Loving Vampires

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Vampires caught my attention early in life.  I believe, apart from ghosts, that they were the first monsters I learned about.  Apart from the fangs and perhaps an ironically anemic look, they appear to be just like us.  I’ve seen a great number of vampire movies over the years—I can’t seem to resist them.  I don’t care for the blood and gore, but the idea of the conflicted undead is a powerful draw.  It’s this conflicted aspect that brought Theresa & Allison to my vampire radar.  This movie is not for the squeamish, and I have to say up front that it is a lesbian vampire movie, with all that that implies.  You have been warned.  Theresa & Allison is also an indie movie—I’ve been watching quite a few of these lately because they’re often free.  This one is also smart and fairly original and it explores humanitarian concerns as well as vampiric ones.

Said Teresa is “made” when a drunken vampire (they get drunk when their victims are inebriated) decides to turn her (make her into a vampire).  She soon learns that vampires are organized and sanctioned by the government, and there are rules to be followed.  Also, some of the standards for vampire lore, we’re told, are male bovine droppings.   Teresa was lesbian before she was turned, and she’s befriended by fellow vampire Allison.  We learn that two major vampire “families” range about New York City—one graceful and kind, the other brutal and unfeeling.  Teresa has real trouble killing people for blood and she’s confused about what she’s become.  She doesn’t know what to make of it when the kinder vampires offer to let her join.  Instead, she follows Allison and finds herself in a blood-drenched nightmare.

Vampire movies are often full of social commentary.  Especially the spate of movies made available by independent auteurs.  Theresa & Allison asks the question of what makes something right or wrong.  It also explores what it means to accept who or what you are while also having the ability to change some aspects of it.  It reflects, it seems to me, the moral landscape of the young.  In that respect, it makes sense that those of us from older generations (let’s not kid ourselves) may have been raised with very different standards.  Culture, however, has continued to evolve.  The internet sped all of that up immensely.  Still, the acceptance aspect of the young is written all over movies like this.  And the internet means there will undoubtedly be more to come.  Vampires are sure getting interesting.

Christmas Monsters

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Gremlins holds up pretty well with the years.  My renewed interest was sparked by holiday horror—I had last seen the movie in a theater in 1984, when it came out.  Having grown used to CGI, I was surprised to re-learn that the gremlins were puppets but that it was so obvious was also a surprise.  Although comedy horror, or horror comedy, had been around for years at that point, as critics pointed out, the contrast here was stark.  This could be a kid’s movie (and was one of the reasons behind the shortly new PG-13 rating) but the nasty gremlins could be unexpectedly brutal.  I’d forgotten that Billy’s mother was so effective—killing a gremlin in a blender and another in a microwave.  The story has been retold and/or parodied often enough that a summary isn’t necessary, but given my recent interest in both gremlins and holiday horror, it’s worth a few moments’ reflection.

Holiday horror is more than a scary movie that happens to occur on a holiday.  In my definition, the horror has to derive from the holiday itself.  In Gremlins the gift of Gizmo is based on the fact that it’s Christmas, otherwise Rand wouldn’t have been looking for a gift for his son, starting the whole chain of events.  More than that, the reason I didn’t go back to the movie again in my college and grad school years was the story Kate tells about her father on Christmas.  Like some parents, I felt like what was a fun little story was a bit too distressing given the holiday setting.  Would the story have worked set at a different time of year—remember, it was released in summer—with the commentary that it makes about consumer culture?  No, this had to be a Christmas movie and the fear comes from that fact.

The gremlins are given minimal backstory here, although Murray Futterman tells Billy and Kate  that gremlins come from foreign merchandise and they tinker with machines.  Gremlins had been used in horror before, and given that the canon of classic movie monsters was being set from the thirties through the fifties (gremlins appeared as monsters as early as the forties) they fit right in.  They’re inspired monsters.  People naturally feel vulnerable on planes and monsters in the atmosphere can be particularly frightening.  And the fact that technology frequently malfunctions, well, wouldn’t it be nice to have a monster to blame?  Reading up on the movie made me curious to see the sequel, which, it seems wasn’t too badly received.  I’m glad to have used a small portion of the holiday season to have refreshed my memory.

Dryad?

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There are so many movies out there.  The prudent horror fan knows not to be nickeled and dimed to death by renting/buying everything available, so you stick with a streaming service and take what they offer.  That’s how I find many of the movies I discuss on this blog.  It’s how I found Ayla.  You won’t find much information on this indie, art-house horror beyond IMDb, and it doesn’t say much.  Although the ratings are low the premise is good and it is beautifully filmed.  It is a little weird, though.  Elton, a mentally disturbed man, has never gotten over the death of his sister when she was four.  He supports himself by working in a bookstore and has a regular girlfriend, Alex, but he hasn’t let his sister go.  Going to a remote, dilapidated house that Alex showed him, he digs under a tree until he finds an adult Ayla.

Ayla’s alive but she doesn’t talk and can’t tolerate solid food.  She seems to be part of the tree where Elton found her.  His brother and mother tell him this woman isn’t his sister.  Alex, who lost a brother when she was a child, doesn’t say whether Ayla’s Elton’s sister or not.  Accepting that this woman now lives with him, she’s just not sure if the dead do come back.  Elton quits his job and tries to move home with his mother, but it doesn’t work out.  While driving at night, Ayla, ahem, distracts him, and his car hits a tree.  Elton understands that Ayla has returned to the tree and begins digging for her, but doesn’t find her.  Alex finds evidence that Elton has begun to turn into whatever it was “Ayla” is.

Apart from being a study of grief—very much like A Ghost Story in that way—Ayla also explores mental illness and incest.  This is done with a high degree of artistry, however.  Those who rate the movie poorly probably haven’t considered metaphors much.  To me, there’s a lot going on in this film.  It’s the kind of movie where you want to talk to somebody about it after it’s over.  Was Ayla really a dryad?  She’s found in a nymph (insect variety) state and quickly transforms to, apparently, Elton’s missing sister.  Meanwhile, his family doesn’t give him the affirmation he requires.  Metaphorically, it seems, like Outpost, to be a movie about dealing with trauma.  Such films are well worth watching and pondering.  And they make me thankful for streaming services that occasionally bring good, if obscure, movies to light.

Which Love

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Perhaps some content creators use genre as a guide when writing, or when filming a movie.  Some categories are pretty well defined—the western, the romance, or in writing specifically, the literary.  Others are less easily settled.  Horror is particularly slippery.  Although The Love Witch was an interesting story with a feminist message, the horror trappings weren’t entirely obvious.  In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of The Wicker Man.  (Not in any literal way, of course.)  Afterward I read that it is also a comedy and that helped make sense of it.  It gets generally high marks although, to me, the acting seemed pretty wooden.  The Love Witch follows Elaine, a young, present-day witch, who’s moving to a small town in California that tolerates witches.  Her husband has recently died and flashbacks imply that Elaine may not have been entirely innocent in the matter.

Once she settles in Arcata, she starts looking for her “prince charming” as she continues to practice the craft.  She finds an emotionally unstable professor who take her home readily enough, but he quickly proves to be too needy.  Part of this is because he took a love potion she gave him.  He dies that very weekend.  Elaine seems less than distraught as she buries him and begins seeking the next possibility.  The husband of a friend comes over when the friend is out of town and he too proves emotionally immature.  After their affair he dies by suicide.  A policeman investigating the missing professor comes to suspect Elaine, but he too feels drawn to her.  The locals, meanwhile, aren’t as witch-friendly as they seem.  They riot in a burlesque club, chanting, “Burn the witch, burn the witch!”  I won’t spoil the ending.

I was watching all of this with the genre “horror” in my mind.  I’d not seen it labeled as “comedy,” and, as an art film there’s nothing so crude as a laughter track or cheesy and obvious comic music.  Instead, the film is an example of “the female gaze.”  Film analysts, and even religion scholars, have long written about “the male gaze,” which looks at women a certain way.  This movie’s writer, director, and producer, Anna Biller, experiments with the female gaze instead.  The results for some men, I suspect, are disturbing.  They certainly aren’t in control in this film.  Retro in execution, it’s unlike most other horror I’ve watched.  Unusual for the genre, the critics responded well to it.  It was a fun flick, but I’m still not sure how wide “horror” stretches, but I do sense that it’s quite inclusive.  And I applaud the female empowerment on display, even if I’m confused.

Could Have Understood Differently

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A lesson many authors need to learn (and I include myself here) is that titles matter.  Cutesy, clever titles may work for well-known writers, but something that describes your book, or movie, is essential.  And avoid acronyms.  I avoided watching C.H.U.D. for years, put off by the title.  I’d read a few books where it was discussed, but finally decided it was something I should see.  If you’re as put off by acronyms as I am, C.H.U.D. has a double meaning.  Initially Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, but more importantly, Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal.  I suppose that’s a bit of a spoiler, but since the movie’s been out since 1984 I’ll let it stand.  Although largely panned, I think C.H.U.D.’s a perfectly serviceable monster movie and despite what the critics say, it has a larger message.

Set in a gritty New York City, the film focuses on the homeless who live underground.  Although it’s not preachy about it, the underlying message is that these are people too.  Until, of course, the contamination hazard mutates some of them into C.H.U.D.  Then they start looking for human victims.  In a city the size of New York, they don’t have much trouble finding them either.  A government cover-up is behind all the mayhem.  Nuclear and other hazardous waste is a very real problem, and none of us really knows what happens to it.  With much of government boiling down to political theater, I’ll take my chances watching movies and wondering.  The good guys in this movie are those who actually care about the homeless.  They are a rather unsympathetic photographer and his wife, a police captain with a missing wife, and a guy who runs a soup kitchen.  They learn something isn’t right beneath the streets but can’t get the authorities to admit it.

This isn’t a great movie—there are gaps in the plot all over the place—but it’s not a horrible movie either.  Sympathetic portrayals of the poor are, in my experience, rare.  These are people who’ve organized themselves into a society that’s come under threat because of those who dwell in the light.  Some classify C.H.U.D. as science fiction,  but that’s a very loose use of the term.  It’s actually a low-budget horror film with a bit of heart.  Unfortunately the title obscures that this is a little gem of a monster movie.  I really had little idea of what it was about when I started streaming, but ninety minutes later I was glad I’d done so.  And I went down to the basement afterwards, you know, just to check.

After Effects

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Every once in a while you find a book you wish had been published sooner.  The Exorcist Effect, by Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson is one of those books.  Although it covers many of the same films I talk about in Nightmares with the Bible, it does so with a different target in mind, and a lower price point.  Drawing on the observation that human recall is often accompanied by “source amnesia,” they explore the idea that famous horror films (and some less famous) get remembered as “facts.”  This seems to be a greater danger to those who don’t actually watch horror or who watch it uncritically.  Movies such as The Exorcist become the basis for what individuals believe about demons.  But it’s far more dangerous than that, because in a culture where everything’s politicized, horror movies become “the truth” for groups like QAnon.

Considering Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen as prime examples, they then move on to consider the fascinating, if weird, lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, and Malachi Martin.  Popularizers such as these three influenced both horror films and general public opinion about demonic possession and exorcism.  The study moves on to the Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties and how heavy metal music both utilizes and ties into the Exorcist Effect.  This important book ends by discussing the very real dangers of a society that elects presidents and others based on this Effect, which confuses reality and movies.  The book shows how many of the ideas behind conspiracy theories either misremember, or intentionally misuse, horror films.

Back in the days when I started Nightmares with the Bible there was comparatively little published in readable terms that discussed demons or, specifically, the portrayal of exorcism in movies.  Laycock and Harrelson’s book would’ve been a welcome contributor to that dearth of resources.  As someone who works on the fringes of the fringe, I don’t always hear the discussions other scholars have and I’m often left to my own devices when it comes to finding and reading information on horror films.  Without library privileges, it often means having to purchase the books to access them.  I was thrilled when I first learned about this book and I’m glad to have finally had the opportunity to read it.  I’m sure I’ll be coming back to it on occasion.  After writing Nightmares, I took a bit of a break from demons because being in the dark for too long can do odd things to a person.  But not knowing about them, as this book shows, might cause even greater problems.

Edge of Civilization

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This is not a movie to be watched by someone with PTSD.  I watched Outpost for the scenery (I’ve been to the area it was filmed many times) and because the New York Times highlighted it.  It ended up being the scariest movie I’ve seen since The Shining.  I mean the kind of scary where your heart is still battering around your chest even after the credits roll.  As an indie horror film it may not be well known.  For clarity’s sake I need to say it’s the Outpost released in 2023.  The one about a woman who goes to spend a summer in a fire tower to recover from domestic abuse.  If you haven’t suffered PTSD, and you’re not as emotionally involved as I let myself become, you might guess by about halfway through what’s really going on.  But there are a bunch of people in the northern Idaho woods that you just don’t trust.

I’ll try not to spoil the ending, but here’s how it goes: Kate was beaten by her husband.  And sexually abused by an uncle when she was growing up.  Against the advice of her best friend, whose brother works for the forestry department, she takes a summer job on a fire lookout tower.  The locals at the store, all men, are threatening in her eyes.  Her new boss doesn’t think she’s a good fit for the post, but to help smooth things over with his sister, he lets Kate have the job.  Along with lighthouses, fire lookout towers are some of the loneliest places in the civilized world.  When a couple of young guys hike by, noting she’s all alone in the tower, your skin begins to crawl.  She keeps having flashbacks to the violence in her past.  Then she meets an older woman hiker who stays awhile and teaches her how to shoot.  A local retiree teaches her how to chop wood.

Kate still doesn’t trust the local retiree.  One of her colleagues from the forestry service has surreptitiously taken photos of her and ogles them.  And day after day after day she has to follow a routine and sees no one.  You get the picture.  I don’t want to give too much away, but for some of us this may be among the scariest movies we’ve ever seen, despite most of it being in the clear summer sunshine of northern Idaho.  The movie ends with a contact number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.  Joe Lo Truglio, the director, is an actor known for comedy.  Outpost makes me think there’s something else behind the laughter.

The Gift

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Each day, each hour is a gift.  With my mother’s passing two months ago, I’ve been struck by the sheer number of colleagues that have died this year.  Not all of them older than me.  I wrote some months back about Michael S. Heiser, a blogging buddy from days past.  An email about a potential author just yesterday sent me back to the Society of Biblical Literature necrology.  This author had died unexpectedly the day before.  Glancing over the top of the list, I saw that three people with whom I’d worked died in November.  This was quite a shock since two of them were younger than me and the other not much older.  The thing about professors is that you kind of expect them to grow old.  To be old.  Life is a gift, and it’s sometimes easy to forget that.

Both tenacious and tenuous, life is a mystery.  Perhaps it’s perverse, but this makes Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” seem like a metaphor.  In fact, those of us who read and watch horror generally do so with a purpose, consciously or not.  It helps us face difficult things.  Five colleagues in one year sounds like a lot.  Someone in my family, younger than me, had six funerals to attend this year.  Life can feel difficult at such times.  Horror can be a coping mechanism.  At least for some of us.  It can be profoundly hopeful.  The meaning of life can be elusive, which is why, the existentialists conclude, we must make our own.  Existence precedes essence, as they say.

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

Other than profession, one of the few things these five fallen colleagues had in common was my perspective on them.  I don’t think they knew each other.  Had I not been an editor I likely wouldn’t have known three of them at all.  We live in a web of interconnection.  And I don’t mean the world-wide web (does anyone even use that term any more?).  Lives are gifts and gifts cross paths with other gifts.  Such information, all at once, can be difficult to process.  It makes me wonder why we allow wars.  Why we don’t think of consequences before we vote autocrats to power.  Instead, if we focus on that ephemeral gift we have, and how we might share it with others, appreciation rather than hatred grows.  To this lonely existentialist who watches horror for meaning, that just makes sense.

Hybrid

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We really need a better category.  Beyond “horror,” I mean.  My wife and I have been re-watching the X-Files on DVD (we know how to stream but we bought these before streaming was a thing).  Having reached the end of season five, we knew it was time to slot in the movie, Fight the Future.  You see, in case your memory’s hazy, the X-Files were closed at the end of season five.  The X-Files movie shows how they reopened.  The X-Files has lots of monsters, some gruesome murders, and some spiritual elements.  It’s categorized in different ways, one of which is horror.  You see, horror and monsters are related.  Others prefer to call it science fiction but that doesn’t really help because sci-fi and horror are closely related and this isn’t exactly like Star Trek.  In any case, we saw the movie when we were first watching the series but I didn’t recall much of it.

As a hybrid—rather like an alien-human mix—it’s both movie and television show.  You could watch the movie without having followed the mythology up to this point, but you’d miss an awful lot.  And you can watch the television series without seeing the movie, since it’s episodic.  You’d also miss some detail that way.  It struck me as strange that this hybrid had trouble working for me.  Was this a movie or a television show?  Our minds (or at least mine) compartmentalize such things.  You know what to expect from television.  You know what to expect from a movie.  Mixing them perhaps adds to the mystique of the X-Files mythology.  The big-budget effects are only temporary, however.

A couple days after, we picked up with season six.  The first episode incorporates the movie into the long-running plot.  You see, movies may be a couple hours long, but a series that runs for several seasons is even longer.  And since the movie is about hybrids, it’s strangely appropriate.  I’ve always been disappointed that they never came out with a third X-Files movie.  It would’ve been nice if they’d wrapped up the mythology in a definitive way.  Although, I suppose, that was part of the draw for the series.  It was open-ended.  And Mulder’s poster said why.  It’s not “I believe,” but “I want to believe.”  That’s the way of the human psyche.  I’m glad to have watched the movie again.  The storyline is intriguing and I’m a fan of mythologies, both ancient and modern.

Shadowy Clouds

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Okay, so it had Chloë Grace Moretz in it, and her face is on the cover of Holy Horror.  And it was tagged as action horror.  And apart from many highly improbable situations, Shadow in the Cloud is a perfectly serviceable movie.  Part “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” part Aliens, and part Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with any generic war movie thrown in, the movie is fun and a tribute to indy productions.  The plot is, admittedly, convoluted.  Moretz’s character (“Maude Garrett”) is a pilot officer who comes aboard a B-17 on a top secret mission.  She has a high priority parcel that must be kept safe.  The all-male crew use just about every sexist trope in the book but one of the crew takes her seriously.  While in the ball turret, she spies a gremlin.

This is a real gremlin, as implied in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”  Set in World War II, the film has other threats.  Japanese Zeros find them and a dogfight begins.  In the meanwhile it’s revealed that the one crew member who doesn’t dismiss “Garrett” had an affair with her and the secret parcel is actually their infant son.  Meanwhile, the gremlin and the Zeros keep up their attacks, killing several of the crew, including the pilot.  Maude takes charge, and oversees the crash landing of the bomber and when the gremlin, still angry at being shot and hacked by her, steals the baby.  This leads Maude to beat the gremlin to death with her bare hands.  Improbably, both her lover and baby survive intact, along with two other not too bad crew members.

The film manages to be pretty heavy on social commentary, and even shows archival footage of women in various Air Force roles during the closing credits.  The production values and the message are what really save this from being a bad movie.  I mean, this entire mission would’ve ended with everyone dead if not for Maude, driven by maternal instinct, keeping her baby alive.  She’s a pilot, a dedicated mother, an acrobat, and, if you’ll pardon the expression, a total badass.  The film is kind of a tribute to women who served in the military despite the innate sexism of the period.  And it has a monster, so what’s not to like?  From the first few minutes on there’s nothing really believable in the plot, but a woman leading the way, both as the star and as her character, is reason enough to pay attention.

Flights of Horror

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I’m never quite sure where to put him. Alfred Hitchcock, that is. Part of the problem is that “horror” is a very slippery genre. Most people classify much of Hitchcock’s work in the “thriller” genre, wanting to avoid the disrespectful older cousin, horror. I recently rewatched The Birds, a movie I first saw in college. You see, Hitchcock is an auteur demanding respect (never mind that many horror directors are highly educated and sophisticated). Even dainty colleges like Grove City considered him worthy of students’ attention. But while watching the extras it became clear that other horror directors considered The Birds horror, or, as they put it, Hitchcock’s monster movie. With its famously ambiguous ending, the film is still a frightening experience. And yet we consider it safe, because it’s Hitchcock.

I think about this quite a lot.  Even in Holy Horror I wondered whether including Psycho was fair game.  There’s no doubt that the remake is horror, and Robert Bloch, the author, was a horror writer and friend of H. P. Lovecraft.  But Psycho is Hitchcock.  Doesn’t that make it more respectable than mere horror?  Horror is often defined as being, or having, monsters.  That’s a bit simplistic in my book, but it is workable.  Pirates of the Caribbean movies all have monsters in them, but they’re blockbuster adventures.  Have the monsters deserted horror?  Or maybe is it that we have an ill-fitting genre title that we just don’t know what to do with?

The Birds is a scary movie.  Animals mass and attack, with the intent to kill.  Daphne du Maurier wasn’t really considered a horror writer, but her books and stories were adapted into horror films.  Like Hitchcock, she’s often considered above mere horror.  It seems that we’re being a bit dishonest here.  Why are we so afraid of horror?  The category, I mean.  Perhaps because the slashers—which Psycho kinda initiated—gave horror a bad rap.  Too much blood.  But there’s blood in The Birds.  Is it the mindless desire to kill?  Just ask the residents of Bodega Bay after the fire broke out.  It seems we have a real prejudice on our hands.  Horror grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and there’s nothing that can be done to make it respectable.  Horror fans object to recent attempts to call certain films “elevated horror” or “intelligent horror.”  Those who use terms like this sometimes imply that the rest of it is, well, for the birds.  It’s time, perhaps, for a new category.

Reflecting Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving, the newest holiday horror movie, was released last Friday.  No, I haven’t seen it—I barely have time to do whatever it is that I do normally.  I suspect, however, that many will object because Thanksgiving is still a quasi-religious holiday.  If we’re giving thanks we must be giving it to someone, or something, that may or may not govern our lives.  Ironically, in many business calendars it is the only annual four-day weekend.  Christmas could come on a Wednesday, so we can’t go giving time away!  Ironically, Thanksgiving was fixed as the fourth Thursday of November (moved from the last Thursday) to ensure about four weeks of shopping time before Christmas.  Me?  I’m just glad to have a couple days off.  2023 has been a challenging year on a personal level and having a couple days out of the office is just what the doctor prescribed.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

It may seem strange to be thankful for horror movies, but I know I’m not the only person whom they help.  I also believe that the genre has been misnamed.  When you think of all the different kinds of films that get lumped under the moniker it really is odd that we have any idea at all what we’re talking about.  What are horror movies, then?  The common equation with slashers is patently wrong.  There’s nothing slash-like in the old Universal monster movies that started the whole thing.  Time and again critics point out that “horror” is generally intelligent, and often funny.  And not infrequently therapeutic.  Yet it has a bad name.  Some even consider it satanic although it produces good.  Being satanic is a matter of how you look at things.

Thanksgiving is a time for reflection.  Reflection without the distraction of work constantly trying to poke holes through our concentration.  The holiday season properly starts at Halloween and sadly ends at New Year.  It’s our reward for having made it through another one.  The holidays that fall into this season all have a great deal in common.  Early Americans celebrated Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and sometimes Christmas and New Years.  We’ve reached the point now where we have a distinctive string of holidays like stones across a rushing river.  We can just make it from one to the next.  From Halloween we can see to Thanksgiving.  From today Christmas is on the near horizon.  New Years follows only a week after.  And it’s a time for reflection and thankfulness.  Even if what we appreciate isn’t the same as everyone else.

Nesting Urge

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Okay, I’m going to try really hard to do this without spoilers.  There’s a twist ending here that, in my humble opinion, works.  All I’ll say is that the monster may not be what you think it is.  The only problem is that there are at least eight movies titled The Nest, and you’ll need to find one  from 2019 if you want to see what I’m talking about here.  Don’t read any summaries beforehand because you want to let this wash over you and draw you in.  Although distributed by Universal, this Italian Euro-horror remains relatively unknown.  That’s really a shame since this movie delivers.  A woman, an heiress, has a paraplegic son that she never allows to leave the estate.  She’d training him to run things when she can’t and she strictly limits the people he can see.

Teaching him classical culture, she won’t expose him to anything modern.  Then a teenage girl his age comes to live on the estate.  She was being raised by the same man who raised the heiress, but she knows things.  She knows about rock music, and she understand the way the world works.  The heiress, however, wants her son to experience none of this.  Afraid of what might happen, she sends the girl away.  In the meantime, we learn that the heiress kills those who are sick among her staff.  She employs a very creepy doctor who does whatever she orders, noting that she has saved them all.  The question is, is it best to live in such a bubble?  Is life so isolated worth living?  The heiress brings the girl back, but begins, with her doctor, to alter her behavior using electroshock treatment.

The Nest is one of those movies where you spend nearly the entire thing being misdirected.  When it’s over you think back on what you’ve seen and it does make sense.  Along the way, you know something’s not right.  It’s creepy in a way more than old, castle-like houses can account for.  I like gothic films like this.  There are disturbing moments that punctuate what seems like an idyllic lifestyle.  The heiress knows that survival equates to a cultured existence, but she never tells her son why.  This film shares some territory with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, in fact, they could be next door neighbors at points.  They both have a similar message, at least in part.  Efforts to build a paradise are beyond human capacity.  We need the outside world even if we fear it.

Cute Monster

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Those who make horror films often rely on the cheap and easy tricks to make viewers jump and  scream.  Some of us are more connoisseurs, preferring films that make you think and that don’t show too much, and maybe even too little.  Lamb once again underscores what has impressed me about Euro-horror over the last few years.  Slow, building dread, it’s the kind of story that you know can’t end happily because it’s, well horror.  There are spoilers here but I hope they won’t stop you from seeing this film if you haven’t.  First of all, the film is in Icelandic, and much of the cinematography focuses on the brutally beautiful cold landscape.  Its sense of isolation and the land make this a fine example of folk horror as well.

A couple, sheep farmers, make a reasonable living from the harsh land.  We come to realize that they live in regret for the death of their daughter.  Then, after the unseen visit of an unseen creature during the dark of an Icelandic Christmas, a lamb is born with a human body.  She quickly becomes their ersatz daughter.  This odd situation, we know, cannot last.  They’ve set their happiness on a gentle monster (of the classic description) and such things never end well.  The movie takes its time spelling out the story, knowing full well that viewers know something is about to happen, but are unsure of what.  Since the husband’s brother stops in (after being forcefully ejected from a car), the film only really involves four characters—six if you count the brief appearances of the lamb’s parents.  And that isolated landscape.

Part-human and part-animal generally counts as a monster.  This one is well behaved.  Cute, even.  Dad, it turns out, isn’t so cute or well behaved.  He has his reasons, though.  The film is scary by implication: What happens when the cute little monster grows up?  The movie invites us to consider that question.  Monsters are often cast as evil and dangerous, but maybe they have to grow to become like that.  With loving foster parents, such as the farmer and his wife, who knows?  This is one of those films that makes you ask questions and offers little by way of explanation.  You just have to accept it.  Something led to a monster in the hills, somewhere back along the line.  But even he may have been even-tempered had is kind been treated with civility.  Monsters have something to teach us.  Even, or maybe especially, cute ones.

High Places

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Among the many phobias I experience is acrophobia—the fear of heights.  I’ve had episodes of vertigo and they never really leave me in the mood to reflect upon them.  And yet, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a classic I’d never seen and about which I knew nothing.  Well, very little.  I knew that Jimmy Stewart’s character suffered from vertigo and that Mel Brooks had done a spoof called High Anxiety.  Hitchcock wasn’t a horror auteur, although he gave the world The Birds and Psycho.  He’s often cast in the “thriller” or “mystery” category, but these things all blend into one another and someone of Hitchcock’s interests might be placed in different genres, depending on who’s doing the placing.  So my wife and I watched Vertigo, not knowing what to expect.

The first thing is it was longer than expected, especially given the deliberately slow pacing.  The story, in case you’re behind too, involves a guy looking for a way to murder his wife to get her money.  It involves a convoluted plot of finding a near double of his wife—whom he seems to love (but not as much as money), to trick Scotty (Stewart) into thinking that she committed suicide while he was helpless with vertigo.  Even when the reveal finally came, I scratched my head a bit trying to figure out why all the elaborate trickery was necessary.  It was, of course, based on a novel that might explain things a bit more thoroughly.  But movies are about visuals and Vertigo is full of those.  Lots of green.  A dolly zoom (a film first).  Even some animation.

Although there’s murder and fear—and even an accidental death because of a nun (not the Nun)—it seldom nudges north of drama.  It’s one of those movies that has gained in reputation since its initial appraisals.  Much of this has to do, it seems to me, with its visuals and subtlety.  (Film critics seem to love those.)  Of course, Psycho was still two years away, and The Birds five.  I’m no Hitchcock connoisseur by any stretch.  Indeed, my life has tended to be bits and pieces of this and that.  (It takes a far larger following than I have to be able to opine on any subject and have people take you seriously.)  Vertigo is, however, one of Hitchcock’s better-known films.  Well enough known to have had a spoof made of it.  And to have drawn me in to a movie themed on something I legitimately fear.