The latter didn’t really capture my imagination either, but the similarities were more imagined than real.  A better comparison might be The Witches of Eastwick, although that film portrays female power in a better light.  Another comparison that came to mind was The Substance, which was much better done.  Death Becomes Her isn’t without its charms, however.  The acting is good although the pacing is a bit slow.  The idea works, but the writing often doesn’t.

Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp go way back.  When they meet up after a lackluster show in which Madeline stars, Helen’s fiancé Ernest falls in love with Madeline and marries her.  He’s a wealthy plastic surgeon.  Helen, depressed, lets herself go but 14 years later has written a bestselling novel.  At the party, Madeline, who’s concerned about her aging, and her declining career, is amazed to find Helen trim and youthful.  And earning back the attention of Ernest.  Madeline visits a mysterious woman who has an age-reversing formula and she provokes Ernest afterwards, as their relationship has been falling apart for years.  He pushes her down the stairs, breaking her neck.  Helen helps him with a scheme to dispose of her body, but Madeline comes back to life, clinically dead.  The body horror comes in with the abuses heaped on the women’s bodies.

There’s a kind of misogynistic undercurrent that isn’t really counterbalanced by the humor.  Ernest is the victim, mainly because he can’t control his own passion for Madeline.  Then Helen.  In the end, he’s remembered as a noble soul while the women take care of each other but fall apart nonetheless.  There’s some social commentary here, but not as much as comes through in The Substance.  And the empowered women aren’t the winners as they are in The Witches of Eastwick.  The humor isn’t as obvious as Beetlejuice (yes, in my mind they’re still connected).  Over the years Death Becomes Her has become a cult classic, and for some viewers, part of their autumnal viewing.  I did appreciate the gothic castle and the perhaps a little too constant thunderstorming.  It was fun enough, and I’m glad to have some of my memories of what goes where refreshed. Still, women deserve better.

Another Peeping

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I’ve become a bit cagey about found footage horror films because they often make me queasy.  With my condition, such nausea can last for days so it’s just not worth it.  This is a shame because there are some very good examples of this sub-genre.  I recently met another horror fan in the area and he suggested Butterfly Kisses.  The camera doesn’t move too much, and, he said, it’s a film worth watching.  He was right.  It’s very meta.  It has layers.  And it’s unusual in that it both deconstructs and participates in the found footage to great effect.  To start at the outside and work our way in, Erik Kristopher Myers leads a camera crew that has been hired by Gavin York, a down-on-his-luck filmmaker to film him making a documentary.  That documentary is about two students, Sophia and Feldman, who are making a documentary for college on “Peeping Tom,” a local urban legend.

The set-up is intentionally like The Blair Witch project, setting itself in Maryland, with film students as victims.  Eduardo Sánchez, co-director of Blair Witch, appears in the film, debunking the movie Gavin York is making.  Each of these layers adds potential opportunity for any of the three sets of filmmakers to bend the truth, if not outright fabricate the story.  It’s very cleverly done.  Not only does it include Sánchez, who is a real-life found-footage horror film maker, but it also incorporates Matt Lake, author of a couple of the Weird US books, including Weird Maryland (and Weird Pennsylvania, which I have on my shelf).  In a sense, movies like this warn against gullibility.  In another sense they encourage it since people quite often have trouble distinguishing between cinema and reality.  The layers only add to the veracity.

In case the title seems inexplicable, butterfly kisses are when a person’s face is close enough to brush your own with their eyelashes, causing you to blink.  Peeping Tom is an entity that appears after staring at a certain railroad tunnel for an hour without blinking.  Then, every time you blink after that, he’s a bit closer.  When he finally reaches you, you die.  He uses butterfly kisses to get you to take the last blink.  Throughout the movie doubt is cast on those telling this account, but at the same time, there is enough evidence that you’re not sure, in the movie diegesis, if it might not be real.  And the camera motion isn’t too bad.  It’s effective found footage with a message.

CronenDrome

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David Cronenberg is an auteur.  Even before I knew his name I’d watched a couple of his films and I’ve been trying to do some backfilling as I can.  Videodrome finally became available at no extra cost, and I wish that I’d been able to see it before writing Holy Horror.  Before I get to that, however, maybe a little explanation is in order.  Videodrome is a broadcast signal that alters reality when someone views it.  Max Renn runs a sleazy television station and he finds Videodrome while looking for new salacious content.  After that, reality and hallucination and new reality become confused.  With Cronenberg’s characteristic body horror, Max’s abdomen becomes a kind of video player and he’s sent to kill a rival of Videodrome.  At least that’s what I think was going on.  He then begins working for New Flesh.

There’s slime and blood and bodies.  Parts of it reminded me of Cronenberg’s later eXistenZ, and even The Fly.  Guns that become bodies and bodies that become weapons.  There’s also a fair amount of philosophizing and social commentary over the role of television.  Specifically, the role sex and violence on screen has on viewers.  (Televisions turn into bodies too.)  The biblical angle comes in after Max has been programmed and reprogrammed, for and then against, Videodrome.  He becomes “the video word made flesh.”  This modified quote from the opening of John’s gospel is significant in his conversion experience.  The plot is a bit confusing, but we see Max transform from a man in control of his own destiny into the pawn for a sinister organization that claims to be trying to do away with those who are inspired by onscreen sex and violence.

Videodrome is a movie that has re-become strangely relevant in the era of scrolling.  One of the characters, Brian O’Blivion, believes marathon viewing makes television replace everyday life.  Ironically, many people experience this with their phones now.  The movie came before cell phones, or at least cell phone popularity.  Certainly before they had screens built in.  Videodrome was well received in the early eighties, and interestingly, my own viewing of it had to await various streaming deals to align.  (And who doesn’t subscribe to a streaming service or two these days?)  The main service I use was charging $15 for it the last time I’d looked.  Then on a weekend after chores, suddenly you could watch it for free, with commercials.  Like a fly, I’m easily drawn into the trap. Perhaps I’ll be scrolling before long.

Pick Up

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Although it came recommended by streaming services, I’d given The Black Phone a pass.  Seeing it mentioned a few times in a book I was reading, I decided I’d better give in.  Since it was an unexpected success, I suppose it got a lot of press.  In any case, it is scary but the violence is off-putting, at least to me.  The gritty story matter, however, doesn’t make it unexpected.  So, a serial killer is abducting boys in North Denver.  Finny’s best friend is taken.  His sister has dreams that reveal something of the truth, but their alcoholic father tries to beat the belief out of her.  (Not that it’s an excuse, but her mother also listened to her dreams and that lead to her suicide.)  Then Finny is abducted.  The killer keeps him in an escape-proof basement.  Then the kids who’ve died start calling him on the eponymous telephone.

The instructions the kids give him don’t always directly help with his escape, beyond giving him courage.  Meanwhile, his sister has dreams (except for one night when her profane prayer in the morning is sure to make some viewers blush).  The dreams are taken seriously by the police, but her father is less-than-pleased.  Although he’s repentant at the end, the punishment he gives his daughter is about as severe as the killer doles out to the boys before killing them.  And there’s kid-on-kid violence.  Finny and his sister both get kicked around, literally.  In other words, there’s a lot of threat of, and actual violence.  There’s also a fair amount of religion involved.

Finny’s sister has a ritual that she uses to invoke the significant dreams.  It involves, you guessed it, a Bible.  A Gideon New Testament.  Also a prayer card of the Virgin Mary and a cross.  This makes the movie worthy of Holy Sequel.  And, of course, appropriate for the scary movie season.  I think there may be a spiritual lesson here, but I prefer horror with supernatural monsters.  The supernatural characters in this film are all good guys.  After they’re dead, that is.  In life some of them were also violent individuals.  So, for people like me there were a few triggers with the alcoholic father and the way that children are beaten around.  As well as a psychopath.  The movie was well made, however, and the mask of the villain is decidedly creepy.  Horror that taps into religion often has a depth that makes people take notice.  And if done well, it shows at the box office.

Carrieing On

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There can be little doubt that horror grew up in the seventies.  If I wanted to sound academic I’d say “the long seventies” since the dam burst in 1968.  I consider movies “major” if I heard about them.  Living in a small town with little money, movies had to be big to get my attention and there were plenty I heard about as I was growing up.  (I didn’t see most of them until years later.)  These are the horror classics of these days and most of the time when my wife and I watch horror together it’s from the classics.  While watching Carrie together this holiday season, I was once again struck by how much religion plays into the story.  There’s likely a reason McFarland chose the remake of Carrie to feature on the cover of Holy Horror.

Stephen King’s story is so well known there’s no need to summarize, but I’d highlight just how religious Margaret White is, in evidence.  This was possible in 1976 because Rosemary’s Baby opened the way in 1968.  The Exorcist in 1973 used religion as its main vehicle.  The next stop for this train is usually The Omen in 1976, but we also find Carrie at that same stop.  The Amityville Horror came out in 1979 with its priestly abuses.  All of these films used the Bible and religion in very different ways, but they were all major horror films of that decade.  I heard of others, of course.  People talked about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), and Jaws (1975), even where I grew up.  (Well, Jaws was a major hit, it’s just I didn’t think of it as horror at the time.)  And although nobody I knew saw Magic (1978), it made it into ads I saw and read in my small town and remembered for years.  This latter bevy of films didn’t have religion in them, but they all demonstrated how much horror had grown up that decade.  As long as we’re using the “long” moniker, Friday the 13th showed up in 1980.

This was a heady time to be growing up, even in a small town.  I didn’t see Carrie until much later.  It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing my mother would take me to the theater to see.  I’d heard Stephen King’s name, of course.  In English class we were assigned one of his short stories in an anthology.  Horror ebbs and flows, just like any cultural phenomenon, but it had to be taken seriously once the long seventies hit.  People were paying a lot of money to be scared.  And a significant portion of those horror classics used religion to move them along.

October Challenge

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There’s a popular October challenge—watch a horror movie every night of the month.  I’m neither a young person nor retired, so this is not something I’ve ever been able to do.  It’s been quite a nice October around here, but adulting requires so much time.  Even for those of us who enjoy horror films.  I have tried to catch up on them, and I went on a Tim Burton kick for a while, but his movies often fall closer to weird on the meter than they do towards horror.  Still, they often have visual appeal and a kind of gothic sensibility.  I do enjoy a good gothic tale.  When I read about gothic fiction I often wonder why it has such a draw for me.  My childhood was in the context of a broken family and I found solace in monsters.  That hasn’t changed.

I’m sure that my wife often wonders what she got herself into.  When we first decided we belonged together (and clearly we do), I’d entered an enthusiastic academic stage.  Pop culture was considered shallow at the time, and although we occasionally watched a scary movie together, it wasn’t an obvious part of my personality.  It was when I became a dark academic, having lost my long-term teaching job and finding myself functionally unemployed, that horror came back to me.  My wife and I had been married for almost twenty years by that point, and even then horror wasn’t a major focus for me.  Our daughter loves Halloween, as do I, but trying to find work, moving to New Jersey, then having to commute into Manhattan all took their toll on my Octobers.

Writing Holy Horror was probably the defining moment in my current October mindset.  At the time religious studies in horror were in their infancy.  I could count the books on one hand.  Since I’m between worlds—I still rely on light academia for a paycheck, but I live in dark academia—I take whatever encouragement that I can get.  It’s not easy to come by when your books are priced for an “academic readership.”  I still get people asking when Nightmares with the Bible will be coming out in paperback.  Now that publishers have latched onto the teat of ebooks, that’s not likely ever to happen.  I still watch horror movies when I can.  My October challenge, however, is to appreciate as much of the season as I can with a 9-2-5 and some very expensive books on my hands.

Picking on Poltergeist

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It’s not nice to pick on the elderly, I know, but Poltergeist is one movie where I disagree with the critics.  One of my “old movies,” I saw it sometime back in the eighties and although there were scary scenes, it felt rather lackluster to me.  That doesn’t mean that I haven’t watched it several times, of course.  As one of the horror films that my wife will see with me, we pulled it out this October and it just felt silly to me.  Part of the reason is that it doesn’t seem to have the style of either Steven Spielberg or Tobe Hooper.  The story is a bit too protracted and apart from the over-the-top ending it’s not clear what the “poltergeists” are.  I’m probably forgetting what it was like to see it in the eighties when it was new and fresh.

Or maybe it’s just that far scarier movies have come out since then.  Reading about it afterwards, it was strange to see how highly rated Poltergeist is among critics.  For me, the problem  was partially the illogic of parts of it.  A tree tries to eat a kid and the authorities aren’t called?  The neighbors didn’t see anything.  If the whole development was built on a graveyard, why does only one house show it?  And after many years have passed?  Naturally, the movie does have some classic moments.  When Marty (who is a rather silly character, along the lines of scientists in a John Carpenter film) pulls off his face, that was shocking the first time.  And Zelda Rubenstein does a great job as the psychic.  Much of the rest of it doesn’t make sense.  Why decide to stay that last night, given what’s happened before?  Of course, without that night there’s no climax.

The fault must be my own.  Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen enough movies now that the input of two directors with different visions seems to’ve pulled the film in too many directions.  It feels much more like a Spielberg movie than it does a Hooper film.  Where’s the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (also an old movie) subtlety and social commentary?  Of course, Hooper’s next film was Lifeforce, which, although fun to watch, also seems not to know where it wants to go.  I know that Poltergeist was a formative movie in the horror genre.  It was a big budget success.  Perhaps the relative dearth of religious explanation hurts it.  There’s plenty of talk of when happens when we die, but it doesn’t have the backing of the conviction of a Fr. Merrin or even (God help us!) Ed and Lorraine Warren.  Or maybe I need to let go and just watch it for fun.

Exorcising Emily

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Perhaps after The Exorcist, the demonic possession movie cited with the greatest respect is The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  This 2005 movie is based, in part, on the true case of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died after undergoing several exorcisms, beginning in 1975.  Sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop, but after reading about The Exorcist the timing of all of this struck me.  Somehow reading about it in Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson’s “The Exorcist” Effect, hadn’t stuck with me.  William Peter Blatty published the eponymous novel in 1971.  This was based, in part, on a case from 1949, over twenty years earlier.  The novel was a bestseller and, of course, adapted into William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in 1973.  That movie was a blockbuster, and is probably the single biggest influence in the current perceptions of demonic possession.  What caught Blatty’s attention in the first place was how rare exorcism was.  And one was held in 1949?

Anneliese Michel had been undergoing psychiatric treatment since 1970.  It was only five years later, after the release of both the novel and movie, that exorcism was suggested as a possible cure.  It may be impossible to know if the priest whom the Michel family approached had read the novel or seen the film.  One thing is certain, however.  The Exorcist brought the topic back into popular consciousness in the western world by then.  Yes, in the United States it was pop culture, but the film was taken with such seriousness that it filtered into everyday consciousness as well.  Although banned in parts of Britain, that consciousness had entered Europe as well.  Was the idea to treat Michel by exorcism part of what Laycock and Harrelson termed “The Exorcist Effect”?

Media is incredibly influential.  Fiction can create reality.  It can cost someone their life.  And not just for being in an accident in the film industry (although such tragedies do occur).  Humans are intrigued by ideas.  We tell stories about them.  Sometimes our own life stories become fictionalized in our recollections.  My memories have been corrected more than once by my siblings.  Culturally, we were shown what demons were and what they could do in The Exorcist.  Even if Michel’s priest hadn’t seen the movie, he lived in a culture already altered by it.  I really need to go back and read Laycock and Harrelson’s book again.  Being invited to a podcast about demons back in August made me think about Emily Rose again, after years of pursing The Wicker Man and Sleepy Hollow.

Old Man Country

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As a movie fan, you eventually come to trust certain filmmakers.  The Coen Brothers produce consistently good work.  I’d missed No Country for Old Men and was somewhat reluctant to see it.    Films about sociopathic killers bother me, and I knew that the Cormac McCarthy novel was about a drug deal gone bad (and made him a household name).  Drugs are another of my triggers, having grown up in an alcoholic household.  But still, the film won the Academy Award for best picture, and it was a rather glaring hole in my viewing of Coen Brother major movies.  While the film isn’t horror, it is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in some time.  The ending is devastating, and sad, and reflective.  It’s easy to see why it appealed to the critics.  Nothing is neatly tied up at the end.  I haven’t read the novel, but I hear the film follows it closely.

Llewelyn Moss comes across a drug deal gone bad.  He finds a couple million in cash and takes it to the trailer park so he and his wife can retire.  A hit man, Anton Chigurh, pursues him and eventually Moss realizes that a transponder has been hidden among the cash, giving away his location.  Meanwhile, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, does what he can to protect Moss’ wife and tries to save him from what he realizes is an unstoppable foe.  Chigurh proves as tenacious as his reputation suggests, and viewers learn that Moss is as equally tenacious, but has both a conscience and morality, both of which Chigurh lacks.  The scenes where Chigurh appears to be fair-minded are the scariest in the film.

The log line “There are no clean getaways” about sums up the outcome.  Often classified as a western, the feel is more of a thriller.  “Coen Brothers movie” might be a genre all its own.  The relative lack of humor puts it much closer to Fargo than to O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Raising Arizona on the Coen Brothers scale.  The unrelenting violence also brought Pulp Fiction (different director, different feel) to mind.  The bleakness of the outlook of Sheriff Bell, as well as the look in his eyes, is haunting.  His conversation with Ellis near the end stirs thoughts of Ecclesiastes and the reflection on just how violent people can be toward each other is profoundly disturbing.  I’ve seen many horror films that didn’t scare me half as much.

Bible Movies

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

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

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

Hollow Singing

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

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

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

Burton on Mars

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

PœN

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

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

Thriller or Horror?

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

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

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

Found Unfound

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

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

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