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.

Demeter at Last

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Now that official scary movie season is here, and now that I’ve had a chance to watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter, well, I guess I can share my thoughts.  First of all, it immediately went into Holy Sequel.  There’s a lot of religion in this vampire film.  If you’re not familiar with Dracula, as written by Bram Stoker, or its many adaptations, the Demeter is the ship which carries the vampire from the Balkan peninsula to England.  Dracula has purchased Carfax Abbey and since he’s traveling alone he has to ship himself there.  He has crates of his native earth loaded on the Demeter, along with his coffin.  Along the way he snacks on the crew until the fateful Demeter arrives at Whitby as a ghost ship, no crew anywhere.  Anyone who knows Bram Stoker’s story knows that nobody survives aboard the ship.

That conceit makes this an interesting angle from which to tell the story.  Critics were unkind, but the reason, it seems to me, is that you pretty much know how it will play out from the title.  Personally, I’m more generous than the majority of critics.  This is a perfectly serviceable horror film, well made, and with a message.  Not only does the Black man not die first, he’s also the sole survivor.  The fact that Drac picks off the crew one-by-one will come as no surprise.  You need to guess who’ll go last and the successful escape of Clemens is, in some ways, unexpected.  I did wonder, apart from the inclusion of the Bible right out there in the open, at the name Clemens and the dog Huckleberry.  Was there a Mark Twain subplot going on here as well?  I found Anna’s presence a bit strained but having a strong woman aboard was a nice touch.  She almost survives too.

André Øvredal directed a couple of other horror films I enjoyed: The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  Having seen three good horror films from him made me add Passengers to my list of movies to watch.  There are a number of directors that are making horror that I’m starting to follow.  Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Damian McCarthy, Osgood Perkins, Zach Cregger, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Ti West, and Ari Aster, among others, are taking horror in some interesting directions.  If I didn’t have to work for a living, and if I could afford all the horror movies I wanted, I have a feeling that the future would be pretty bright.

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.

On October

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October has come quickly this year.  September was quite transitional.  Mostly pleasant, but we shivered through the recent sunless days of the nor-easter around here.  Between work and full weekends, I wish the approach of my favorite month could feel more regal.  I know die-hard horror fans watch movies in that genre every night of this month.  My schedule won’t allow it, and I’ve been so busy that I’ve fallen behind on movie watching.  Most of the time the movies I discuss on this blog are ones I’ve seen the previous month or two.  It seems I have lots of other things to write about.  And I’ve been trying to step up my reading this year.  Goodreads tells me I’ve finished sixty books so far in 2026.  And so October snuck up on me.

For scholars of religion, and those of us who pretend to be such, October starts in earnest the planning for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting.  It will be in Denver this year.  Last time it was there I shivered the whole time.  A colleague recently asked me to contribute to a volume on Ugarit.  I had to decline, being so out of date.  I could’ve said, “My mind is preoccupied with October.”  Horror movies and Halloween.  The changing of the leaves.  Jacket weather and reading gothic novels.  Pumpkins and apples. October is the month when many in this climate feel that they come alive, just in time for the darkness and cold of winter to settle in.

For many years I’ve been pondering the spirituality of the dark.  I don’t mean “dark powers” or Satanism or anything like that.  I mean the restorative, contemplative nature of being in the dark half of the year.  Since the equinox it’s been more dark than light.  We spend half of each year in this way.  Instead of cursing the dark, it seems to make sense to try to find its spiritual benefits.  In the Middle Ages monks used to awake in the night to say their prayers.  Even today spiritual writers occasionally venture into the realm of asking what we might learn to appreciate in the dark.  October’s a good time to think about such things.  Others have also begun to explore the spirituality of horror films.  This began to occur to me, in rudimentary ways, when I was a student in seminary.  So suddenly October is here.  Hopefully it will have some time tucked away for reflection.  Between watching horror movies, of course.

B’s and Q’s

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A friend who read my review of The Stuff recommended Q: The Winged Serpent.  The former was the first Larry Cohen movie I’d seen, one that I stumbled upon while looking for something free to watch.  I was favorably impressed—it was a comedy horror that worked.  Q was earlier and was more of a low-budget horror, but with elements of satire in it.  As well as social commentary.  If you can handle stop-motion animation, and you want to see the inside of the Chrysler Building dome, you might enjoy this monster flick.  And there was a good deal of theology in it.  It’s certainly worth talking about in the context of horror and religion.  One warning in advance: if you’re like me, all the camera motion—many aerial shots of Midtown Manhattan, it might make you a little woozy.  It did me.

The movie follows a petty criminal who discovers the lair of Quetzalcoatl inside the Chrysler Building.  Meanwhile, a priest of Quetzalcoatl is sacrificing willing victims in Manhattan to bring the deity back.  A cop who’s willing to believe (Detective Shepard) researches beliefs in the Aztec god and tries to connect the sacrificial murders with people who are disappearing—often from Manhattan rooftops.  The question arises: is this a god or just a monster?  That’s a freighted question these days.  This idea is that if it can be killed it’s just a monster.  If not…

The story has its shortcomings and the direction isn’t great, but overall it’s not bad.  A creature-feature with some thought.  As Shepard chases down experts he starts to understand that even if this is just a monster, there are devotees of Quetzalcoatl in Manhattan killing (willing) victims.  At one point Shepard says, upon seeing a victim with his heart cut out, “All we have to do is eat the bread and drink the wine,” or something similar.  This is fairly sophisticated coming from a B movie.  Religion is also behind some of the humor as well.  When the Aztec priest comes after the petty criminal he can’t kill his victim unless he says a prayer.  The criminal refuses, and in doing so saves his life.  Interesting thought.

While having the trappings and feel of a B movie, Q gives the viewer of religion and horror movies something to think about.  The movie doesn’t reference the Bible or quote it, so it can’t make Holy Sequel, but it’s worth a lazy weekend afternoon to give you something to think about.

Demons Amok

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Not all low budget movies are bad, but some really struggle.  Demon Hunter perhaps more than most.  Not only is the script poorly written, the overall story fights for comprehension.  The basic idea—Jake, a half-breed demon, hunts and kills demons for the church when exorcisms fail—is contrived.  It doesn’t help that many aspects of the Catholicism it portrays it simply gets wrong.  And the common issue that most demon-monster movies can’t seem to overcome, that demons are incorporeal, makes this into a slug-fest rather than really having any kind of film with a statement.  Okay, let’s step back a second: Jake is hired by Cardinal White to stop Asmodeus, the demon of lust.  Asmodeus had made it to the earthly dimension and is trying to populate the world with his spawn.  The Cardinal sends a nun, Sara, with Jake but she just can’t kill demons.

When Asmodeus tries to rape Sara, she is revealed to be a half-breed demon as well and she kills him.  Jake tries to rescue her but has no choice but to kill Sara.  The Cardinal, who has tough-guy priests blocking his door, reveals that they knew about Sara all along and knew that Jake would end up killing her too.  Feeling betrayed for the set-up, Jake goes and keeps on killing those who’ve been seduced by demons.  Bad storytelling can be bearable if some aspects are believable, such as the religious elements.  The problems begin from the opening scene, which is an Exorcist knock-off.  The priest is reciting Latin prayers from a Bible instead of the Roman Rite.  He’s also not dressed for an exorcism, but this is California and it was perhaps a warm night.

Cardinal White walks around wearing a stole all the time.  One of the priests attending him is packing heat.  Demons can’t tell demons, or at least half-demons, from human beings.  And Jake can’t seem to respond to anything without a snappy comeback.  Demons are killed with crosses (not crucifixes) with the bottoms whittled down into points.  Although they have inhuman powers they fight to the death with fisticuffs.  I kept looking for something, anything, to hold onto to that might make this movie make some sense.  The story, which is mercifully brief, is padded out with driving sequences that take a little too long.  A few scenes in the movie weren’t too bad, but there weren’t enough of them to redeem this one.  But it does end up in Holy Sequel, for what it’s worth.

Eating Sin

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Although a good example of religion and horror, and a member of Holy Sequel, The Order isn’t a great movie.  For a plot that delves into Catholicism, it doesn’t have a great understanding of religion.  It misuses the term “theosophy,” to boot.  So, Fr. Alex is a Carolingian priest, one of two remaining.  He says the mass in Latin with his back to the congregation.  Then he’s sent to Rome by a corrupt Cardinal to investigate the suicide of his mentor.  Before setting off for Italy he invites his last fellow Carolingian, Fr. Thomas, to come.  A woman who escaped a mental institution after shooting him during an exorcism also comes.  Once the investigation begins, Fr. Alex determines a sin-eater killed his mentor.  The Cardinal gives him a special, ritual knife that is needed to kill the sin-eater.  His associate, Fr. Thomas, knows how to get underground Catholic knowledge leading to said sin-eater.

The sin-eater convinces Fr. Alex to seek what he wants.  The priest wants the girl who tried to kill him, so he renounces his vows to sleep with her.  The sin-eater wants to die—he’s been at this for five centuries and is weary.  He attacks the girl, making it look like suicide, so Alex has to eat her sin to get her to Heaven.  He then kills the sin-eater.  The corrupt Cardinal had made a deal with said, dead sin-eater, that if he arranged for the sin-eater’s release, he’d become Pope.  Alex, who has now taken over as the sin-eater, foils this plan and decides to use his now power for just causes.

All fairly convoluted.  Of course, the sin-eater idea would be picked up a few years later in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.  That’s where I was first exposed to the concept.  A sin-eater is a folkloric concept going back at least to the seventeenth century, mainly in the British Isles.  It has been under-explored by academics (it has “history of religions thesis topic” written all over it).  It’s an interesting idea but isn’t handled well in this movie.  There’s the trope of esoteric Catholicism at play, and interestingly, The Da Vinci Code came out that same year.  Dan Brown’s novel played into the Zeitgeist regarding things the Catholic Church didn’t want laypeople to know (supposedly).  The novel sold an obscene amount of copies.  For all that, we’re no closer to learning the actual history of sin-eaters.  Thesis topic calling!

Not Really

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Some horror films just have trouble finding their way.  Blessed is one such movie.  The writing is one problem.  The misunderstanding of religion is an even larger issue.  Samantha and her novelist husband Craig can’t have children.  When he gets a large advance for his first book (dream on) they visit a fertility clinic in upstate New York where Samantha becomes pregnant with twins.  The lake scenery in a light winter (actually in Romania) is the best part of the film.  It’s quite evocative.  The clinic, in any case, shares facilities with a cloning company.  And Craig gets introduced to a tycoon who works in multiple industries, including publishing and, hmm, cloning.  As Samantha grows visibly more pregnant Craig becomes more focused on his writing, neglecting her and visiting the tycoon in the city whenever he can.  It’s implied that they have an understanding, but that doesn’t hold with the ending.

An Italian priest starts to warn Samantha about the evil at the clinic.  Not only that, but the tycoon tells her about his fascination with saints, including Ambrose who killed an angel—Lucifer—whose blood was sealed in a vial recently stolen from the monastery in which it was kept, as per the Italian priest.  That blood made its way to the cloning clinic and so, yes, Rosemary, Samantha’s carrying twin children of the devil.  The priest kidnaps Samantha and prays with her, insisting that she take poison to banish the evil.  He then tries to burn her to death and he also drives into the clinic and sets it on fire.  Samantha survives the fire and her twin girls kill another child at a Halloween party a few years later in Manhattan.

This is one of those movies that tried to improve on Rosemary’s Baby and although some of it is eerie, it’s not really scary and many elements are simply dropped or stuck in for no apparent reason.  The novelty was twin Antichrists who were both girls.  They, like Adrian, appear only late in the movie and the visual cues for what is happening are off.  It’s an interesting attempt to bring science and religion together in horror, but it has trouble understanding the religion it represents.  Quite often in horror, and perhaps other genres, a veneer of religion is used without any kind of research into what any tradition actually believes and/or does.  The, presumably, Catholicism here is strange.  There maybe a scene with the Bible, so I’ll add it to Holy Sequel, in the maybe category.

Who’s Calling?

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I learned of this movie from Victoria Jaye’s Hell, Horror and Despair.  (She discusses several movies that I’d missed.)  The Calling immediately went into Holy Sequel.  Not because it was a great movie, but because it uses the Bible.  Indeed, it begins with a quote from “Revelations”—the plural is always a sign that someone hasn’t done their homework—and concerns the birth of the Antichrist.  It goes down like this: a young American woman falls in love with a wealthy British television personality and they get married on the Isle of Man.  She gets pregnant on their wedding  night, the same day a young boy is murdered.  As their son grows, he excels at speaking backwards and has an ability to harm others he dislikes without touching them.  And he’s cruel to animals.  Kristie, the mother, is sent away on business to London a lot so the boy, Dylan, is left with her husband Marc.

Kristie notices that Dylan is very close to Marc and she is being excluded from the family.  On her way home after missing Christmas with her family—when Marc crucified Dylan upside-down to prepare him—the taxi driver starts to reveal that Dylan’s father is Satan, not Marc.  Kristie thinks he’s crazy but soon learns her best friend was murdered while she was away.  (Man is an island with a population well below 100,000.)  She begins to suspect something’s not right.  By discovering a piece of another Bible—this is so Holy Horror!—from the taxi driver, she learns that Dylan is not what he seems.  The taxi driver convinces her to kidnap and drown this son of Satan before he becomes the Antichrist.  A spoiler follows.

When she emerges from the Irish Sea after drowning Dylan, Marc shoots Kristie.  In the hospital (she survives) she tells the story to a priest.  Then on television they see that Dylan, three days after his death, and not coincidentally Easter Sunday, is resurrected.  The news tells of how both the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury are becoming convinced Dylan may be the second coming of Christ, but Kristie flees with the priest as they know he’s the Antichrist.  Now, this isn’t a great movie.  It came out just at the millennium, capitalizing, as Jaye suggests, on the end of the world mania.  Nevertheless, despite the poor acting and inexplicable elements (a parish priest willing to miss Easter Sunday mass to sit with a possibly insane woman in the hospital?) it is a very good example of the way the Bible appears in horror.  I should’ve watched it years ago.

Child Snatcher

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Folk horror, like folklore, is a commonplace of the human condition.  We are afraid and some of our fears are deeply rooted.  Some go back to traditional monsters.  The Moogai is an Australian folk horror film.  It’s based on the fact that from the turn of the twentieth century until the seventies indigenous children were taken from their parents to integrate them into white society.  The moogai is a character like the boogeyman that comes to steal children.  Set in present-day Australia with an adult child of one of these stolen children, the movie concentrates on a parent’s fear of losing her own children.  It also sets up modern medicine against folk wisdom.  Sarah is embarrassed by her birth mother Ruth.  She doesn’t like the ideas she puts into her own daughter’s head about the moogai.  At the same time, Sarah’s unable to sleep and has been seeing things not easily explained after the birth of her second child.

This leads to her husband and others questioning whether she’s experiencing from postpartum psychosis or whether something real is happening.  Then her husband sees the moogai while Sarah’s restrained in a psych ward.  When her husband is arrested for breaking her out of the hospital, Sarah realizes that she has to get to her birth mother to destroy the moogai since no “rational” people will believe her.  Using traditional methods, Ruth and Sarah confront the moogai and rescue her children.  In the process, Ruth dies.  Belief comes at a price.

As a horror film this was recommended by the New York Times.  The moogai is shown perhaps a little too clearly to be scary, but his two faces are creepy.  The really valuable part of all this, however, is the folk tradition.  And the “social programming” that stands behind the horror.  The white men stealing children are the real moogai.  It’s a movie with a conscience.  Similar assimilation efforts were made with indigenous peoples of the Americas.  There’s a horror is being told, “Assimilate or die.”  Capitalism, of course, can allow no other systems to survive.  How can you get rich if everyone doesn’t agree to play along?  Movies like The Moogai ask that trenchant question: what if native peoples know something that the power-hunger interlopers do not?  What if there really are monsters out there?  Of course, in the movie the moogai is symbolically white, just as are the government men at the beginning who come to snatch the children from an indigenous settlement.  Heavy lifting by folk horror.

Love and Jealousy

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Obsession is one of those horror movies that surprised the industry by becoming super-successful last year.  It seems that those who work in movies just can’t accept that horror can be good.  No matter.  Obsession was discussed a lot and I had it on my list for quite some time.  The premise is fairly simple: wishes can come true.  Those who make them, however, often wish they hadn’t.   The idea isn’t new, but it’s the execution here that makes it compelling horror.  The story follows four young adults who work in a music store.  Baron (Bear) is secretly in love with Nikki, while Sarah—the daughter of the store owner—likes Bear.  Ian is Bear’s best friend and he can talk to him without the pressure of sexual tension.  Ian encourages Bear to confess his feelings to Nikki, but he’s too timid to do so.  Instead he buys a One Wish Willow from a New Age shop and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world.

The wish comes true.  The four friends are destabilized.  Nikki, who’d been occasionally going with Ian, suddenly becomes obsessed with Bear.  She spends the night, and then won’t leave.  This might be okay, but she acts in very creepy ways, both when she’s obsessed and when elements of her true self break through.  Their friends soon don’t want Bear to come over because Nikki’s always with him and she’s acting very weird.  One night, when the Nikki under the spell is asleep, actual Nikki asks Bear to kill her.  Bear, in the the meantime, is conflicted.  He finally has the beautiful girlfriend he’s always wanted, but she scares him with her strange behavior and her utter obsession with him.  Her jealousy leads Nikki to kill Sarah.

Since it’s only one wish per customer, Bear buys the last One Wish Willows and asks Ian to undo his wish.  He doesn’t and Nikki shoots him.  Since death is the only thing that can break the wish, Bear is left with an uncomfortable choice.  I’ll leave it at that.  The movie is an intelligent and thoughtful reflection (with some light elements) on relationships.  Human emotions are tricky to navigate and both love and jealousy are quite common in our species.  Many of us experience relationships with uneven levels of love and commitment and, if we’re honest, there’s an element of horror to such situations.  If wishes did come true, we all know, the world would likely not be a happier place at all.  Something to think about.

Waking Up

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Moody, gothic, and intriguing.  These are words that might describe The Awakening.  It’s also an ambiguous, somewhat confusing ghost story.  To discuss this some spoilers will be necessary, so please be advised.  When you’re on the lookout for a movie to watch on an afternoon when staying awake is a struggle (which, in all honesty, is just about every afternoon), on a weekend I’ll open my long list of movies to see and compare it against what’s streaming for free on the couple of services I pay for.  Seldom do the list and offerings coincide at all.  In any case, when I find something off-list that looks intriguing I usually check IMDb to see how many stars it’s earned.  On some streaming services four out of five stars will translate to three out of ten on IMDb.  The Awakening had 6.5, which is pretty good.

So, set just after the First World War, Florence Cathcart is a seance buster who doesn’t believe in ghosts and who’s written a book debunking the whole thing.  She’s then invited to a boarding school where a ghost has been frightening the boys, one of them to death.  Her own past is deeply repressed, however.  So deeply that she has a screen memory of an event that never happened to mask it.  After setting up all her equipment she does find evidence of the inexplicable.  Robert Mallory, a teacher and wounded veteran, believes in ghosts.  He says that those who went through the war see them.  He and Florence fall in love—her fiancé was killed in the war—and during the school holiday, she’s left alone with him, Maud the housekeeper, and one student.  Here come the spoilers…

The one boy left behind is the ghost of her step-brother.  Florence grew up in that house and Maud was the housekeeper, and mother of the boy.  Her unhinged father killed Florence’s mother and was trying to shoot her as well but accidentally shot his son by the housemaid.  He then killed himself.  Florence has to remember her past to realize she’s been seeing ghosts she doesn’t believe in.  It’s an eerie film but the plot is bit confusing.  It brings religion into the story, and even the Bible.  The tale of Holofernes’ beheading from Judith is represented in a painting.  Her debunking book is kept next to the Bible.  By the end we’re asking ourselves if Florence is a ghost.  This is a good, spooky film.  A bit ambitious, but it gets more stars than the usual freebie on a sleepy afternoon.