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.

Haunting the House

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Although it starts off a little slowly, the premise of The Haunting of Ashburn House keeps you reading.  I don’t mind taking the time for a story to unfold.  I know many people want action to draw them in, but I’ve been reading about quiet horror and since it often takes its time, I know to appreciate it.  I’ve not read Darcy Coates before, but as this tale unspooled itself it grew gripping.  Even before the action took off, the situation was intriguing enough to draw me in.  I do quite like a haunted house story.  So, Adrienne has inherited a big old house from a great aunt she only vaguely remembers meeting once as a child.  A writer a bit down on her luck, she’s glad to have a place to live, but she knows nothing of the recently deceased relative who lived there.

Ipson, the town outside of which Ashburn House sits, is peopled with citizens who remember, often incorrectly, the tragedy that took place in Ashburn decades ago.  An entire family, apart from a young daughter, had been slaughtered there.  The daughter, sent to a foster family, returned as an adult to care for the house.  It has many secrets.  The people have been kept away from the house during the aunt’s long life alone there.  Adrienne arrives with little money and no acquaintances, and no knowledge of the history of the house.  She soon discovers that it’s haunted.  Not one to believe in ghosts, it takes some time to convince herself that the occurrences are supernatural.  Once that’s confirmed in a very stark way, much of the rest of the novel unfolds over the course of another day and night.

I don’t remember where I learned of this novel, but I do recall it was on a list of gothic literature.  Indeed, it is gothic.  And it’s a horror story.  The monster—“ghost” is a bit mild—has to be explained, but it fits within the context.  These days to make horror stories work you need to isolate protagonists from phones or “signal.”  Putting Adrienne in a small town, in a house with no wifi, and even partially without electricity, serves this end quite well.  Making her more or less penniless raises a bit of anxiety—such things can happen far too easily in real life.  The story is nevertheless well told and once the monster attacks it becomes difficult to put down.  I don’t remember where I learned about The Haunting of Ashburn House, but I’m glad that I did.

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.

Djinn Genre

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I really don’t like to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed.  Many of them, however, are quite small and I have a list to which I try hard to stick.  I do end up getting books I hadn’t intended to, to avoid said empty-handedness, and so I found The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark.  It crosses various genres with elements of steampunk, horror, and fantasy.  Set in Cairo in 1912, where a system of off-ground trams run, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is responsible for keeping the paranormal under control.  Agents Hamed and Onsi of the Ministry are called in to handle, well, a haunted tram.  Their department is on a budget and can’t afford a major exorcism—assuming the haunting is a djinn—and they have to find other means.  Their first attempt fails but ultimately reveals that the entity is an al, from Armenian folklore.

Alk are baby-snatchers.  Hamed and Onsi have to learn how to handle this dangerous entity before it can harm any women.  That’s the basic idea.  The novella introduces the reader to some North African/West Asian folklore and builds on both Muslim and Coptic ideas, as well as non-traditional religion.  It’s a somewhat fun story as well.  The agents resort to some unconventional means to deal with the al, and djinn are a regular part of daily life.  As are androids, called eunuchs.  This is, of course, an alternate reality, but one in which Cairo is a major city along the lines of London or New York.  But with a distinctly North African feel.  And a society that accepts all different races equally.  Women, who are rallying for the vote, are the ones who identify and suggest the solution to the problem.  It’s an optimistic story.

Djinn are often thought of as Islamic versions of demons, but “demon” is a slippery word.  Christians adopted a Greek term that referred to entities both good and bad and made them pure evil.  One of the things this story does is to treat each entity appropriately to its realm.  There’s no lumping everything together into the “evil” basket.  In fact, some of the characters have djinn as business partners and others, it is implied, are basically family friends.  This is a worldview completely different from the way such things exist in our current cultural outlook.  The story unfolds fairly quickly since this is a short book.  There are a few horror elements to it, but mainly it is an imaginative vision of a world poised to celebrate equality, and everyone is better for it.

Adult Events

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The best children’s material contains winks for adults.  Those of us who grew up with Looney Tunes and then watched them when we were older know that to be true.  I’d forgotten some of the gems in A Series of Unfortunate Events.  The Hostile Hospital has the Baudelaire orphans wanted for murder, Count Olaf thought to be dead, and the children volunteering at a hospital.  A hostile one.  When Lemony Snicket describes one of his hiding places, he notes that it’s in “the Cathedral of the Alleged Virgin.”  That one elicited a full-blown grin.  Another lemony snicker emerged when two of Count Olaf’s associates get to arguing only to stop and acknowledge that they shouldn’t let their personal issues interfere with their work.  Such an adult scenario indeed.

As far as the story goes, this eighth volume is closely connected with the seventh, The Vile Village, in that the children remain under the suspicion of murder.   This began in book seven and carries on here, adding further tension to the tale.  No Mr. Poe comes to their “rescue.”  As the children hide in the eponymous hospital, they discover a sliver of a clue about their parents as they find a photo of them along with Jacques and Lemony Snicket.  Jacques, of course, had died in the last book.  There’s also a new false lead on V.F.D. with the Volunteers Fighting Disease providing comic relief throughout the tale.  And comic relief is probably necessary for kids, since the story does get darker.  Chapter 11 is hilarious, with Olaf’s associates trying to pretend at being doctors, even as the story takes a serious turn.

The children have their hopes ignited that one of their parents survived the fire.  Lemony Snicket enters a little further into the story.  The Baudelaires are now wanted for both murder and arson.  And they can only escape by hiding in the trunk of Count Olaf’s car.  This is the first book in the series where the children don’t actually see Olaf but only hear his voice.  Of course, he’s still following them.  The Quagmire triplets don’t appear in this volume either, having been whisked away (rescued) at the end of The Vile Village.  Re-reading these books as an adult has been a fascinating exercise.  Daniel Handler is certainly a clever, and entertaining writer.  Of course, the events in the book are silly enough for children, and some of the humor is effective even for adults.  Some of the action is too.  There’s pleasure in re-reading some kid lit, especially as an adult.

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.

Unlikely Heroes

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I discovered Vicious by V. E. Schwab on a list of dark academia novels.  I’m glad I did.  The dark academia comes in because the protagonist Victor and antagonist Eli meet in college.  Eli has already stolen Victor’s girlfriend, and he has a thesis idea that postulates EOs (Extra Ordinaries) gain their ability from near death experiences (NDEs).  Determined to prove this, he and Victor try to kill each other, with consent, so that they can be revived to see if they have special abilities.  They do.  Victor’s parents, self-help book writers, have no time for him while Eli is very religious.  They soon become enemies.  Victor’s ability is controlling pain, both his own and that of others.  Eli can heal nearly instantaneously from any injury.  Ten years later Victor is in jail and Eli has become religiously convinced that he has to kill EOs.  He finds a college woman who controls minds and together they get away with murder.

The book is quite well written.   I’ve read plenty of novels that were a plod to get through, but this one never lost my interest.  The tension builds to a pretty high level at some points.  And yes, there is blood.  I think dark academia is an appropriate classification here, and perhaps low fantasy.  There are horror elements, but the abilities of the EOs make it feel like a superhero movie.  Thoughts of The X-Men kept coming back.  In any case, Victor escapes from prison with his cellmate and goes on the hunt for Eli, who’s been systematically murdering EOs because they go against God’s laws.  They discover Sydney who has an ability on which the entire story turns.  With the page-turning power of a thriller, Vicious was a book I always looked forward to picking up again.

I’m not going to give any spoilers here—the novel is well worth reading.  I was intrigued by the way Schwab used the religion angle to motivate the killer.  Those who come back from death, the plot suggests, have something missing that was there before.  This, combined with his religion, gives Eli the motive for killing.  Of course, his morals were problematic to begin with.  Selfish and narcissistic, he ignores Victor’s needs from the beginning.  Even when being saved by the woman who controls minds, he’s never grateful.  Religious but completely oblivious to his own moral failings, he develops a God complex.  This adds a depth to what might otherwise be simply a speculative action story.  With, of course, dark academia stylings.

Annabelle yet Again

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Over the past decade, sometimes with years between, I’ve been viewing the original Twilight Zone episodes.  In the way that firsts so often do, it influenced much of what would come after.  Recently when my wife was out of town, I was going through season five in the evenings.  I reached “Living Doll,” an episode I never remember seeing before.  The haunted/possessed doll/dummy has a long pedigree, of course.  I’ve discussed it several times on this blog; memorably it occurs in Dead of Night.  An earlier Twilight Zone episode, “The Dummy,” raised the specter in season three.  And, of course, Child’s Play took the idea and ran with it.  And ran.  And ran.  The highest grossing horror series in cinema, of course, is The Conjuring franchise.  It features, in more than one installment, the doll Annabelle.

The story behind Annabelle, purportedly, goes back to the 1970s when Ed and Lorraine Warren took the demonic “conduit” from the hands of a nursing student.  She was concerned that the doll moved on its own.  The student and her roommate had a psychic tell them the Raggedy Ann doll had belonged to a girl named Annabelle.  Of course, the Warrens saw this as a demonic case and famously locked the doll in a glass holder in their occult museum.  Annabelle, apart from having her own spin-off series, appears in the very first Conjuring film.  Since the Warrens passed on, the doll circulates in tours, drawing in those attracted to this particular kind of thrill. 

The Twilight Zone episode “Living Doll” is aptly credited with giving us the creepy doll Talky Tina as a blended family struggles to integrate.  The unsympathetic step-father, Erich, seems unsympathetic to the fact that his young daughter Christie is feeling rejected.  Her mother buys her a Talky Tina and Erich immediately complains about the expense.  The doll famously tells him it will kill him.  And it does.  The interesting thing is the girl’s mother’s name is Annabelle.  This gets me to wondering if some psychic a decade later had seen this episode and, perhaps subconsciously, drew the name from Jerry Sohl’s ghostwritten episode for Charles Beaumont.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  The Twilight Zone was an immensely influential series.  In the late fifties and early sixties, television had seen nothing like it.  Of course, haunted dolls, dummies, and puppets already inhabit those first steps into the uncanny valley where we know they’re not really human (AI, anyone?) but they look like they could be.  Only Annabelle knows for sure.

Monster Frankenstein

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There have been any number of film adaptations of Frankenstein.  Guillermo del Toro, as an auteur, has a distinctive style.  I wan’t quite sure how well the two might mix.  I’d been avoiding his 2025 Frankenstein for that reason and because it’s two-and-a-half hours long.  Even rainy weekends don’t always have that big a block of time to spare.  When I finally found the time I found it an interesting departure from Mary Shelley’s story, but, as with most del Toro films, well made.  And the Bible appears in it as well.  This, of course, is part of the whole horror mystique.  Other versions of Frankenstein have played with the idea of the creature’s superior strength but del Toro adds the distinct element that Victor Frankenstein’s creation can’t die.  When he’s killed, he recovers.  He becomes the unstoppable pursuer.

The movie also makes clear that Victor is the real monster.  It is he who kills Elizabeth and then blames it on his creation.  Likewise, when his benefactor is accidentally killed, Victor blames the creature.  The dialogue focuses on religion and death—the Bible reference isn’t gratuitous—and in an interview del Toro noted that Frankenstein is, for him, religion.  Like many del Toro horror films, it doesn’t share the feel of much of modern horror.  For example, there are no jump startles and the presentation is more like a drama or adventure movie than it is a horror one.  There is gore, however, and a monster, both of which place it into the expected category.

Another theme that runs through this rendition of the iconic horror story is that of reconciling with a problematic father.  Victor’s father is cruel and demanding.  He, in turn, becomes cruel and demanding with his creature.  Both “fathers” believe they have the right to dictate the future of their sons.  Victor, while brilliant, is emotionally poorly equipped for his role as surrogate parent.  In the end the creature reconciles with his imperfect but repentant dying father.  With large themes such as this, and the religion and death dialogue, it’s natural enough that this movie attained critical recognition.  And the acting is sincere, with characteristic del Toro sympathy for the monster.  Both monsters, in this version.  The creature and Victor both undergo a kind of redemption by the end of it all.  While not emotionally wrenching—the basic storyline is perhaps too well-known for that—this is a monster film with heart.  This is, of course, a del Toro hallmark.

Monster Drink

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The Monster may trigger those who grew up in alcoholic households.  Still, it is effective and moving, and quite scary.  Lizzy is the fourteen-year-old daughter of Kathy.  Kathy is an alcoholic and generally not really fit for motherhood.  Their relationship is explained through flashbacks and also the events of the morning of the fateful trip.  Lizzy, typical for the child of an alcoholic, has to be the parent in the relationship much of the time, but she’s still an emotionally insecure minor.  Kathy is driving her to her ex-husband’s house for his weekend custody and she’s pretty sure Lizzy won’t come back.  Starting to realize that she’s losing her daughter for good, she tries to make up but the relationship is far gone.  Then they get into an accident on an untraveled road.  And a monster is stalking them.  The build-up is quite good.

The car can’t be driven and Kathy’s wrist is injured.  They learn, as the monster kills the tow-truck driver and ambulance crew that eventually make it to the scene, that it fears light.  They’re able to escape in the ambulance but the monster knocks it off the road and continues stalking them.  Kathy realizes she won’t live much longer because of her injuries and the two finally bond.  Kathy plans with Lizzy how the girl will escape.  Instead, when Kathy lures the monster out, Lizzy attacks it.  The monster kills her mother, but Lizzy kills it.  The acting is quite spectacular, even if the story is sad, edging on depressing.  A girl learning to face and overcome her fears, the story is almost a parable.  It’s also not unrealistic regarding life as the child of an alcoholic.  In my interpretation, alcoholism is the real monster here.

The Monster is one of those good movies that just didn’t perform well at the box office.  It may have been ahead of its time in giving actual heart to a horror setting.  It may not’ve helped that the title is somewhat innocuous.  Yes, there is a monster, but the story is bigger than that.  The monster leads to the final reconciliation between mother and daughter, even as it kills the former.  It’s a meaningful monster.  Interestingly, the reviews I read don’t make the connection with alcoholism.  Perhaps the reviewers haven’t experienced life in such a home.  It explains Kathy’s lack of parenting skills to a considerable degree.  This is a thoughtful, scary movie.  And some of the reasons for the fear may not be what you expect.

Period Exorcist

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The prediction was that it would be forgotten in five years after it lost the Oscar for best picture to The Sting.  The Exorcist, however, is a movie that continues to spawn new books and analyses.  I read The Story Behind The Exorcist because I wanted a contemporary account with its seventies impressions.  I didn’t see the movie when it opened; I was younger than Regan at the time.  I certainly heard about it, though.  Throughout my childhood it was whispered of as the scariest movie ever.  Peter Travers is a well known movie critic; the book was written before he joined Rolling Stone.  Stephanie Reiff is a little more difficult to pin down.  She wrote two other books, both about the occult, published in 1977.  Travers would’ve been in his early twenties when the book was published.  It shows in the at times punchy style.

The Exorcist was a phenomenon.  My awareness of it was second-hand for many years but I did hear about the long lines to get in to see it.  A whopping box-office success, it was the first horror film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar.  Horror films still tend to be shunned by the Academy, despite their frequent financial success.  In any case, when I discuss horror movies with those born in, say, the eighties or later, The Exorcist rarely comes up as among the scariest films.  It is, however, largely responsible for the way that demonic possession is understood.  No possession movie since hasn’t owed a debt of gratitude toward it.  The Exorcist often lands on lists of the greatest movies ever made.  It’s interesting to read the dismissive period reviews of the critics reproduced in the book.  The film is over fifty years old and still discussed.

While I don’t spend much time on social media, the other day a friend posted a picture of himself reading a book about The Exorcist.  I’ve read at least five on the film specifically.  Interestingly, William Friedkin, the director, never reached these heights again.  William Peter Blatty, author of the novel as well as screenwriter and producer, never replicated the success.  Not only was the movie a runaway hit, it represented the true coming of age of the horror genre.  It attempted things never before seen.  And it influenced religion itself in ways nobody dreamed mere celluloid could.  I’m still reading books on it.  This particular one doesn’t have the greatest depth, but it captures the feel of the times.  Adding The Roman Ritual as an appendix, however, may have been playing into the Devil’s hand.

Underground Sydney

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It’s probably best, if horror movies have taught me anything, not to go exploring underground.  As far as found footage films go, The Tunnel isn’t bad.  It didn’t make me ill from camera motion, so that puts it ahead of most recent efforts.  Some explanation of the monster would’ve been good, but even so, it does keep you watching.  The premise is that an Australian news team, in need of a big story, decides to go down into the tunnels that create a virtual second city under Sydney.  The story is that the government had planned to reclaim the water that filled some of the tunnels to help alleviate a drought.  The plans are suddenly and silently dropped, suggesting an untold story.  Knowing that the homeless use the tunnels, the team of four breaks in and finds evidence of squatters.  And more.

While getting some ambient sounds recorded, their audio engineer disappears.  Finding a room splattered with lots of blood, the remaining three have to decide whether to keep looking for him or try to go for help.  On the way they realize that some kind of humanoid monster is stalking them.  It attacks and kills a security guard who’d initially tried to keep the crew out.  The three, each of them attacked underground, manage to find their way to an active subway station.  But the producer dies while awaiting medical help.  The reporter, the only woman in the group, blames herself for putting her need for a big story over the welfare of her colleagues.  There’s also a fair bit of bitterness at having lost the producer when plenty of people, who might potentially help, were around.  Only the reporter and her cameraman survive.

Ever since The Blair Witch Project, it’s been tricky to determine which found footage horror films really work.  Paranormal Activity did.  And this one does too, at least to an extent.  Since they ostensibly tell you no more than the characters know, fixed answers are difficult to come by.  Thus we’re left wondering if the monster here is a human, mutated or not—it does move faster than most people can manage—and what its backstory might be.  The conceit of using tunnels to house it, while not unique, does offer some possibilities in the cinéma vérité realm.  It is a world of which few beyond the homeless and city engineers have direct experience, thus it’s foreign even to the locals like the news team.  Probably there are no monsters in such places, but caution, it seems to me, wouldn’t be misplaced.

Sun Cut

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The Severed Sun is an independent folk horror film, written and directed by Dean Puckett, that hasn’t received enough attention.  I wish this blog had a greater reach so that it might create some buzz for it.  The movie has some shortcomings but overall it is quite strong and it shows just how horror can be based on religion.  Scenes of modern conveniences, such as nicely paved roads, electrical wires, and modern-ish farming equipment suggest that the setting is post-apocalyptic.  A small band of people have gathered around a preacher whose religion is unclear.  It seems to be some form of Christianity, but he doesn’t quote the Bible and says nothing of Jesus.  There are crosses, however.  In any case, the people live in marginal land where they work communally and where each family has its own house.  They believe in marriage and male headship of the house.

Magpie kills her abusive husband.  She’s the daughter of the pastor of the community.  She has a son and an adopted son.  There’s an actual monster of darkness in the woods.  It’s unclear whether Magpie conjures it or not.  Magpie reveals the abuse of another father who’s been molesting his daughter.  The beast in the woods kills him.  The community turns on her, claiming she’s a witch.  Her father, however, saves her from immediate danger.  The pastor’s chosen acolyte, John, is in love with David, Magpie’s adopted son.  Magpie is also in love with David.  The pastor, although he shames and publicly humiliates his daughter, protects her when he can.  He doesn’t believe in “the beast,” but he uses it to get his followers to conform.  Realizing that his own heavy-handedness is problematic, he decides to kill David and the wife of the molester so that they can blame it on the beast and maintain control of the community.

Magpie escapes from the confinement where she’s being kept and kills John.  The pastor, not realizing it’s his daughter, mortally wounds Magpie and the beast kills him.  There’s a lot going on here.  The land is clearly part of the threat with which the people live, a telling folk horror element.  The religion that holds them together oppresses women and homosexuals.  And it does seem that Magpie has some influence over the monster.  Not all the details are spelled out, but enough information is given to appreciate what’s happening.  At its best moments it’s like a Robert Egger movie, but the language is clearly that of the present time, although the community lives without electricity or modern vehicles.  No farm animals appear.  Enough is strange to be unsettling, and it would be great to see more discussion of it.