Yes, Yes

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You had to’ve seen this coming.  Ouija: Origin of Evil, with a different director and writer, and the same producer, pulled off the better prequel/sequel.  I don’t give that accolade lightly.  Now, I’m not a professional film critic, and I like to say nice things whenever possible, but even sequels/prequels that professional critics do say are better often find me in disagreement.  In this case I stand with them.  And I have some ideas, apart from natural talent, why it is so in this case.  The problem with ouija, and spirit boards, is that you have no way of knowing who or what may be answering your questions.  In the first movie we just know it’s someone with bad intent, and we need to wait until all the twists are finished to find out who.  The second begins with the premise that we already know who, but we want to know why and how.

But it goes deeper than that.  The first movie left religion out completely.  The prequel scoops it back in by the shovelful.  And if you want to make a movie about ouija work, you need to have demons.  To begin with, the family previously in the house is Catholic.  The kids go to Catholic school.  The headmaster is a priest who wants to help the family.  He quotes the Bible (Holy Sequel, anyone?)  He recognizes that the entity isn’t who it says it is.  Although showing demons is always a bit of a dicey proposition, the prequel opts for the preferred look from the period, and show them only dimly.  It still has to work with the world built by the original, which leads to a strange backstory of a Nazi in the basement operating on homeless people, but you have to work with what you’re given.

So the second movie is scarier and better made.  It didn’t earn as much as the first one did, though.  The idea hadn’t, I don’t think, been tapped out.  Rather, I think once you’ve laid out the premise, viewers have to be enticed back.  If a subject is mishandled, it does require extra work to convince viewers that the next experience will be better.  The critics, however, immediately saw the difference.  You really don’t have to know the story behind Ouija to see this movie, but it definitely helps.  It earned enough that unofficial sequels were released before the official prequel.  One of them only by a matter of days.  It pays to get it right the first time, and if you’re working with a naturally religious topic for your horror, you shouldn’t be afraid of religion.

Yes, Maybe

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The truth is, only experts and professionals can really keep up with horror films.  As the most successful genre of, well, genre films, there are tons of them.  I completely missed Ouija when it came out about a decade ago, despite the fact that it did well at the box office.  The only reason I watched it now was that a friend sent me a list of horror films from a reputable website that recommended the prequel to Ouija, but I felt that I needed to see the original before finding out what happened behind the scenes.  The original didn’t fare well with the critics and it’s pretty clear why.  The story, although it has twists, isn’t really convincing and the acting is off at times.  (Five teens left alone to watch a haunted house while their parents just take off for weeks at a time?)  Still, it’s atmospheric, and it plays on a scary theme.

I must confess that ouija boards frighten me.  I consider myself both rational and skeptical (in the classic sense), but there’s just enough doubt with spirit boards.  I’ve never owned or played with one.  (Interestingly, the movie was funded in part by Hasbro, the current seller of the game.)  In fact, when I discovered the Grove City College yearbook was called Ouija, I was a bit put off.  (By the time I graduated they’d changed it to The Bridge.)  Although GCC wasn’t really traditionally gothic, like most colleges it had its share of ghost stories.  Even in conservative Christian country things go bump in the night.  And while most stories told about tragedy after using an ouija board are unverified in any way, still…

So, the movie posits a deceiving entity that kills teens who contact it.  I suspect I need to watch the prequel to find out why.  It does manage to have a few scares, but it’s mostly about atmosphere.  I agree with Poe on this point—atmosphere’s often the point of a story.  Although the critics are right (who discovers a body in the basement and goes to an asylum for advice instead of notifying the police?), some of us do watch horror films for this kind of haunted house experience.  And while I’ve got Poe in the room, the threat to young ladies is there.  One thing missing, though, is any talk of religion.  No Ed and Lorraine Warren warnings of demons.  This is a straight-up nasty dead person who likes to kill those who want to communicate with their dead friends.  It does create a mood.  And it cries out for a prequel.

Not the Witch

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Hagazussa came to my attention from, I believe, the New York Times.  In the autumn normally staid news sources start suggesting horror films to watch.  Subtitled A Heathen’s Curse, this new Euro-horror (filmed in German) immediately reminded me of Robert Egger’s The Witch, but with a lot less plot.  It’s a moody and disturbing story of the life of an outcast young woman in the sixteenth century.  Raised by a poor, goat-herding mother, Albrun watches her mother die of the Black Death, when Albrun’s a tween.  She continues living in her childhood home, with a daughter whose origin, like that of Albrun, is never explained.  The locals shun her as a witch but a seemingly friendly villager befriends her before turning against her and betraying her.  After this neighbor, and then others, die, Albrun drowns her infant daughter after eating a toadstool in the woods.  She then bursts into flames atop a hill in the Alps.

As folk horror, the movie is more about the haunted landscape than about an intricately plotted story.  There’s nevertheless a great deal of symbolism used, including much regarding Eve—apples, serpents, and goddesses all play a part.  Locals fear pagans, and the church interior lined with bones reminded me strongly of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where plague victims’ bones fill the underground vaults.  Seeing such a place reminds you forcefully of your insignificance.  Hagazussa is an art film as well as folk horror, and it appeals to gothic sensibilities.  There’s very little dialogue.  Indeed, the loneliness of Albrun is a major aspect of this moody, atmospheric work.  Such stories always remind me of how difficult life was for those who had to try to scratch a living from the land.  Existence was tenuous at best.  Especially for women alone, as determined by Christian society.

The movie left me reflective.  It also underscored how religion and horror tread the same paths repeatedly.  The village priest tells Albrun that sacrilege must be cleansed, even as he hands her her mother’s skull, polished and decorated.  He wearily admits that he struggles to led the community.  Indeed, Albrun’s new “friend” castigates Jews and heathens, even as she takes part in the robbing of Albrun’s livelihood.  Witches, as “monsters” were invented by the church as fears reached out to point to new sources.  Even if they had to be fabricated at the expense of innocent people.  Fear operates that way still, as anyone who watches political ads knows.  It’s easier to persecute than to educate, it seems.  In the end, Albrun burns up and we realize we’ve just watched a parable.

Dead Trilogy

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When we lived in New Jersey our internet wasn’t fast enough for streaming.  I’d watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but I was never able to find a DVD of Day of the Dead.  Well, it finally came around to streaming (thanks, Freevee), so I was able to complete the trilogy.  It doesn’t get discussed as much as the previous two, and it’s clear that it doesn’t come up to their level.  Still, the discussions of larger issues—God, civilization, and military power—are worth pondering.  There are a few jump startles but less intensive gore than the previous two, until well into it.  So, here’s the story: a base of operations has been set up in Florida where the military is overseeing civilian scientific experiments on the animated dead.  The military guy in charge is a real jerk and threatens to shoot those who don’t comply.  Also, there’s just one woman among them (who made that decision?).

As might be expected, things go haywire.  The head scientist, “Frankenstein” to this crew, is trying to teach the dead not to eat the living—to coexist.  The living are hopelessly outnumbered, and despite the Jamaican civilian, John, suggesting they go to a deserted island and start all over, everyone seems content to hang out and fight each other.  In the end, military overreach leads to everyone being killed except John, Sarah (the woman scientist), and Bill, who seems to be Irish.  In the end the three of them fly to a deserted island and you kind of get the idea that this will be a bit more of an R-rated Gilligan situation.  The film is campy and there is a comic tone throughout despite the serious issues raised and the actual horror elements (blood and zombies lurching out of the dark).

It actually also attempts to explain how the dead continue to move and why they eat with no internal organs.  The brain, down to its reptilian base, retains the eating instinct.  Frankenstein, before being killed by the military, is training the promising dead, especially Bub.  In the end, Bub kills the military guy.  As far as the story goes, it seems to send mixed messages.  The good guys do prevail and the dead, at least Bub, is more righteous than the fascist military that holds sway via constant threat.  One does get the sense that Romero was having fun with his zombie movies and some of the special effects were quite good.  I’m glad to have finished the trilogy, but I don’t think I’ll bother watching the remake, which was, back in the day, fairly easy to find on DVD.  They’re never as good as the dead they try to reanimate.

Ending the Cycle

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Curious to finish out the “Poe Cycle” of American International Pictures, I looked up The Oblong Box.  The only thing similar to Poe’s tale is the title, as viewers must’ve come to have expected even in 1969.  Poe was the marketing to sell the film, but not much more.  Okay, the theme of premature burial has Poe’s fingerprints all over it, but that’s not part of his story “The Oblong Box.”  Now, as for the movie, it has several subplots and a pretty high body count.  Its ending isn’t really explained, but after starting out as seeming racist, it comes out justifying the actions of the Africans at the beginning.  In the middle it’s a muddle.  Pacing is completely off and some sub-plots, such as the police investigation, are summarily dropped.  Apart from the positive view of Black people, which is important, the film is a confusing criss-cross of unsavory motivations.

The Markham brothers own an Africa plantation and the trampling of a slave by a horse leads to revenge on the part of the slaves.  The scarred brother, Edward, is driven insane and he escapes his brother Julian’s care by being buried alive.  Grave-robbers, however, want him so Christopher Lee can experiment on his corpse.  Edward escapes again and dons a scarlet mask, but his insanity leads him to kill a variety of people, looking for the witch doctor who can cure him.  Meanwhile, an unscrupulous lawyer is cashing in on the brothers’ wealth but ends up being killed by Edward.  There’s a rather pointless bar fight, and, after killing Lee, Edward and Julian finally face off with Edward getting shot but biting his brother before he dies.  The witch doctor raises Edward from the dead, buried in his coffin, and Julian now has his brother’s scarred face (and presumably, his insanity).

The movie was the first to feature both Vincent Price and Lee.  The film had a change of directors, pre-production, and a script that was added to by another writer.  The plot verges on tedious and it’s difficult to feel sympathy for any of the characters, apart from the women, who don’t seem out to hurt anyone.  Price (Julian) also plays a “good guy” until the reveal near the end, but Edward dominates the screen time, all the while wearing a mask.  The “Phantom of the Opera” reveal is shot in the dark, however, and the results are not so grotesque.  And those who’ve read Poe’s story wonder where the ship might be.  This is the only Poe Cycle film not directed by Roger Corman, and he, as well as Poe, are both missed.

The Next Phase

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Sometimes I get things backwards.  You have to understand that in the pre-internet era finding information was somewhat dicey.  Those of us from small towns had limited resources.  The movies I saw were on television, with a rare trip to the theater being a treat.  Books, on the other hand, could be had for a quarter or less at Goodwill.  There I found the sci-fi horror Phase IV by journeyman writer Barry N. Malzberg.  I knew there was a movie, which I hadn’t seen, and I assumed it was based on this novel.  Actually, the book was a novelization of the movie.  But it’s more complex than that.  The movie was based on an H. G. Wells story, screen-written by Mayo Simon, then novelized. That novelization made a real impression on me as a kid and I knew that I would eventually have to see the movie.

Some scenes from the novel were still alive to me before watching the film.  It occurs to me that maybe you don’t know what it’s about.  Intelligent ants.  Some cosmic event boosts ant intelligence and two scientists are sent to Arizona to sort it out.  A local family ignores an evacuation order, and when one of the scientists destroys the oddly geometric anthills, a war is on.  (I remembered the destroying the anthill scene.)  The war is both of might and wits.  Meanwhile the family is attacked—I remembered the scene of the ants eating the horse—with only a young woman surviving.  She’s found by the scientists after the first pesticide is released.  The ants attack, intelligently, the research station.  We never do see the expected ants popping out of Dr. Hubbs’ infected arm, but it’s clear by the end that the ants have won and we’re living in Phase IV.

A few observations: this is a scary movie, even if seventies’ fare.  The sci-fi elements dampen the horror down a bit, but it is still scary.  And it also references religion.  I watched the movie a few weeks after seeing The Night of the Hunter for the first time.  What does a Depression-era serial-killing preacher have to do with ants?  The hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  Now, there’s a project out there for someone inspired by (if such a thing exists) Holy Horror.  Is there a discernible pattern of how hymns are used in horror?  I suspect there is.  That hymn is used so differently in these two movies that I’m convinced something deeper is going on.  If you’re interested, the idea’s free for the taking.  I’ve just spelled out two of the movies for you.

Escape Room

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I didn’t go out looking for horror films in 1979.  I knew about Alien, of course.  Everyone did.  Even in a small town.  I didn’t see the movie until many years later, though.  I was still in high school and money was scarce (college was all either scholarship, loan, or work-study money).  If Tourist Trap ever came to town I didn’t know about it.  In fact, I didn’t know about it at all until reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  Enough time has passed that the movie is now streaming for free and, indeed, it is David Schmoeller’s first film.  Critics didn’t love it, but King thought it had some appropriate eeriness, so why not?  It isn’t horrible—I’ve definitely seen worse.  And movies with animated mannequins hit that uncanny valley at just the right angle, even if poorly written.

The story’s a bit convoluted.  Five young people are on vacation and get drawn into, well, a tourist trap.  There’s a fair amount of psychokinesis that goes on, and the tourist trap is Slausen’s Lost Oasis, which is filled with animated wax-work figures/mannequins.  These are what make the film creepy.  As the plot unfurls, the kids get killed off, one-by-one, as horror viewers come to expect.  There is a bit of a “reveal” toward the end, so I won’t spoil it.  It is fair to say that insane antagonists were fairly common by 1979 and that the blurring of real people and manufactured ones is a bit unnerving.  There are some questions of motivation, and many times the characters don’t take the obvious steps to help themselves.  Still, the movie isn’t too bad.

I was drawn to it, having seen Schmoeller’s real groaner, Netherworld.  And King’s recommendation.  There is something about movies that are lacking in undefined ways that keeps you watching.  I was curious how Tourist Trap was going to end up.  There were several points at which I thought I’d figured it out, only to be told, “but wait, there’s more!”  The more wasn’t always really worth waiting for, but the ending has a bit of a payoff.  There is some slasher aesthetic here, but it’s unconventional enough that you may at least be kept guessing.  The thing that the movie gets right is that human figures that aren’t human are scary.  Many films play on this, of course.  Even if you’ve seen others, it still tend to ramp up the shudder factor a bit.  It only took four decades for me to stumble into this tourist trap, and it was a reasonable brief vacation from reality.

After Daytime

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When you’re looking for freebies to watch, it helps to get some advice of what to see.  Particularly if it’s older (and more likely to be available).  I hadn’t heard of Night Watch until I saw it in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre list of really scary movies.  Granted, this was nearly a half century ago and many horror classics had yet to come.  Still, I was surprised at just how “ho-hum” Night Watch was.  Yes, it has a twist ending that makes some of the foregoing less credible, but that little hook was kind of neat.  Otherwise, the pacing is slow and the characters largely unsympathetic.  And scary it is not.  Granted, had I seen it as a young man in a theater, that might’ve made a difference.  I know that Fatal Attraction really bothered me in those circumstances.

The story of a rich couple with a traumatized wife and an unfaithful husband, it has trouble garnering the sympathy of some viewers.  Elizabeth Taylor’s acting is pretty good, and the setting (lots of British thunderstorms), and some good, creepy music do help the mood.  And if you’ve seen Rear Window and Gaslight a bit of this will look familiar.  Taylor’s character thinks she sees a murdered person in the adjacent house and as her hysteria increases nobody will believer her anymore.  Of course, her husband is having an affair with her best friend (who is living with them), so what could possibly go wrong?  The movie’s generally not considered horror, although a number of King’s favs aren’t.

That got me to thinking about what the scariest movies would’ve been to me back then.  Keep in mind that most of my childhood fare was Saturday afternoon monster movies.  If we move it ahead a few more years, say to the early-mid eighties, I was in college and saw more that was properly scary.  Of course, I didn’t see the really scary stuff until I lost my job at Nashotah House.  So by the mid-eighties my scare list would have included Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, and a Dracula movie that I didn’t catch the title of and for which have been trying to locate the specific scene that really set me off.  Oh, and The Cross and the Switchblade.  I was a child with many obvious phobias, and my mother didn’t allow really scary viewing.  A couple episodes of The Twilight Zone really bothered my young psyche.  Perhaps I need to put together a post on movies I’ve seen since then that fall into the Danse Macabre time frame.  There’d definitely be things scarier than Night Watch in there, I assure you.

Not Plan 9

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Dementia 13 is a strange little movie.  It’s Francis Ford Coppola’s directorial debut, and it was produced by Roger Corman and released by American International Pictures.  Like many Corman/AIP movies, it was low budget and quick.  It seems that Corman had some money left over in the budget from a previous movie and he offered Coppola the opportunity to direct a film shot quickly and funded by the leftover funds.  With a script written in three days (and it shows), he set out to film what was intended to be a Psycho knock-off.  The title might give that away, although I’m not sure what the 13 has to do with it, other than being “unlucky.”  Shot in Ireland with mostly American actors, the film is suitably gothic, but the original start to the movie is a red herring.  So what’s it about?

A rich heiress has never recovered from the death of her young daughter, who drowned in the rather sizable pond on the estate.  One of her three sons dies early in the film, setting up a subplot that goes nowhere.  The two remaining sons, unaware of their brother’s death, keep the ritual of the annual acting out the sister’s funeral.  While the widow of the deceased son tries to work her way into the will, she is axe-murdered, bringing this into the horror genre.  The family doctor suspects something’s wrong (although viewers are led to suspect him), and finally solves the crime after another bit character is beheaded.  Part of the problem is the film is too brief to develop the ideas properly.  Released at only 80 minutes, with a 5-minute gimmicky prologue, you really don’t have time to absorb the psychology of the characters.

The influence of Psycho is pretty obvious, the wet woman slowly chopped to death while in the water, is the scariest scene in the movie.  It’s shot in such a way that it’s not obvious that she’s actually being struck until the end of the act (a budget thing, I suspect).  The wealthy widow drops out of the story as the family doctor becomes the self-appointed detective.  Of course, the previous deaths have been undetected, so no actual police come.  In sum, creepy (but not too creepy) Irish castle, siblings working at cross-purposes, a scheming daughter-in-law, and the irruption of the past into the present, along with the black-and-white filming, ofter a quick gothic thrill.  Otherwise, it seems more like homework than an example of foundational horror, but still, it has had inspired a remake, and that’s saying something for a three-day script.

Not Alice’s

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Sometimes I forget that movies are entertainment.  I mean, they’re big business and make some people obscene amounts of money.  In that respect they’re serious.  And also, they literally get into our heads and become part of our life’s experience.  Horror films, whatever that means, are often intelligent and thought-provoking.  I’ve been focusing on genre for a while now and when a friend recommended Willy’s Wonderland, and it was on one of my streaming services, I said “why not?”  This is entertainment, but the genre is all over the place.  Comedy, yes.  Fantasy, check.  Thriller, okay.  Action, definitely.  Horror, I’ll buy as well.  Nicolas Cage movie?  Well, he doesn’t look like he’s in his mid-fifties, and he doesn’t say a word in the whole thing.  The movie has possessed animatronic animals.  Satanists.  Small-town conspiracy.  Teens getting themselves killed.  And “one tough hombre.”

So what’s it about?  Hayesville has made a deal with the Devil.  A serial killer started an entertainment restaurant for kids’ birthdays, but along with his associates, began, well, killing.  Before the police could get them, they committed ritual suicide in a satanic pact, and they were permitted to inhabit the animatronic creatures.  When they weren’t fed, the machines started preying on townsfolk, so now they trap passersby and trick them into spending a night in Willy’s Wonderland so the machines can feed.  Cage’s unnamed character shows up and spends the night cleaning, killing machines, and playing pinball.  A young woman whose family had been killed tries to burn the place down, but, with her friends dead, and Cage leaving town after the carnage, she goes along for the ride.  It’s one of those movies that defies genre conventions.

As with many films released early in this pandemic, this one had a tough time at the box office.  I’d never even heard of it until the friend’s recommendation.  Lots of movies just disappear, but this one has at least the beginnings of a cult following.  It’s not difficult to see why.  If you can put up with the slasher aspect, it has quite a lot going for it.  Creepy kids’ stuff, children’s songs, and tawdry attractions are something we all experience in our own lives.  And a guy who goes around doing good—cleaning up other people’s messes, is something I think we tend to appreciate.  As a former janitor myself, I like the idea that the cleaning crew is the one who, well, cleans the clocks of the mechanical villains.  It’s a wonderland worth visiting.

Re-Unborn

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Some months ago I wrote a post about the possession movie The Unborn.  I don’t watch movies to pass the time.  I watch them to learn something.  And many horror movies are fairly smart.  In my blog post on this one I didn’t go into too much analysis because I already knew at that point that I wanted to share my thoughts on the larger venue, Horror Homeroom.  My piece, “Ecumenical Exorcism in The Unborn” has just been posted there.  The fairly small number of regular readers I have know that I post about horror movies with some frequency.  They help me to make sense of things, especially in this insane world where petty dictators keep rising to the top of the political spectrum because, apparently, we hate ourselves so much.  Horror helps prepare you for that.

In any case, The Unborn is a good example of how religion and horror work together.  They cooperate very nicely, in fact.  Religion is pervasive enough in horror that it would be an error to say “religion-based horror” is a sub-genre of the whole.  No, the two go together as naturally as chocolate (vegan, preferably) and peanut butter.  If I had a million dollars I might go back to grad school to explore just this nexus.  (I wouldn’t be looking for a teaching job either, because “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…”)  I’m not the only one who knows that there’s something there.  Ironically, before horror films proper were even invented, many churches actively discouraged the movies.  Perhaps they were inherently aware that these represented competition.  And there was already too much competition, what with other denominations and all.  But some films do occupy the same space as religion.  Quite often horror.

If you’re interested in how The Unborn fits into this picture, head on over to Horror Homeroom.  And yes, there is a book-length project in all of this.  It’s one I’ve been chipping away at for years.  That’s because the connection is obviously there, but I haven’t, to my own satisfaction, been able to figure out exactly what it is.  Perhaps I need to add a degree in psychology to my bucket list.  These things meet similar mental needs for a cross-section of people.  I suspect that most horror fans don’t think about it too much, which may be why my blog isn’t exactly jammed with traffic.  That doesn’t mean that the connection’s missing.  There are many things in life yet to be discovered.

Suitable Genre

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As I muse over genres, it seems that “low-budget Lovecraftian horror” might be an—ahem—suitable one.  This is perhaps because Lovecraft has trouble being taken seriously as a literary writer and his stories are so easily parodied.  I watched Suitable Flesh unaware that it was a Lovecraftian (low-budget) movie.  I’ve seen quite a few of these over the years and they can be pretty fun.  This one was somewhat enjoyable.  Based on Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” it’s a body-swapping, possession fest that involves two psychiatrists who have been friends forever but who both become victim of a nameless possessing entity.  It took some adjusting to believe Heather Graham in her lead role here—she doesn’t strike me as the Lovecraftian type.  She does seem to enjoy her role, nevertheless.

Lovecraft famously didn’t write many women.  He was xenophobic and a racist.  He didn’t much enjoy being married.  Modern films (and even novels) based on his works tend to redress this situation, sometimes creating a little disconnect with the white-male Lovecraftian universe.  Still, the story is fun.  Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Graham’s character) encounters a young man whom she supposes is schizophrenic.  In actuality, his body is being taken over by an entity that had possessed his father.  While possessed, the patient begins an affair with Dr. Derby and that leads to her also being a target of possession.  Although not considered a comedy it does seem that part of the story has an inherent humor about it.  Some consider it camp.  Lovecraft’s mood is difficult to translate to film.

Although cinema existed during Lovecraft’s lifespan, his writing wasn’t influenced by the possibility of film conversion.  The monsters are too enormous and the concepts too broad.  The real fear here, apart from the gross-out effects, is that of losing your identity.  The whole centers around a psychiatric ward where the supernatural events aren’t really accepted by the science that reigns.  People end up dying because the supernatural is inadmissible.  In this aspect, it shares some of the overarching concepts of some great horror.  The Exorcist, for example, derives a great deal of its energy from the fact that modern people have great difficulty in accepting that a demon could actually exist and science doesn’t seem to be working.  There are plenty of other examples of this.  Lovecraft’s stories bring us close to this realm, although Lovecraft himself was an atheist.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons his works are difficult to translate to film.  Or maybe something larger is going on.

Life Plant

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If your backyard is like mine, you’ll find The Ruins scary.  It’s pretty scary even if your plant-control skills are better than mine.  There’ll probably be some spoilers here, so I’ll say upfront that I recommend the movie.  If you’re wanting to see it fresh, well, you might want to pick up here afterwards.  Two couples vacationing in Mexico befriend a German who’s off to find his missing brother, last known to have visited an obscure archaeological site.  When the group arrives, they discover that the local Maya, who don’t speak Spanish or English, try to prevent them from approaching the pyramid.  Once they touch the vines growing all over it, the locals kill anyone who tries to leave.  It takes the group a few days to learn that the vines are carnivorous, and if you get a wound, they will invade your body through it.  It gets pretty gnarly.

Plants, we are coming to learn, share some form of consciousness.  They move (slowly by animal standards, but they do).  And they can quickly “consume” such things as say, oh, paving stones, that have been deployed to control them.   In a matter of maybe three weeks crab grass had nearly completely covered such stones that I laid out to try to reduce the amount of mowing the yard requires.  Plants exemplify the tenaciousness of life.  They can far outlive humans, or any other animal.  Being rooted in the earth has its benefits, it seems.  The Ruins has been described as ecological horror, and I would agree with that.  One thing, though.  Ecological horror often makes it clear that humans “started it.”  Here, the plant grows in one location only, kept under strict control by the locals.

Although the movie didn’t rock the critics, I thought the acting was good and the premise well laid out.  This writer knows how to put his protagonists at the edge of a cliff and then throw rocks at them.  The tourists are all likable people, but they’ve stumbled upon something dangerous, inadvertently, and they have to try to survive amid plants that seem to have a kind of sentience as well.  Somewhat like Triffids.  This is a very tense story.  There’s a bit of gore as well, so be warned.  Nevertheless, it’s not a gross-out for gross-out’s sake.  The larger story is intelligent and it even raises several ethical issues along the way.  And it seems to suggest that if you’re planning to travel to Mexico, stick with the well-touristed ruins rather than trying to discover some new ones.

Sowing Seeds

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The Bad Seed is one of the scariest movies Stephen King lists from about 1950 to 1980.  Like many movies from before my time, I was unaware of it.  Projecting it back to 1956, when it was released, it’s pretty clear why it had trouble making it through the Production Code Administration.  Showing no blood or gore, this two-hour feature may seem to drag a little but it ends up in a very dark place.  I’ve never read the novel upon which it was based, but I’ve learned that the ending had to be changed because evil doers, according to the PCA, cannot go unpunished.  In fact, the ending is so dark that the director, Mervyn LeRoy, had the cast do a walk-on introduction when the movie was over, assuring the audience that this was just fiction after all.

The shock comes from a child psychopath.  So much so that Rhoda Penmark has become a character in her own right.  A sweet, innocent eight-year-old girl, she lies nearly as well as Trump and has skeletons in her closet.  Skeletons an adult shouldn’t have, let alone an eight-year-old.  Not only is she a sociopath, she’s convinced all the adults that she’s just as innocent as she acts.  The movie moves into psychological territory quite a lot, including a discussion of “nature or nurture” as the source of human evil.  The title of the film gives away the conclusion on that front.  Some children are born bad.  What’s more, this is the result of genetics, according to the story.  Rhoda is the child of an adopted woman—her adoption has been kept secret from her.  Eventually her father confesses that she was the child of a notorious serial killer, abandoned and adopted by loving parents.  Rhoda herself is raised in a loving, stable home, but she is her grandmother’s daughter.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that if they had ended it at the hospital scene it would’ve been scarier.  The book, apparently, ends the scarier way.  I do have to wonder if Alfred Hitchcock was familiar with the tale in some form.  The movie was released four years before Psycho, but then again, that was based on Robert Bloch’s book.  Maybe he’d read the original.  In any case, I’d been watching King’s list of scary movies and mostly finding myself unbothered.  A couple of his choices: Night of the Hunter, and now The Bad Seed, have managed to rattle me a bit.  Even with its nearly seventy-year-old sensibilities, the latter still scares.

Out of Time

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I don’t know about you, but I seldom think of Venezuelan cinema.  I feel a strange satisfaction, however, that the highest grossing movie produced in that country was a horror film.  It’s possible to find The House at the End of Time in streaming services, with subtitles.  And it’s worth doing.  It’s a movie that will stay with you.  Intricately plotted and having a lot of heart, it’s a story of loss and redemption.  After an apparent break-in at her house, Dulce is accused of killing her husband and son, and is sent to prison.  We’re shown, however, that she found her husband already dead, or nearly so, and that her son had been stolen away by a mysterious force.  After three decades, given her age, she’s released to house arrest.  A neighborhood priest becomes interested in her case, believing that she’s innocent.  It’s the house, it seems, that is haunted.  Previous families who lived there experienced similar fates.

I won’t spoil it for you, but this is a horror film with heart as well as smarts.  It also explores the life of the poor and learning to live with past mistakes.  It’s a story about a family.  Unlike many horror movies, the protagonists aren’t “all things being equal,” middle-class people.  In this regard, it reminds me of The Orphanage and The Devil’s Backbone—also both Spanish-language horror films.  And there’s a verisimilitude about the poor as the ones suffering the effects of haunting.  Now even that has become a trendy commodity.  A house haunted sometimes increases in value as ghosts become gentrified.  Obviously, ghosts can haunt anyone, but there’s almost a parable aspect to them.  Sometimes ghosts are all that the poor have.

That may be one of the reasons that The House at the End of Time is also Venezuela’s most internationally distributed movie.  And the reason that an American production company is working on a remake (presumably in English).  The ghosts here aren’t what we’ve come to expect, but religion plays a large part in the movie since the priest pays special attention to Dulce.  The reason why is eventually explained, but he is a non-judgmental cleric.  He attempts no exorcism.  Instead, he researches and seeks to find an explanation for what is happening at this most unusual house.  Catholicism is a large part of the culture in Venezuela, and I do hope that the remake doesn’t remove it.  A sympathetic cleric is often difficult to find.  And in this case, one that really pays off.