Sluggish

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If you enter into it with the spirit of the thing, Slugs is actually better than you might expect.  You have to expect that it’s going to be hokey and outlandish, with bad acting.  With all of that in the assumed category, it’s a passable horror film.  I was surprised to learn, in the opening credits, that it was based on a novel.  That makes me almost curious enough to read it.  Set in a small town in upstate New York (Ashton), the movie is about carnivorous slugs.  There’s an incipient humor about the idea and although no planned laugh-out loud moments permeate this film, there are plenty of incredulous snort opportunities.  The local health inspector is the first to cotton onto the fact that the slugs are attacking, but even he doesn’t believe his own wife at times when she points out their unusual behavior.

There’s a lot of running about and trying to get officials to do something about it, but who takes slugs seriously?  Meanwhile the gastropods eat the town drunk, a gardener, a young couple making out when the parents are gone, and are responsible for the death of a local developer.  That leads to the gore required by the tale.  Finally the health inspector teams up with the local sewage inspectors and a high school science teacher who figures out a way to blow up the slugs.  In some respects the movie resembles Evolution at this point—using a pumping truck to spray the invaders with a chemical solution that saves the day.  The best friend of the protagonist does get eaten by the slugs while trying to save the town, but otherwise there’s a happy ending.

This is a bad movie but it’s better than many “so bad it’s good” features.  Some competent work is done with special effects and the story itself is laughable (I don’t know about the original story).  I have a weakness for innocuous creatures turning dangerous—it’s one of the more interesting applications of existential horror in a world full of different types of animals, plants, and fungi.  (And occasionally even minerals can attack, cue The Monolith Monsters.)  As a kid these were the kinds of movies, in addition to the usual vampires, werewolves, and mummies, that helped me cope with an uncertain world.  There are those who find Slugs profoundly bad, but I’m not among them.  Is it great?  Not by any stretch.  Is it worth watching for free when you have a spare moment?  Certainly.  If you get into the spirit of the thing.

Remembering Downtown

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Monroeville Mall.  Even those who’ve never been to Pittsburgh may recognize it as the site of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  I have to confess that, although living in Pittsburgh for a little while I never got there myself.  It has nevertheless been a pilgrimage site for fans of the movie, but, according to the New York Times, the mall has been purchased by Walmart.  Their plans?  Tear it down.  No empathy.  No sense of decorum.  Just cheap prices and sub-par goods.  I recently had to go to a Walmart.  It had literally been perhaps a decade since I entered one.  I dislike their business practices and they have ruined many a small town downtown area as well as many a mall.  In fact, the one I’d be in prior to this recent trip was the store located in Seneca, Pennsylvania.

Across from that giant Walmart stands the husk of the once trendy Cranberry Mall.  Not far away is the struggling downtown of Oil City.  My aging mother lived in Seneca—had once worked in the mall—but getting down the hill into Oil City was more difficult than nipping over to the super Walmart for groceries or other necessities.  Prices were cheap and she wasn’t flush with cash.    The same applied to many of her neighbors.  Walmart exploits such situations, becoming the only show in town.  Mom and pop stores can’t compete with their prices.  Malls, although many affluent specimens still exist, have struggled in working-class areas.  They served for more than shopping, however.  They were meeting places.  They too contributed to the troubles downtown.

Monroeville Mall never went upscale enough to survive.  Ironically, it was the message that shopping had become a source of meaning that was critiqued by Romero’s movie.  It’s that same corporate greed for more and more market share that will be the eventual death-knell of capitalism.  Any system founded on greed is the same thing as “might makes right.”  We’re seeing that in the politics of our own day.  The paradox of this ouroboros will become clear eventually, if our species survives long enough to observe.  We become attached to places.  While not all movie props can be preserved, we’re compelled toward pilgrimage, and Pittsburgh is the home of the modern zombie.  A message that may not always come through in Dawn of the Dead is that all of us are being made into zombies.  Not by some satellite picking up something in space and then returning to earth, but by good old capitalism.

Horror for Folk

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I’ve been following a few auteurs these days, and I discovered  Damian McCarthy somewhat accidentally.  Wanting to watch a movie and relying on the two streaming services I can choose from, I watched and enjoyed Oddity.  A bit of Celtic folk horror, its story is disturbing rather than the kind of thing that destroys you psychologically.  A friend then told me that he’d directed only one other movie, Caveat, which I also watched.  Hokum is the third and most recent of the folk horror trilogy and is a movie I’m glad to have seen.  It follows an acerbic American writer, Ohm Bauman, who goes to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes at a place they enjoyed.  He arrives at Halloween and finds the hotel owner frightening two young boys with stories of the Cailleach, a witch associated with the coming of winter.

Bauman treats everyone poorly except Fiona, the one woman on the staff.  He hangs himself after disposing of the ashes but is rescued by Fiona and the single bellhop.  After he’s released from the hospital, Bauman finds the hotel closing for the season and Fiona missing.  He suspects she’s in the forbidden honeymoon suite and Mal, the front desk clerk, reluctantly allows him to explore it.  Bauman finds Fiona’s body and learns that Mal murdered her because he got her pregnant.  I’m leaving out a lot, but the movie’s worth watching.  The witch, in the film’s scariest scene, circles Bauman as he hides in the curtained four-poster bed while trapped in the honeymoon suite.  Mal realizes that his only option is to kill Bauman and the two end up in the hotel basement where Mal is caught by the witch.  Bauman, we learn, was playing with a gun as a boy and accidentally shot and killed his mother, thus his guilt and depression.

A little research after watching Hokum revealed some of the subtlety of the film.  The Cailleach, who drags away the murderous Mal, is associated with winter.  In Celtic timekeeping, Halloween is the onset of winter and the murder that leads to Mal’s demise took place on Halloween.  It’s even shown with a carved turnip jack-o-lantern.  Holiday horror, anyone?  Another aspect that comes out is that the witch’s minions strip off body parts as the unwary are dragged away.  The owner frightens the boys at the start by implying the witch will take their private parts.  Mal is guilty of murdering Fiona because he impregnated her.  Subtle, but effective.  There’s more to the film than I can summarize in the brief space here, but it is another example of sophisticated folk horror from Damian McCarthy.  He is an auteur worth following.

Shy Incubus

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

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

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

Smile for a Second

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I’d read that Smile 2 was better than the first Smile.  But there was a gap of about a year between seeing the sequel and I might’ve forgotten some details about how this was supposed to work.  The “smile” entity possesses someone when they see the previously possessed person die by suicide.  Okay, we’re back where we started.  The movie makes a fairly heavy use of hallucinations, so it’s difficult to know how far to “rewind” to get back to what “really” happened.  So let’s start at the beginning.  Skye Riley is a pop artist who’s trying to stage a comeback tour after a bad stint with drug abuse that led to the death of her boyfriend in a car crash.  Since Skye was in the car, she sustained several injuries but she’s healed up and ready to perform again.

The problem is that she’s still in pain.  A high school friend, who unfortunately is possessed by the smile entity, deals in drugs so she tries to get some Vicodin from him.  She witnesses his death by suicide and becomes infected.  From that point on the hallucinations start.  We learn that the possessing entity drives the victim, or host, insane within a week.  Skye meets a nurse who offers to help her by stopping her heart, thus killing the entity, and then reviving her at the last moment.  She naturally thinks him insane.  Meanwhile the hallucinations continue and the viewer doesn’t know what is “real” and what is not.  After reconciling with her best friend, and killing her mother, Skye decides she has to take the nurse’s offer.  She’s tricked by hallucinations into not having the procedure done and (somewhat predictably) dies by suicide in front of a huge audience, thereby infecting them all.

The film was praised for its acting, and no doubt, it is good.  The premise is scary enough, but somehow it just didn’t convince me.  Perhaps it was a little too slick.  A little too self aware of the previous film.  The explanation for the entity is that it’s some kind of demon or spirit, but when the movie ends up showing its “true form” it doesn’t seem as scary as all that.  Maybe because it’s smiling.  I’m glad that the critics found it good.  Horror does deserve more positive press than it tends to get.  The creepy smile is effective, but the movie itself, while introducing religion, in the form of a demon, felt like more of the same.

Spliced

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Predictably, I watched Splice again after reading the novelization by Claire Donner.  It is, as I indicated in my post on the book, a sad story.  During this rewatch, a few things stood out.  First and foremost, how many times you must rewatch a film to pull off writing the novel.  Either that, or hit the pause button constantly.  When I was writing Holy Horror I did both of those things quite a lot.  A detail you want to catch, and you have to see what’s on the screen.  I’d pause a scene and put my face right next to the screen, seeing individual pixels.  You have to know your stuff.  Another factor is that actors really do have influence on your understanding of character motivation.  An ambiguous look for the camera comes away pregnant with meaning in the novelization.

The emotional life of the characters is really filled in, in print.  The movie felt like it was going too fast.  That’s a finger on the pulse of reading a book versus watching a movie.  For a writer a movie deal can be a real boon but often you read about how they dislike the results.  That’s really no surprise.  A book takes time to read and you reflect as you go.  Movies hit you with constantly shifting images.  Both can be powerful media, but in different ways.  Another thing I noticed (I hadn’t seen the movie for thirteen years before reading the book) is that the mental image I’d formed of the characters was quite different from what the actors looked like.  

In the introduction to the novelization, screenwriter and director Vincenzo Natali notes that he likes how Donner explores Dren’s inner life.  Dren, in case you’ve not read or watched, is the hybrid.  Indeed, that is an element largely missing from the movie.  Some critics suggested that it should’ve explored that more.  For many of us, emotion is a major motivating factor of life.  We are frequently driven by our feelings, and, despite what AI says, they are integral in our thought process.  What was going through the mind of a creature, part human, with no parents?  I know that having grown up not really knowing my father left deep impressions, voids, in my life.  The novelization explores these kinds of things for all the main principals.  In my opinion, reading the book enhances watching the movie.  Of course, I’ve always been on the book side of the equation to begin with.  

Big Feet

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It’s a strangely affecting film.  Among certain groups, Sasquatch Sunset was discussed long before it was released.  I knew it was categorized as a comedy, and that it featured a Bigfoot family, otherwise I knew nothing about it.  When it finally came to a streaming service, with commercials, I convinced my wife to watch it one weekend evening.  I was surprised how deeply it invaded my dreams.  It was still stuck in my head when I awoke the next morning.  Now, movies will sometimes do that to you, but it’s difficult to say why this one does so.  First of all, there’s no dialogue at all.  No “humans” are shown in the film.  The Sasquatch—parents, a child, and an another adult male—communicate by grunts and howls, but you soon begin to feel for them.

The plot, such as there is, is simple.  The movie follows the group through a year, during which two of them die.  The remaining Bigfoot bury them.  They are perplexed by the human intervention in the wilderness.  They have no permanent residence, but are nomadic.  They come across as road and it frightens them.  Then they find a tent.  And logged areas.  A leg-trap.  Finally they don’t know what to make of a Sasquatch statue that they find outside the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek, California.  The whole movie engenders a sense of loss.  Loss of the wilderness, and loss of connection with the natural world.  And, of course, there are many comic moments.  We see ourselves in Sasquatch, and since they are played by human actors, that’s only natural.  They play the parts midway between ape and human, which is oddly disturbing.  All of this acted without words somehow forces concentration, and stays in your head.

Bigfoot has become less of a taboo subject in my lifetime.  Sasquatch outdoor statuary has become common.  The cryptid adorns whimsical tchotchkes and even Christmas tree ornaments.  Although they aren’t recognized by mainstream science, some prominent scientists have cast their vote with the “may exist” camp.  Reports of sightings continue to grow as the ridicule factor declines.  It’s a topic, however, still best handled with some humor.  The 1987 Harry and the Hendersons, which wasn’t as good as Sasquatch Sunset, was also a comedy.  Stephen Spielberg was an executive producer of Harry but kept his name out of the credits, even though he directed UFO movies.  Ari Aster is one of the executive producers of Sasquatch Sunset.  The topic’s becoming more mainstream, and this is  one of those movies, I warn you, that may get stuck in your head.

Things Seen

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I disagree with the critics on this one.  Things Heard & Seen is a remarkable horror film.  That’s not to say it’s without its flaws, but it is quite engrossing for the right kind of viewer.  It has elements of dark academia, as well as ghosts and a respectful treatment of Swedenborg.  And it takes place in the Hudson Valley (the headless horseman is even mentioned once).  The Bible appears both visually and is quoted.  In short, it encapsulates many of my personal interests.  And it’s not badly made.  There will be spoilers here, but it’s difficult to discuss religion and horror without them.  George Claire married Catherine because he got her pregnant.  He has, however, finished his doctorate and been offered a post at Saginaw College, in the Hudson Valley.  It quickly becomes clear that George is an entitled, self-centered liar (sounds familiar).

As the story unfolds, both Catherine and their daughter Franny see ghosts.  George dismisses them but even at the college the head of his department is a Swedenborgian and tells him not to dismiss the spiritual world.  George’s true character starts showing through.  He cheats on his wife.  He forged his letter of support from his Columbia doctoral advisor because his work was substandard.  When a fellow faculty member finds out, he runs her off the road, putting her into a coma.  He drowns his department head while boating on the Hudson because he also learned the truth.  He even claims to have painted pictures done by his brother.  In other words, he’s a real piece of work.  The ghosts aren’t able to save his wife when he murders her, but his colleague comes out of her coma and spills the beans.

In the end, George sails away into a Thomas Cole painting where a Swendenborgian ending overtakes him.  The use of Swedenborg adds an etherial element to the film, figuring thoughtfulness to what otherwise might be just another story about an unhinged academic.  The department head’s advice about seeing death in a Swedenborgian way was also strangely affecting.  In other words, this is thoughtful horror.  And once again it demonstrates that religion can be crucial to understanding what we really fear.  I suppose some critics dislike the unambiguous use of ghosts and the supernatural breaking into “reality,” but that seems to be precisely the point.  I only learned of this movie because Netflix recommended it, but they hit on several major themes in my work over the past several years.  I would watch this one again.

Missed Movie

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

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

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

Check for

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If after Sleepaway Camp you’re still willing to go into the woods, beware of Ticks.  Actually, for a direct to video movie, Ticks isn’t bad.  It has some production values and a story that, although very far fetched, keeps you watching.  It all begins with a group of inner-city kids going on a wilderness enrichment project.  They don’t know that some cash croppers growing marijuana have been using steroids to enhance the growth of the plants nearby the cabin.  The steroids leak onto some ticks who grow supersized and are out for blood.  The kids and their chaperones know none of this as they try to get into nature and away from their unhealthy urban lives with its crime and entitled situations.  The local sleazy drug lord, however, doesn’t like them too near his operation, and keeps an eye on them.  One of the drug growers is the first to be attacked.

The mutated ticks start out about the size of a hand.  They first attack the dog of  one of the kids, draining it of blood and killing it.  Then they go for people.  Although there’s nothing really new here, other than using ticks as the monsters, it’s a somewhat fast-paced film that satisfies the monster itch.  Only one of the kids actually dies, although several are bitten.  In keeping with the tropes of many American films, though, the one Black kid is the sole victim.  This could’ve been thought through a bit more carefully.  The only other deaths are, however, three white men—all of them associated with the drug growing operation.  A bit of humor keeps things from getting too heavy, but the fact is that ticks can be scary and it turns out that making them bigger, as tenacious as they are, can work to make them scarier.

If you’ve ever been bitten by a tick (only once, that I know of, in my case) you know they can be frightening in that they carry diseases.  In the movie, instead of Lyme their bite is, or can be, hallucinogenic.  This isn’t applied evenly, however, sometimes the bites do this, and that is used to build some tension and to resolve some issues.  In the end, though, it turns out like many of the young-people-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movies.  I won’t tell you how it ends since you may decide to see it, if you’ve cheap like me, and have been hankering for another excuse not to spend a week in the woods.  You’re generally fine if you do rent a cabin, but it is always best to check for ticks.

Jurassic Horror

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We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.

Failed Horror

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In general I’m not one for stopping a movie, even if it makes me uncomfortable.  I have what is perhaps a bad habit of not reading about movies before watching them, and occasionally that leads to problems.  Combined with my interest in watching films that I don’t have to pay for (i.e. they stream on services I use, or commercial sites like Tubi) this sometimes leads to bad choices.  I started watching Maniac (2012—more than one movie has this title), but stopped about halfway through.  It wasn’t because I was too scared, but rather what I was watching simply wasn’t what I watch horror for.  I’ve long preferred supernatural themes to mere slashers.  Some slashers with that supernatural element (the biggies: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street) still have an appeal, but for the most part more recent bloodbaths don’t really do much for me.

A few weeks after I attempted Maniac, I tried to watch Freaks.  This is an early film that I’d read about many times and didn’t really want to watch, but it was “free.”  In this case, part of a collection of movies I’d purchased on DVD some years back.  It turned out that the disc was damaged and got stuck in my player.  Now, weekends are a precious commodity.  I hate wasting time.  My wife was still asleep so I tried watching High Tension (2003).  I stopped about halfway.  One of the more extreme slashers, it also is a home invasion story, which I dislike.  It was predictable up to the point where I left off.  Then I decided to read a synopsis and learned it has a twist ending that may have made it worth finishing.  I’m no fan of torture porn, however.

By this point it was too late to start yet another movie.  It was light already and we had to go get groceries soon.  Finding time to watch horror movies, even on weekends, has been really tricky.  And I’m getting to the point where I may have to start reading about films before I invest time in starting them.  The problem is I prefer for movies to reveal themselves.  It doesn’t take a genius to know that “free” movies are often free for a reason.  Perhaps it’s time to start specifying “monster movies” for what I want to see.  Horror has wrongly been associated with mainly slashers for many years now.  Some of us prefer monsters, and preferably ones that won’t cost us an arm and a leg.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Still Early

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the history of horror movies of late.  Although they began being labelled “horror” in the early 1930s, the idea had been around for some time.  When I learned that the problematic director D. W. Griffith presented an early horror film based on Edgar Allan Poe in 1914, I had to see it.  Fortunately it’s easily found.  Long in the public domain, this silent film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.  The Avenging Conscience is an adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  The set-up is quite different, and it has a happy ending.  The characters aren’t named, apart from the sweetheart, who is called Annabel.  She’s taken from Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” which is also used in the film.  A young man owes his good fortune to his uncle, who raised him as an orphan.  When he falls in love with Annabel, the uncle objects.  The lad owes him loyalty.

The young couple decide to break up, so as not to upset the uncle.  The young man has been reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and thinks about killing his uncle.  He falls asleep in a chair and when he awakes decides to do the murder.  He is witnessed, however, by a passer-by.  He has to pay him off, but he is now free to pursue his love.  He walls the body up next to the fireplace.  A detective, alerted by the uncle’s friend, interviews the young man and the tapping of his pencil reminds the nephew of a beating heart.  He begins to see the ghost of his uncle.  His guilt eventually comes out and he begins a shoot-out with the detectives.  When he can’t win, he hangs himself, which causes Annabel to leap off a cliff in despair.  Then he wakes up.  The uncle is still alive, and has had a change of heart about the young lovers.  The couple marries and a weird coda involving Pan and some strangely dressed children, apparently a book the nephew wrote, winds things up.

The ghosts, insanity, and the murder mark this as early horror.  Although the actual deaths, except the uncle’s, take place off screen, they are still horror territory.  And, of course, horror properly didn’t quite exist.  Although The Avenging Conscience can’t really take credit as the first horror film, it is certainly an early one.  And it is based on Poe.  Silent, black-and-white, and not really scary at all, this movie has a place in the history of what we now recognize as horror. Watching it is to watch a bit of history.

Early Horror

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The origins of the horror film are hazy.  Although solidified as a genre name in the early 1930s, the ideas that eventually led to horror movies probably began with the 1896 George Méliès offering “The House of the Devil” (“Le Manoir du diable”).  This trick film features many of the macabre elements that would later become horror.  The Devil enters an old castle in the form of a bat.  We see him conjuring all kinds of magic—an Igor-like assistant, a cauldron, a skeleton, ghosts, and witches.  So much of what would feature as the genre developed is here already.  Others have pointed out that Méliès didn’t produce this film with the intention to scare.  It was a three-minute set of trick photography with typical exaggerated gestures and stage-magician tricks.  Still, there’s something there for horror fans.  Especially those of us pressed for time. 

Image credit: George Méliès, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The film itself is easily and freely found on the internet.  It is sometimes mistaken with “The Haunted Castle,” which was a remake lasting only 45 seconds, that came out the next year.  George Méliès was a visionary in many ways and his techniques in this film would pave the way for both independent producers and Hollywood studios as the early forms of the genre appeared.  “House of the Devil” also shows several tropes that will become standard vampire fare.  The Devil transforms from a bat,  he wears a cape, and is frightened off by a cross held aloft.  This was a year before Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published.  The idea of making films scary in their own right would be a later development, but these early pieces of cinema contain many of the elements we would later associate with horror.

It’s difficult to imagine these days, but in the 1920s the Disney short “Skeleton Dance” was considered too macabre for children.  (I discuss this in my book, Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.)  There was furor after the release of Dracula in 1931 with some critics finding no redeeming value in it.  Horror films had a difficult road to acceptance, which is still true today.  They weren’t regularly called horror films until the early thirties, although they existed before that.  Some are for lighter entertainment, like Méliès’ work.  Comedy horrors are a popular sub-genre.  Even today they continue to be made and are more funny than scary.  Think Scary Movie,  Shaun of the Dead, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.  And many, many others.  George Méliès showed what film could do.  And he inadvertently created the first horror movie.

Lights On

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

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

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