Not Fantasy

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There’s a reason I watch horror.  One of the many things you can’t find online is how popular movies were before the internet days.  This is an issue for me because I only just now found out about Phantasm, which was released in 1979.  Granted, I lived in a small town, but I did know about The Amityville Horror—everyone knew about The Amityville Horror.  The films were released the same year, but Phantasm was an indie production and probably didn’t have reach into my local region.  Nobody talked about it at school and I only became conscious of it a few weeks ago.  I learned that it was quite a box office success, but the critics didn’t care much for it (and I can see why).  It was, however, rediscovered and has become a cult classic.  I can see that too.  The thing is, it is a bad movie.  I’m learning to appreciate such things.

Part of the reason the film bothered me is that I really dislike “but it was all a dream” endings.  Even though there’s a final suggestion that some of it “really happened,” or Michael is dreaming within a dream, such endings always make me shrug.  Horror, to really work, has to be in that liminal zone between believability while on screen and the deeper knowledge that it’s fiction.  Phantasm just had too many strikes against it to be believable.  The dwarves were lifted straight from Star Wars’ Jawa.  The Tall Man isn’t scary (this is from a current-millennium perspective, granted) and while you’re just trying to get into the horror mood (the music is appropriate) a flying ball of death, a sudden sci-fi element, is thrown in.  Of course, the plot takes a kind of sci-fi turn near the end.  It didn’t, however, do any heavy lifting.

I was surprised to learn that it became a franchise, no members of which I’d ever heard.  It is interesting that speculation exists that the creepypasta stalwart, the Slender Man, was developed from the Tall Man concept.  Given that I was seventeen when this movie came out it might be someone of my vintage—but from a different vineyard—would find Tall Man scary.  Of course, if I’d seen it when it was first out, and in a theater, I might’ve gotten some chills from it.  I could have included it in Holy Horror since there is some Bible in it, but it isn’t used to its full extent for a movie that mostly takes place in and around a funeral home.  There is some comfort in knowing that even if your work isn’t great, it can still be rediscovered if enough time passes.  And there’s good reason to watch it.

Premature

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The last, for me (but actually the third), Roger Corman Poe Cycle film is The Premature Burial.  Released the same year as Tales of Terror, it departs from the other Poe films in not starring Vincent Price.  Indeed, this is because it was originally not an American International film, but was later brought into the fold.  This particular story by Poe doesn’t have the superstructure of this film at all.  Indeed, Poe’s tale is spare, beginning with reported events of premature burial and ending with a first-person fictional account.  The movie does have a quote or two from the story, as well as the elaborate preparations that the narrator, in the movie the protagonist Guy Carrell, undertakes to be able to escape his mausoleum.  In the movie Carrell has to be an aristocrat, so as to afford such a fancy contrivance.

Although the screenplay was written by Charles Beaumont, a frequent Twilight Zone contributor, it lacks pacing and contains some improbabilities.  The theme of grave-robbery is also prominent and doesn’t fit well with what actually happens in the plot.  Since the movie is over sixty years old it’s safe to say that it involves a twist ending.  The marriage—missing in Poe—of Emily Gault to Guy is a ruse to get the family fortune by murdering Guy by fright.  Emily exploits his fears of premature burial (his father suffered catalepsy)  to lead to his own premature burial.  The grave-robbers, however, visit Guy that night, not realizing that he was only catatonic.  Guy then takes his revenge, only to be shot by his sister when he attempts to kill an innocent family friend.

Fitting for the Victorian era, Poe used the theme of premature burial in a number of his stories.  “The Premature Burial” is the tale that contains Poe’s famous quote, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague.”  This remains true even going on two centuries later.  Accounts of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) complicate our simple binary of life and death.  The movie is, of course, coded as horror and is part of the suggestive string of interpretations that cast Poe as a “horror writer.”  Corman had been growing a reputation as a director of horror (but he, like Poe, worked in other genres) and it was this recasting of Poe into what was developing into a mature cinematic genre that partially solidified the writer’s reputation.  Premature Burial isn’t the best of the series, but I do feel as though I’ve accomplished something by finally having watched all of them.  Or have I?

Still October

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Before October was over, I wanted to watch Knives Out.  Not horror, it’s more of a murder mystery but it’s funny and it makes just about every list of movies to watch in October.  I’m pretty sure that list compilers don’t really understand what I mean by typing in “October movies.”  Or maybe the kinds of movies I’m thinking of simply don’t exist.  More on that later.  Knives Out is the story of the death of a famous writer.  (Given the fantastic house in which he lives, a very famous writer—the majority of us only ever modestly supplement our day job incomes with book sales.)  But this fantasy of being paid enormous sums for what is really hard work is, well, a fantasy.  This writer, who has/had three children, altered his will before his 85th birthday celebration and on this hangs the tale.

The two surviving children, and spouse of the third, have been cut out of the will.  Their means of support—they all relied on their father’s largess—is gone and so when the writer dies on the night of his birthday, by suicide, some questions arise.  There are many twists in the story, and I won’t give away the ending, but the main question that the private investigator asks is why he was hired in the first place.  All the forensic evidence confirms this having been a suicide, and although the adult children’s stories disagree in any particulars, the events surrounding the death seem clear enough.  At the center of all of this is the writer’s private nurse.  She’s an immigrant and she stays out of family squabbles.

The protests over the will bring out the true character of the children, or, in some cases, their spouses.  And although the viewer is clued in early as to what actually happened, like a mystery novel, a vital clue is left out that ties the whole together.  It’s quite well done.  It’s an October movie like Clue is an October movie, or perhaps Murder by Death.  There are some nice shots of trees in color, but it lacks the haunting, melancholy feel that I associate with October films.  Will I watch it again?  I should think so.  Movies like this bear re-watching, if for no other reason than to try to spot “donut holes” (the private detective’s phrase) in the plot.  It’s also a reflection on how money can corrupt.  But also how desperate people can become when their support system is withdrawn.  And that’s truly scary.  Knives Out would work on any dark and stormy night, but it’s not horror.

International Horror

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As someone who has written a couple pieces on Jewish horror for Horror Homeroom, I have developed a natural interest in international horror.  I was one of those who scrambled hard to find The Golem (2018) when it came out, but was able to see it only in 2020.  When I learned about New Israeli Horror, by Olga Gershenson, I knew I had to read it.  The subtitle, Local Cinema, Global Genre, pretty much captures how she approaches the subject.  It also helped me understand a bit better the way filmmaking works.  I once, rather naively, asked a film scholar how many movies had been made.  He responded, “It’s impossible to know.”  Even experts in cinema can’t see every movie, and those of us who watch horror can’t see every horror film.  (I wouldn’t want to.)  I hadn’t realized, however, until reading this book, that in places like Israel it often comes down to state funding.

I’ve written quite a lot about Euro-horror over the past few years.  Often cooperative ventures, these are horror films that aren’t part of the Hollywood system, and they are frequently quite good.  Those of us who enjoy movies may not often think of who pays for them.  It’s kind of like book publishing—someone’s got to pay for all this, and hopes to make their money back in the process.  In Israel many movies are funded by official agencies.  And such agencies tend not to like horror.  New Israeli horror, by Gershenson’s reckoning, began only about 2010.  One of the reasons I’ve turned to writing about horror is that its history isn’t so long as, say, ancient West Asian studies, which reaches back thousands of years.  Reading about something not even two decades old, but still history, is fun.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book.  Of the films discussed I’ve only seen one, the aforementioned Golem.  Before writing Holy Horror, I paid no attention to where films were produced.  I’d seen some international movies, sometimes obvious because of subtitles, but my usual fare is homegrown.  I gather that I’ve been missing a lot by not seeing more Israeli horror.  When you add Jewish horror (Jewish-themed horror, in my way of seeing things) to the mix, there’s a new angle to take on religion and horror.  Many of the films Gershenson reads are about Israel’s army and critique of the militarism that has become part of life in Israel.  I confess to not keeping up on politics because to me it tends to be scarier than horror.  But I can see, from this book, that I’ve been missing some interesting cinema.

Whence Evil?

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I’m at a stage where horror-comedy, or comedy-horror is becoming appealing.  This sub-genre is really perfect for those horror fans who like to laugh and still get something of substance.  Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a great example of the dangers of stereotyping.  Like Scream, it is very aware of horror tropes, but it makes fun of them in creative ways.  At points it’s laugh-out-loud funny, but it is pretty gory.  It begins with the usual folk gothic scenario of a group of college kids going camping deep in rustic country.  At the last gas station, they encounter Tucker and Dale, whom we’ve been primed to think of as potentially murderous hicks.  In reality, they’re a couple of hapless but nice guys on their way to fix up a cabin they bought as a vacation house.

The college kids end up camping nearby and interpret everything Tucker and Dale do through the lens of assuming hillbillies are inbred evildoers.  It’s kind of a reverse Deliverance.  So it sets up a love story between one of the coeds, Alison, and Dale, who rescues her from drowning.  Meanwhile Alison’s friends assume Tucker and Dale have kidnapped Alison and plan to attack to set her free.  Of course, mayhem ensues.  Dale, who is big and shy, and who suffers from an inferiority complex, keeps on making missteps in trying to convince the other kids that his intensions are good.  That’s the most brilliant part of the movie—it cautions against reading people in the light of our biases.  Often when I find myself in areas where we see lots of Trump signs, the locals, in non-political contexts, are very nice.  I feel sad that one man has decided hatred is the only way to power.  Making people distrust and hate each other so that he can win.

People, overall, are pretty descent.  There are some bad ones out there, for sure, but the number of times I’ve encountered helpful strangers—in both rural and urban settings—reinforces my underlying belief that if we don’t try to set people against one another their natural goodness will come through.  It’s hard to do when all the campaigning, and even the rhetoric from 2016 to 2020 was of distrust of others and personal superiority.  The real hero of Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is Dale, the one with an inferiority complex.  Those who humbly assume that others are better than they are seldom try to hurt other people.  And yet, those who don’t know “salt of the earth” types, who may live in less-than-ideal circumstances, frequently approach them with fear.  It’s a horror-comedy in the making.

Why, Cathy?

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Learning to appreciate bad movies is a skill like any other.  It takes practice.  “Why?” I hear you ask?  Why climb a mountain?  Actually, there is a motive for seeing bad movies, apart from the good feeling they can leave you with.  (I might’ve actually done it better!)  That’s because they’re often free streaming.  If I had an endless budget I might well be able to avoid bad movies, but what’s the fun in that?  I found out about Cathy’s Curse because I was looking for a movie about a cursed doll.  (Don’t ask.)  I’ve seen many, of course.  Child’s Play and the whole Annabelle series.  But I felt I was missing something.  Wikipedia actually has a page on haunted doll movies, and Cathy’s Curse stood out to me.  Yes, I was forewarned, but I was also curious.

A Canadian horror film from 1977, Cathy’s Curse has become a cult classic.  The story line decidedly makes no sense.  Cathy, a young girl, moves into her grandparents’ house with her father and mother.  Her father’s father had died in a car crash with his daughter Laura, about Cathy’s age, some 30 years earlier.  Cathy’s parents are troubled, her mother having recently had a nervous breakdown.  Laura’s vengeful spirit possesses Cathy through a doll the latter finds in the attic.  For some reason, Cathy kills the housekeepers and attacks other children.  She tries to drown herself.  She kills the handyman’s dog.  The dog, which is clearly male, is explicitly said to be female in the movie, perhaps because one of the favorite words of the writer is “bitch.”  After about an hour and a half of running around screaming, the opening of the cursed doll’s eyes suddenly brings normalcy to the house.

There are some genuinely good things about the movie.  The late fall-early winter mood is nicely framed.  Why people hang out outdoors without coats in freezing weather is never really explained, though.  Neither the writing nor the acting are stellar.  And have I pointed out that the story makes no sense?  But still, there’s something there.  The idea of possession, a young girl under threat, the scary old mansion—these are classic tropes.  It’s unclear why, when Cathy’s father is fixing breakfast, he immediately sends her to bed and it’s suddenly night.  Or why the detective calls him by the wrong name.  Or why nobody can take a doll away from a little girl.  Ah, but that’s it, you see.  The haunted doll.  You have to learn how to appreciate these things, you know.

May I?

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The thing about horror is that it’s an intensely personal preference.  Some people really like a movie while others find it, well, meh.  When the nights begin to lengthen you get lots of curated lists (I’ve never been asked to do any, but I’m working on one anyway) suggesting October viewing.  One such list that a friend sent me appealed to me because it was for movies on Netflix.  Since that’s one of the few streaming services to which I have access, it makes the movies seem free.  This particular list recommended May the Devil Take You, a 2018 movie from Indonesia.  The almost polite title suggests it wasn’t named in English.  In any case, I didn’t really find this one particularly scary and in part that was because of the apparent incongruity of the culture and the monster.  I knew that Indonesia was a highly Muslim majority country, and I know Islam also recognizes the Devil.  Still, Satanism feels kind of out of place here.

The story isn’t terribly deep: a man makes a deal with the Devil, through one of his dark concubines, to become rich, in exchange for the souls of his family.  His wife is the first to go, but he remarries a retired actress who has three children, two young adult.  His only biological child, from his first marriage, Alfie, feels herself estranged.  (It’s unclear to me whether the youngest daughter of the second wife was also biologically his, but it seems so.)  When the father falls into a serious, undiagnosed illness, the children, and actress, all converge on the house where the pact was made.  Of course they open the basement door—locked and with warnings posted—where the Devil’s concubine waits.  The actress becomes possessed and the two older daughters, Alfie and her stepsister, try to fight it off, only to have the stepsister become possessed.  She kills her brother and intends to kill Alfie and her own young sister as well, but the latter two manage to overcome her.

The plot is a bit convoluted but the basic story is maybe too familiar—make a deal with the Devil and all Hell will break loose.  I also wonder if some of the lack of real impact here comes from the subscript translation.  I don’t know how this is done, but I suspect it’s not dissimilar from Google translate.  That may be fine for academic purposes, but it does seem to lead to stilted dialogue among a group of twenty-somethings trying to fight the Devil in Indonesia.  My personal October list is more moody.  Seasonal.  And by no means complete.  The only way to find the movies, it seems, is trial and error via curated lists.

Like Twilight

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The weird thing about watching The Similars is that I’d convinced myself that the movie was from the late sixties.  It’s set in 1968, and the use of desaturated colors gave it an antique feel.  The movie is actually from 2015, a fact that jarred me when it was over.  As I watched it my first thought was, “this is like The Twilight Zone.”  It is, very much so.  It begins with a voiceover and it follows a group of eight people in a bus station during a preternatural hurricane.  By the way, there will be spoilers here.  It’s pretty difficult to discuss the movie without them.  Please be warned.  Also, the film is in Spanish, so you may need subtitles.

Ulises, a youngish man, is trying to get to Mexico City where his pregnant wife is giving birth in the hospital.  A native woman, a shaman, avoids Ulises, while Martin, the ticket seller, doesn’t trust him.  The bus isn’t coming because of the hurricane which, the radio announces, covers the entire world.  Another pregnant woman, Irene, is fleeing her abusive boyfriend, but odd things have begun to happen.  A bathroom attendant and the shaman have seizures.  A mother and her ill son arrive.  Martin insists Ulises is a witch, and Martin has covered his face with bandages.  What soon becomes clear is that everyone is taking on Ulises’ face.  They assume he’s either a government agent and they are being experimented upon, or he’s somehow a supernatural being.  Then the Twilight Zone twist comes: it’s the ill boy who’s the one with special powers.  He is following the plot of a horror comic book he read, where everyone is transformed to look alike and they lose their identities.  That part was borrowed directly from the Zone.  The shaman reveals that aliens gave the boy his powers and this is an extraterrestrial plot.

There’s a lot going on in this movie.  Isaac Ezban, the director, apparently wanted it to be a character-driven drama, like Twilight Zone.  Indeed, the film nods to more than one episode of Rod Serling’s series.  Although it’s derivative, it’s artfully done.  The retro feel to it adds to the effect.  And when Irene’s baby is born it’s pretty clear that we’re firmly in the world of horror.  There’s a certain amount of humor here, but the parts are played straight.  The idea of a child with unlimited power is terrifying, as even ancient stories of Jesus as a boy show.  It does seem to be, however, an alien plot while the camera stays firmly focused down here.

Virtual Head Sickness

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I think quite a lot about the nature of reality.  Our brains—no, our minds—create reality for us.  I’m reminded of this when I get motion sickness from watching a movie.  I am not actually moving, and I even look away from the screen frequently, but if I don’t realize it soon enough, I become quite ill.  There really should be an advisory warning for people with my condition since I have occasionally lost an entire day recovering from such an experience.  Most recently it happened with V/H/S Viral.  I had not watched any of the V/H/S franchise; indeed, I didn’t realize it was a franchise.  I was watching it under the false impression that it was a Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead movie.  Well, it partially is.  They were responsible for one of the segments—it’s an anthology film.

I made it through an hour and ten minutes, with only eleven minutes to go, when I realized, “I’m going to throw up if I don’t shut this off.”  So I did.  Now, if you have the condition I do, there’s little that you can actually do when the process starts.  You can’t move your eyes much, and even moving your physical body has to be done slowly.  (My sister-in-law, who is a physician, once tried a “tough love” cure when I got motion-sick from a small plane ride.  It didn’t work.  I ended up laying in the dirt by the side of a camp road in Idaho for about half an hour before I could open my eyes and walk, very slowly, back to the cabin.  Once there I slept the rest of the day.)  You might understand why I resent when a movie does this to me.  After maybe an hour, I tried to read.  I was actually reading “Hans Phaal” by Edgar Allan Poe at the time, the part where Hans is hanging upside down outside the balloon.  I had to put the book down.

Although I’d almost gone too far, after a couple of hours I could stand to scroll a bit.  (That often makes me mildly ill, so I need to be careful.)  Then I realized that V/H/S is an anthology series and that various filmmakers are invited to contribute.  Thus the mention of Benson and Moorhead that drew me in in the first place.  I had been trying to complete my viewing of their films.  They aren’t a franchise, but I realized, post-nausea, that I had already seen all of their feature-length collaborations.  They’re philosophical movies, and leave me questioning reality.  The fact that my mind makes my body motion-sick when it’s not moving also does the same thing.

Keep Them Open

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“To be is to be perceived.”  That was the summary of Berkeleyian philosophy we were taught in college.  In other words, not to be perceived is not to exist.  So, Don’t Blink kind of runs with that idea.  Before getting started, a spoiler: close your eyes if you don’t want to know something important.  Okay, so no explanation is given.  Ten friends (a lot of names to remember) drive to a resort that is so remote that you arrive with the fuel tank on empty.  The friends explore the resort but there’s nobody there.  Clearly people were there, just shortly before, but they’re all gone.  And then the friends start disappearing, but only when nobody sees them.  That’s the Berkeleyian angle.  The last survivor never does figure out what is going on, although the authorities seem to be aware that something’s up.  For those of us easily ignored, this is a scary movie.

It’s also another potential film for Holy Sequel.  After her boyfriend vanishes, one of the girls finds a Bible and begins claiming that God is punishing their sins.  Given that these are all millennials, this kind of thinking starts to get on the others’ nerves.  It’s not a major event in the film but it reinforces, as so many factors do, that religion and horror aren’t ever very far apart.  And in case you’re wondering, no, she’s not the survivor.  Neither does she suggest this might be the “rapture.”  During said event, the righteous disappear, not twenty-somethings with a weekend of sex on their minds.  The director, Travis Oates, is apparently a Hitchcock fan, so some elements fit into that sensibility.

I only found out about the movie because a friend suggested that it might be good beginner horror.  There are a couple of pretty intense scenes, but overall there’s not a ton of blood and guts.  There aren’t any jump startles, just a dread that continues to grow throughout.  I’m pondering how the Bible is being presented here.  It’s used as an apotropaic device—as protective magic.  Because the Bible is divine, it has, so the belief goes, the power to prevent harm.  Ultimately, in the world of this movie, nothing has that ability.  Although the Bible’s there, the message is pretty nihilistic.  Kind of like thinking about the heat death of the universe.  Still, the acting is good and the premise, although Vanishing on 7th Street also covered the idea of people just disappearing, is engaging.  Even though it doesn’t answer the question of why, or how, it is a movie that underscores the philosophy of George Berkeley as having perhaps been onto something.

Something Somewhere

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A friend suggested I might like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead films.  An unusually intellectual type of horror, these movies challenge perceptions of reality and are tied together with one or two thematic elements.  Something in the Dirt is their most recent offering and as far as existential horror goes, it’s a winner.  The storyline, as with their other films, plays with alternative realities bleeding over into what we think of as everyday life.  There’s a lot going on in this one that will keep you guessing until the end, and even after that.  Levi, a ne’er-do-well, awakes in his cheap apartment in LA and meets his neighbor, John, just outside.  Even this initial meeting has a sense of the surreal about it, but the two strike up a conversation, each trying to weigh the other’s truthfulness.

Levi’s apartment begins to show elements of paranormal happenings.  Neither he nor John have professional careers, so they figure they can use their off times to make a documentary about the phenomena to sell to maybe Netflix, setting them for life.  They each start coming up with theories about what is happening from ghosts to extraterrestrials to Pythagoreans building Los Angeles on an occult geometric pattern.  Ultimately they seem to settle on two basic forces of nature: electromagnetism and gravity.  Both are distorted in this apartment.  Meanwhile, each learns that the other isn’t quite what he seems to be.  Levi has a history of arrests that he downplays.  John is the member of an evangelical, apocalyptic group, but he’s also gay and claims to have made a ton of money that he donated to the church.  (Religion and horror, folks!)  Neither really trusts the other but synchronicities keep occurring, preventing either one from just ending the project.

They bring in occasional experts who have varying degrees of skepticism regarding whether the two are faking what they capture on camera.  After all, they include reenactments along with their actual footage.  I won’t spoil the ending here, but it is pretty much what a seasoned viewer of Benson and Moorhead might appreciate.  These movies are so unusual and so full of hard thinking that it seems odd that they aren’t discussed more often.  If I understand correctly, there is only one remaining film where they appear as writer, director, producer, editor, and director of photography that I haven’t seen.  They are the kinds of movies that if you binge on you’ll either end up enrolling in a graduate program in philosophy or spending the rest of the day blowing dandelion seeds into the wind.  Or maybe there’s something in all this.

Haunted Space

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A haunted house film set in space.  That’s what I thought and then read the same words in a published description of what the writer and director were going for.  In that way it was a clear success, but in others it struggles.  The premise is good, if jarring.  Space travel, which is the most scientific of scientific enterprises (there’s a reason the rest of us say, “I’m not a rocket scientist”) collides with the traditional supernatural.  The results are worth pondering.  Event Horizon has become a cult classic, and like many older films, has been more positively reevaluated in recent years.  So the crew of Lewis and Clark is on a rescue mission to the ship Event Horizon, in a decaying orbit around Neptune.  Neptune’s atmosphere provides lightning for this haunted house.  The crew learns that Event Horizon has been through a black hole and has returned sentient.  Its crew has no survivors and it won’t allow Lewis and Clark to either escape or to destroy it.

Those of us who watch horror looking for religion—and even general viewers—can’t help but notice that Event Horizon ended up in Hell and returned.  It plagues the rescue crew with hallucinations of their regrets and failures.  Weir, the scientist who designed Event Horizon, is more or less possessed and stops at nothing to save the ship, which has brought Hell back to this dimension.  Again, it’s a bit jarring, like vampires in space.  (Yes, I know it’s been done.)  There’s even a point where Weir informs one of the crew that the crewman doesn’t believe in Hell.  Heck, they’re in outer space on a ship technology built.  But what if there is a spiritual reality—“dimension,” in the film’s lingo—out there?  What if some traditional religions are right?

The movie’s not apologetic, but it’s offering a reminder that to be human is to be spiritual.  No matter how much science “proves,” there’s always potentially more “outside.”  Hell in Event Horizon is beyond the bounds of the universe.  It is another place but a place it is.  It costs some of the crew their lives, but does it claim their souls?  Event Horizon is one of those movies that the studio ordered severely edited, and for which the edited footage was lost.  Movies ever only show us what directors, producers, and studio execs want us to see.  People crave stories.  And when a movie, like Event Horizon, raises more questions than it answers, viewers want to know—what really does happen in a haunted house in space?

Some Body

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Many period movies are reevaluated and found better than originally critiqued.  (It feels strange to write that about a 2009 movie, but that was a decade and a half ago.)  I’d read about Jennifer’s Body before, but the title put me off from watching it.  Then, of all places, the New York Times recommended it last year during one of their autumnal forays into the horror genre.  Interestingly, it’s a possession movie with a few twists.  Demons are quite malleable monsters, of course.  So Jennifer and Anita (Needy) are best friends.  Jennifer is the girl all the guys want, and Needy, well, isn’t.  One night they go to hear a band at a local bar, and Jennifer leaves with them.  We later find out—spoilers about to appear—that their intention is to sacrifice a virgin to Satan to help them succeed as an indie rock band.  Jennifer’s no virgin, though, and demonic transference took place—i.e., Jennifer is possessed although the band gets their boost.

Then Jennifer has to eat people (high schoolers, of course) to survive.  She eventually tells Needy all of this, and her friend researches the occult and realizes her former friend is seriously dangerous.  And she decides to stop her.  I won’t give away the ending (it was only 15 years ago), but I will say that the overall result is somewhat unusual for a demon movie.  There’s plenty of religious imagery, but nothing really explicitly showcased.  For example, Needy’s mom has religious paraphernalia around the house.  There are no clergy in the story and Needy teaches herself what she needs to know about dispatching demons.  In other words, it’s a strangely secular possession movie.  And in the end demonic ability leads to justice.

The critical reappraisal is largely based on the feminist message and complexity of female relationships in the movie.  Both written and directed by women, those aspects aren’t unexpected.  And the movie is a horror comedy.  The funny parts tend to come from aspects of the dialogue since the acting is played straight.  This isn’t so much a scary movie as it is a smart one, which is probably why the Times critic recommended it.  Demons aren’t always scary monsters in horror, and what you end up being afraid of here is that the relationship between Jennifer and Needy might end since it seems to be the foundation on which two young women’s lives are built.  Is it a good movie?  Well, it’s not bad.  I tend to lean on the side of the reappraisers—it still has something to say. 

Another Host

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Several months ago I wrote about The Host, a movie I enjoyed but had watched by mistake.  By that I mean that someone had recommended The Host (2006) and I watched the completely unrelated The Host (2020).  (You can’t copyright titles.)  I waited long enough that the right Host became available on a service I use so it was, in essence, “free.”  This one is a Korean monster movie, directed by Bong Joon-ho.  I’d previously seen his excellent Parasite, and The Host didn’t disappoint in either the social commentary department or in the heart-felt monster tale.  In the latter department it has some common ground with Godzilla Minus One.  The Host begins with chemicals poured in the Han River causing a mutation that becomes a big problem.  This monster kills many, but the story focuses on the Park family where a ne’er-do-well father (Gang-du) disappoints his daughter and siblings.  Then the monster carries off his daughter.

The government, wishing to hide the origins of the creature (an American military facility did the chemical dumping) invent a virus story to keep people away from the river where they have trouble locating the monster.  Meanwhile Gang-du learns that his daughter is still alive, being kept as a future meal in the creature’s lair.   His father, sister, and brother all come together to try to find her, having to work around the corrupt government response to the crisis.  In other words, there’s a lot going on here.  The monster is believably rendered and its interactions with crowds of people don’t strain the imagination.  I do have to wonder if the creators of Stranger Things were familiar with this film.  Again, there’s some overlap there.  There are some holes in the plot, or it may be that I didn’t quite get everything (quite likely regardless).

It’s easy to see why the movie won so many awards.  The question that haunts me is whether this is a horror movie or not.  There are definitely horror aspects, but the overall feel is a meaningful monster movie, which isn’t really a recognized genre.  Monsters sometimes—often, in fact—bring out the best in people.  Without giving too much away, we can say that about this movie.  A family torn apart is reunited by a monster.  It doesn’t end well for them, but they have learned something by the experience.  And the movie is impressive from a cinematic perspective as well.  So now I’ve had two Hosts and although quite different from each other, both are recommended.

Not What It Says

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The title sounds promising.  Gothic Harvest.  But the movie in no way lives up to it, even with its vampires vs. voodoo theme.  So, during Mardi Gras a group of four coeds decides to party in New Orleans.  Of course, this is the capital of American voodoo.  While drinking themselves to oblivion, one of them gets picked up by a local and taken back to the family home.  There, of course, she’s kept as food for the “vampire.”  An aristocratic woman who fathered a child with a slave has received a curse—she and her child remain alive, she aging, while the rest of the family is arrested at their present age.  (Really, the story makes little sense, so don’t ask.)  They need young blood to keep the aristocrat alive so that they can continue living.  In the right hands such a story might’ve made a passable horror film.  These weren’t the right hands.

It’s a good thing I’m trying to develop an aesthetic for bad movies.  The acting is bad, the dialogue is bad, the writing is bad.  Is there a moral here?  Don’t go partying during Mardi Gras since you might get picked up by a family under an ancient curse?  And  would it really hurt to do a second take of scenes where an actor stumbles over their lines?  I don’t know about you, but to me the title Gothic Harvest suggests that lissome melancholy of October.  You can start to smell it in the air in August and you know something is coming.  Honestly, I’m not sure why more horror films don’t capture that successfully.  I’m always on the lookout for movies that will catch my breath in my throat with the beauty and sadness of the season.  They are few and far between.

So, like a clueless coed during Mardi Gras, I’m lured into movies whose titles promise such things.  One of the movies that I, inexplicably, saw when I was young was the James Bond flick, Live and Let Die.  Roger Moore had taken the reins from Sean Connery but that film set my expectations for both the Big Easy and voodoo.  I’ve only been to New Orleans once, and that during a conference.  It was before the revival of my interest in horror.  Successful horror has been set there, of course.  The one thing Gothic Harvest gets right is the evocative nature of Spanish moss.  And the opportunity to try to learn to appreciate bad movies.