Best King

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I suspect most people have read one or two at least.  Most reading folk, that is.  I mean Stephen King novels.  He’s sure written plenty.  By my count I’ve read nine: The Shining, Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, It, The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Revival, and Cujo.  I probably have one or two more in me.  The dilemma is that I like King’s writing—I’m not one of those nay-sayers who call it clap-trap.  There’s real literary merit to much of it (sometimes just too much of it), and he integrates religion into horror really well.  The thing is, not all of his books are made equal.  I suspect that’s true of any writer.  I’ve consulted some lists to see which are the best and I’ve watched some movies before reading the books, but I’m starting a ranking of my own here—it will probably be revisited from time to time, as events warrant.

What’s his best?  Well, such lists are supposed to start with the worst and work their way forward.  I’ll cave to convention this time.  So, The Tommyknockers and Cujo are tied for least favorite.  Each has a reason: The Tommyknockers is too long and lacks sympathetic characters and Cujo is just too nihilistic.  The premise is good but the bleakness got to me.  The Stand comes next primarily because of the length.  I like the way that one ended up, though.  Revival, my most recent read, comes here, about in the middle.  It was enjoyable to read, even with its length.  I think King has a little trouble writing convincing kids, but the story was good.  Next I would put ‘Salem’s Lot.  Who doesn’t like a good vampire story?

Not that kind of book.

My top three are, perhaps predictably, generally among the top ranked.  My order is perhaps a bit different than most, however.  I really, really enjoyed The Shining.  The movie, I believe, is better.  That may be heresy, I know.  Carrie has all the freshness of a novelist breaking through, and it’s effective.  Better than the movie.  That leaves Pet Sematary as my current favorite.  The story there caught me up and it’s the only one of my top three that I read before seeing the movie (both of them).  The book is way, way better than the movies.  Compared with Revival, which also deals with what happens after death, Pet Sematary offers a commentary on grief that doesn’t involve everyone dying by suicide.  It’s on a much more human level.  As I read more, I’m sure I’ll form other opinions, but for the time being, these three of the King’s early novels, are, in my standing, the most deserving of the crown.

Haunted Life

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It’s funny what a difference that a few years can make.  I can’t seem to recall from where I sourced my movies in the noughties.  Streaming was extremely tenuous in our Somerville apartment—the plan didn’t include the required speed for it.  Like in the old days when it took twenty minutes to upload a photograph through dial-up.  In any case, I know I’ve watched The Haunting before.  I know it was in Somerville, but having watched it again I have to wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me.  I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House there, and I saw the movie.  But how?  It’s all about mind games, but the mind games are played on a woman who has an abusive family, one that damages her psychologically.  Escape is important to her, even if it is to a haunted house.

I think the last time I watched this I was looking for something that might scare me.  That phase was one of thinking not much frightened me—but this movie is scary.  Even with its “G” rating, its lack of blood and gore, and black-and-white filming.  It scares.  One thing I’ve noticed when reading about these older movies after I watch them is that many improve with time.  Shirley Jackson was known during her life but you become a classic writer only AD—after death.  The Haunting has aged well.  I suspect it has something to do with Robert Wise, the director.  What must the psychology of a man be who directed The Sound of Music, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Haunting?  The latter is all about psychology.

Movies that make you think are those, I believe, that may become classics.  And perhaps there’s a bit of Eleanor inside all of us.  Wanting to be noticed but eschewing publicity.  Needing someone to love us, but pushing away those who try.  Children in bad environments learn unorthodox, and often unhealthy, coping techniques.  Eleanor has difficulty accepting that John is married when she thinks she’s finally found a place that accepts her for who she is.  Even if it’s a haunted house.  Especially if it’s a haunted house.  As a child I’d no doubt have found the movie boring.  There is, however, much for adults to absorb.  And, I expect, I’ll need to go back and read the novel again.  One of the reasons for watching horror is that the viewer is seeking something.  It’s not just thrills.  I didn’t write about the movie the last time I saw it so I don’t recollect when it was.  Or even how.  My thoughts now, however, are that I should’ve paid closer attention the first time.

Colorless Sunday

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Growing up, my Saturday afternoon horror movies were catch as catch can.  I never really had a plan and I’m sure that there are several films I saw that I have forgotten.  I’m sure one of them wasn’t Black Sunday.  I knew nothing of directors and their reputations then and I was unaware that Mario Bava made quite a splash with this moody movie.  I can now understand why (thanks to Amazon Prime).  This is an unusual vampire and/or witch story, and one which had quite an impact on future films, including one of my favorites, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow.  Indeed, Black Sunday is about as gothic as they come.  A witch is murdered as the film opens, along with her lover.  Two centuries later a couple of doctors stop for the night in the Moldovan town where this happened.  They find the corpse of the witch and accidentally reanimate it.

The monster the witch raises (her lover, initially) attacks people like a vampire does and the victims become vampires themselves.  The best (but not only) way to kill them is by driving a sharp spike through their left eye.  This is quite violent for a 1960 film, but it certainly cemented Bava’s reputation.  In any case, the younger doctor falls in love with the local princess, but the witch has designs on her too.  The older doctor and the princess’ father both get transformed into vampires and get killed off.  By the end, only the young doctor and the princess remain, along with an Orthodox priest who helps with deciphering how to take care of occult monsters.  The plot is more complex than that, and the film is now understood as a landmark.

At the time and place where and when I went to college, courses in horror films were not on offer.  (I was rather preoccupied with religion, in any case, and might not have taken one anyway.)  By the time I was in college, however, I viewed monster movies with nostalgia, but I was trying hard to be respectable.  You always have to be proving yourself when you grew up poor.  Learning how these early horror films fit together is a form of self-education.  And it’s fun.  And horror movies offer an escape from a world where you know you’re having trouble fitting in.  Many of the movies I watch are still catch and catch can, but I think it pays to be more intentional about them.  And I’m glad I caught Black Sunday at last.

More Omens

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Brushing up on my eschatology, I watched The Omen again.  The original, that is.  One of the underrated aspects of cinema is that people learn their theology from it.  Movies tend to be more memorable than sermons.  It is opined among some that The Omen is responsible for the prevalence of dispensationalism among many Americans.  I’d put a bit of a finer point on it in that The Late Great Planet Earth was being raptured off the shelves all the way through the seventies (I personally bought two copies) and it caused a feedback loop with The Omen.  Many mainstream ministers, without benefit of a Fundamentalist upbringing, were caught unawares, I expect.  Scholars of religion have noted how several aspects of the narrative—the character of “the Antichrist,” the rapture, indeed, the Apocalypse—have been read back into the Bible by credulous believers.

What I found interesting in this viewing is the debt owed to The Exorcist.  Of the two there’s no doubt as to which is the superior film.  The name Damien in The Omen, I read somewhere once upon a time, was taken from Fr. Damien Karras.  During the late seventies and early eighties, unruly boys were routinely called “Damien” by frustrated camp counselors and others.  Apart from this nod, if true, is the fact that the abruptly introduced character Karl/Carl Bugenhagen is an archaeologist exorcist.  (He’s the guy who gives Robert Thorn the knives, if you haven’t seen it for a while.)  The scene shot in Jerusalem (said to be Megiddo) underscores that Fr. Merrin is also being channeled here.  I suspect that the film was getting a bit long in the tooth and some explanatory material on Bugenhagen was left out.

It has also been suggested that the number 666 entered popular culture because of The Omen.  I would temper that a bit with the fact that a lot of people were reading Hal Lindsey’s new apocalypse as well and the two of them got the job done.  There’s no doubt that after the film the evil number took off in a direction that would’ve left John of Patmos scratching his head.  This brings me back to the point that belief is influenced—sometimes constructed—by movies.  The Omen was a huge success at the time, despite the fact that many critics (also not raised Fundie) thought the premise was silly.  Most people aren’t film critics.  The Bible can be pretty impenetrable as well.  Preachers may not be inspiring.  Movies, however, wrap it up neatly and tell you what to believe.  Perhaps it’s some kind of sign.

Lying Beneath

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If you wait long enough you can find successful films for free on Amazon Prime.  What Lies Beneath had big-name star power and still retains a “horror” classification, although “thriller” is used about as often.  I actually enjoyed it and found some parts as scary as I am comfortable getting.  Although I guessed who the killer was well before the climax, I wasn’t sure how this would end.  This made the last fifteen minutes or so very tense.  There may be some spoilers as I ponder this a bit, so be warned.  Of course, the movie is nearly a quarter-century old, so you may already have an idea of what happens.  I’m a purveyor of older culture, it seems.

Claire Spencer, and her new husband Norman, live in an isolated spot in Vermont.  Norman is a genetic engineer and Claire used to be a musician, but the death of her first husband and adjusting to being an empty nester lead to her neglect of playing.  She starts seeing a ghost in the house Norman inherited from his father.  She comes to believe the ghost is of a missing young woman from the area, and she begins to find clues that link her husband to this unsolved case.  At first you think it’s going to be like Rear Window, but it turns into something very different.  The sense of unease is quite effective—you know something’s wrong but you’re not sure exactly what it is.

This is another of those movies where the genre feels up for grabs.  There’s an actual ghost and there are stingers.  Yet it’s directed by Robert Zemeckis, not really known as a horror director.  It’s stylish and has Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford in the leads.  It’s not really gritty at all.  There is blood and fear, though.  The more movies I watch the more I realize that genre is a tenuous thing.  Stories are forms of expression and sometimes they come in the varieties that explore some of the darker parts of life.  Norman’s tragic flaw is that he values his career above all else.  He tries hard to outshine his father’s accomplishments—he lives in his childhood home but refurbishes it.  He can’t get out from under that shadow and that drives him to extremes.  The movie received mixed reviews, but I found it gripping.  It’s well acted, as you’d expect, and hey, there’s a ghost.  It’s close enough to horror to work for me.

Movie Prophet

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Is there such a thing as a movie so bad that it can distort reality itself?  If so, I nominate A Haunting in Salem.  A little explanation.  I am trying to develop an aesthetic for bad movies.  I’m finding it not too difficult for movies that are so bad they’re good.  Usually such movies are fun—whether intentionally or not.  But there is a class of movie that is poorly written, poorly acted, poorly lighted, poorly set, poorly premised, poorly directed, poorly paced, and all without a hint of humor.  That’s this movie.  I watch bad movies because of my expensive habit.  I stream movies.  Since I work 9-2-5 and I’m tired by 5, I do this on weekends.  I’m not paid enough to afford renting movies every single weekend, so I look for what I can find on the services I can access—Hulu, Netflix, and, mostly, Amazon Prime.  I try to find something that grabs me.

I watched A Haunting in Connecticut and A Haunting in Georgia, as well as their remakes.  The Salem in the title made me think this might have something to say about the Witch Trials.  Perhaps it did but I was so busy groaning that I couldn’t hear it.  Although set in Salem it was filmed in Pasadena (who would notice?).  They used a 200-year-old house as a 400-year-old house, as if there’s no difference.  There’s a scene where the daughter asks her mother about her father’s PTSD.  She says something like, “He shot that man in the war.  He thought he was a bad guy, but he was a good guy.”  It’s difficult to write this badly, even if intentional.  Sorry, I’m getting away from Salem.  Well, it turns out that the witches were buried on the property of Judge Corwin’s house and they kill every sheriff and all their families, when they move in.  This has been going on for four centuries but nobody has caught on?  Even a scene where the mayor is shown raising the flag outside his office had me scratching myself bald.  Is that one of the mayor’s duties?

Most of the time the actors act like there was no direction—showing the wrong emotions and not even remembering what was said just a minute ago.  And you can’t really feel for anyone other than the deputy who seems to be trying to be a nice guy.  Maybe this is my calling in life—to serve as a prophet warning my small band of readers what movies not to watch.  I can’t recall the last time I couldn’t wait for a movie to end so that I could wash my eyes out with soap.  Avoid A Haunting in Salem.  Don’t even consider it.

No Changes

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It’s one of those polarizing movies.  Well, maybe middling-polarizing.  For certain kinds of people.  I didn’t see The Changeling when it came out, but I watched it about a decade ago.  It struck me as lackluster then, but I decided to give it another try.  One of the reasons is that I’d read a couple of things about it recently and thought that maybe I’d misjudged it.  There are those who say it’s a very good haunted house movie—one of the most influential Canadian films of all time.  Hyperbole aside, it’s one of those vengeful ghost movies and the most affecting scene, to me, is when George C. Scott is crying in his bed about the death of his wife and daughter.  There are a couple startles, but nothing really that scary overall.  It is slowly paced and sophisticated, but not terribly so.  It still strikes me as lackluster.

I’ve seen many movies since that feature a child murdered seeking to have their story told.  The end result is, however, a feeling of “so what?”  The boy’s father got away with the murder and the beneficiary—who may or may not know all or part of the story—dies in revenge.  There are just too many questions left unanswered.  The haunted house tropes are fairly conventional, and the wheelchair chase scene is a bit strange.  I wondered if there might’ve been something I was missing.  There are critics with a “meh” response, but others rate it highly.  I did learn that, although the film makes no such claim, it is purportedly based on actual events.  That I’d like to know more about.

Playwright Russell Hunter (who lends his name to Scott’s character), alleged that these kinds of things happened to him while living in the Henry Treat Rogers mansion (in Denver).  A local, Katie Rudolph, has done some fact-checking that casts doubt on the story.  Hunter claims to have found human remains (as in the film) and this would seem to be something that could be checked out as well.  In all, there’s not a ton online about the story and its supposed authenticity.  The house was torn down some time ago.  It would seem that any author (Hunter co-wrote the movie) would see the benefits of claiming actual events.  Even if the film doesn’t play that card.  Was there a murder in the mansion?  From what I’ve been able to find, there are about as many unanswered questions as there are in the movie itself.  Although next time I’m in Denver, that’s not to say I won’t be tempted.

They Come in Batches

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There’s horror and there’s comedy horror.  And then there’s just plain silly.  Gremlins 2: The New Batch falls into that last category but with the strange factor that it’s silly without being funny.  There are a few smirk moments, and sometimes the self-parody approaches clever, nevertheless it’s bad.  It’s a big budget bad movie.  The idea that the gremlins try to take over New York City is funny, at first, but other than Phoebe Cates and Christopher Lee, they don’t seem to know this is a satire of Gremlins.  I guess not knowing about the plot—I tend not to read reviews about movies before I see them—I was expecting something more like the first one, which I thought was pretty good.  The only reason I knew the movie existed at all was that the Blu-Ray version of Gremlins comes with The New Batch.  The late eighties and early nineties I was spending holed up in Edinburgh working on a Ph.D.  We didn’t have much money and didn’t see many movies.  We had no television (there is, or was, a television tax in the UK), so I never heard of the sequel.  

I presume we all know the three rules of mogwai, and needless to say, they immediately get broken.  The eponymous new batch takes over the Manhattan tower of Daniel Clamp.  His high-tech building needs no gremlins because the technology already doesn’t work well.  The high rise houses, among other things, a genetics lab where Christopher Lee camps it up, but which means the gremlins have access to formulas that allow them to grow wings, tolerate sunlight, and become spiders.  Sound silly?  You betcha.  One of the gremlins is even able to talk.  I watched with increasing stupefaction. 

Bad movies and cult followings are the peanut butter and jelly of cinematography.  Some bad movies never attain cultdom, but I can see why this one has.  The big budget ensured glitz and special effects.  Even the self-awareness to have Hulk Hogan being able to control the gremlins in the theater with a threat almost gives the movie an art film feel.  The horror, mostly based on the fact that there are monsters, is tightly constrained.  Although I felt increasingly like I was wasting my time as the movie went on, upon reflection I can see why some people have glommed onto it.  It may just have edged over into the so bad it’s good category.  I’ll need to think about it.  And avoid eating after midnight.

Mirror Gothic

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I have a soft spot for gothic novels.  I get the sense that Rebecca James set out to write the most gothic novel ever in The Woman in the Mirror.  Although the supernatural persists in the background throughout the novel, it’s mainly the reflection of two women who encounter the mysterious Winterbourne Hall, high on a cliff over the Atlantic in Cornwall.  Rachel Wright, in the present day, is a self-made woman.  Overcoming the life of being raised an orphan, she has opened a successful art gallery in New York City when she receives an unexpected letter informing her that she’s inherited an expansive property in England.  Not knowing who her parents were, this is a world-changing surprise, so she heads to Cornwall to find her past and to figure out what to do with her inherited property.

Her story is intertwined with that of Alice Miller.  An English woman from two generations past (I’ll come back to that), Miller grew up with a bully for a father and a desire to make it on her own.  She’s hampered, however, by a past secret.  She takes up employment as a governess at Winterbourne where a Rochesterian Jonathan de Grey is lord of the manor.  His two children, fraternal twins, require keeping and the last governess threw herself off the cliffs—you see what I mean by most gothic—so Miller takes the post.  The massive house, however, has a strange effect on her.  Not only on her, we learn, but on most of the women who live there.  The final housekeeper, however, does seem to be immune, perhaps because she’s older.

The story is slow paced, with a fair amount of romance thrown in.  Both Rachel and Alice have lost lovers and are coping with their pasts.  They never meet, of course, being from separate generations.  Perhaps this is just the perspective of an old geezer, but putting Alice Miller in, presumably, her twenties in 1947 doesn’t really seem long enough in the past for the story to unfold as it does.  I couldn’t help but think that this makes her about my mother’s age and I would have to admit that my own daughter is old enough to inherit an estate while having already become a successful artist in Manhattan.  The timing just seemed a little off to me.  The perfect gothic novel seems to require some Victorian aspects, in my opinion.  Nevertheless, this story becomes quite gripping toward the end.  If you want a modern-day gothic romance, you’ll likely enjoy The Woman in the Mirror.

Gather Round

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The church has been keeping secrets.  That’s the basic premise behind a fair raft of horror films.  Apart from giving those of us watching religion and horror quite a bit to talk about, it reinforces just how close the two are.  The Gathering is a film I missed when it came out, but one which has an interesting, if unlikely premise.  At times it reminded me of The Reaping, and at other times, the prequels to The Exorcist.  Cassie is a young American woman who loses her memory after being hit by a car near Glastonbury, England.  At about this time a deliberately buried church is being explored by an art history professor.  He asserts that it is the church Joseph of Arimathea built and represents, in its altarpiece, the earliest rendition of the crucifixion.  The clergy seem quite disturbed by this.

Meanwhile, Cassie recovers and is taken on as an au pair for the art historian and his wife (the one who hit her with the car).  The people of Ashby Wake stare at Cassie, as if they know her.  She has premonitions of several local people dying violent deaths.  The clergy learn that the altarpiece depicts those who came to watch Jesus’ crucifixion, not out of love or devotion, but simply for spectacle.  Since then they’ve been cursed and show up to watch various historic tragedies.  The clergy want the church, the earliest representation of the spectators, reburied.  The people of Ashby Wake include those of “the gathering,” indicating tragedy is about to unfold in that small town.  There is a twist ending I won’t reveal, but this is one of those horror films that rely on religion to make them work. 

Critics tend to dislike the film while viewers are divided on the question.  I actually enjoyed it, personally.  The concept of the watchers committed to bloodlust seemed different, particularly when put in the context of nascent Christianity.  It doesn’t handle religion as well as some horror does, but it’s a serious effort.  Why Joseph of Arimathea would want to have portrayed gawkers rather than those loyal to Jesus is one of the bigger questions left unanswered.  After the ending some of the unusual scenes earlier on make more sense.  But still no reason is given why an early church would have portrayed those not to be emulated.  As a horror film with no jump startles, but a slowly building dread, it fits the bill for some of us.  The “church keeping secrets” theme is one that should be explored further.

Which Witch Where?

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I like to think of myself as a kind critic.  I’ve been on the pointy end enough to know how it feels when those who don’t like my work are unkind.  I’ll try to find a nice way of saying Witches of Amityville, or Witches of Amityville Academy, must’ve been shot on a very modest budget.  It must’ve been written by someone who’s still working hard to master the craft.  And the actors are continuing to improve as the director gets better at that role.  Why did I watch it?  Amazon Prime gives it four stars.  The incongruity of Amityville and witches suggested it might be a bad movie, and in that regard it did not disappoint.  So what’s going on here?

There’s a witch academy in Amityville.  Although all the cars have steering wheels on the right, everyone speaks with American accents, apart from a couple of characters.  The interior shots, however, are also pretty British for the most part.  There does seem to be some awareness that Amityville is in the new world.  In any case, said academy is run by an evil coven that is seeking to release the demon Botis.  To do so they have to sacrifice college-age women (and no, it’s not that kind of movie).  One of their intended sacrifices escapes and is found by three white witch sisters who also live in Amityville.  They decide to train this young woman who, as it turns out, is a very powerful witch.  Problem is, the director of the academy can’t release the demon without sacrificing this particular victim.  So she kidnaps her back.  The three good witches burst on the scene, actually more like just walk on, and prevent the sacrifice.  The bad witch kills herself and releases the demon, but the young witch is so powerful that she destroys him.  In the end the witches must go to Salem.

What’s not to like?  Some of us, day by day, year by year, work to improve our writing skills.  We write stories that incorporate whatever ability we’ve managed to scrape together.  And we struggle to find publishers.  I like bad movies because they are a great place to find hope.  The world’s a big place.  Even the entertainment industry is large enough to absorb movies produced by Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix, among others, including the big studios.  They’ve got to be looking for content, right?  Those of us who channel our creativity towards writing, and who keep trying to get it published, have a chance, don’t we?  What’s the harm in believing in the power of magic?

Monster v. Alien

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“Horror” is a faulty genre category.  Nobody quite knows where its boundaries lie.  Take Predator, for instance.  I recently watched it for the first time although I’d known about it since I was in seminary.  I am not a fan of tough-guy movies, so it took the fact that it’s sometimes coded as “horror” to get me to watch it.  Horror is often defined as a genre that has to have a monster.  Check.  We got your monster right over here.  The monster’s an alien but so is, well, Alien.  An action-adventure, sci-fish movie with a monster—is that horror?  I knew I had to see it for the sake of completion.  I’d heard of Predator vs. Alien (haven’t seen), and enough people comment on Predator that I was beginning to feel hopelessly outdated.  Or even more hopelessly outdated.

I presume the rest of the world saw it long ago, but I didn’t even know the plot.  A group of tough-guys are duped into a covert operation that allows for many explosions and bodies flying through the air.  Then they have to get out of the jungle alive because there’s an alien sportsman on the loose.  Apparently he likes earth for a good challenge since he won’t hunt somebody who’s unarmed.  He wipes out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team—and to the film’s credit, the Black guys don’t die first.  There’s time for that, of course.  As they tromp through the jungle shirts come off because the guys are all ripped, of course.  One of the team, Billy, decides to fight without a gun so when it’s down to just Arnold and the alien the predator decides fisticuffs will settle this in a manly way.  When Schwarzenegger’s trap mortally wounds said predator, it sets off a bomb that allows for the biggest explosion of all.

So is this horror?  Hulu thinks so.  Schwarzenegger apparently thought it ended up as sci-fi horror—which is a thing.  It’s a thing because horror is a poor genre.  It’s ill-defined.  You kinda know when you’ve just seen a western or a romance.  But lots of horror films are disputed.  Critics repeatedly opine that The Shining isn’t horror.  Neither is The Exorcist.  Of course, both always wind up near the top of horror list movies.  Horror movies don’t win academy awards, as a rule.  Still, “horror” fans seek movies out that others classify as drama, or even action-adventure.  Horror is close kin with science fiction, another disputed genre.  The two are often quite distinct, however.  So, did I watch a horror movie this weekend?  I honestly can’t say.

Forewarning

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The Devil’s Advocates series, as you learn from pitching and writing one, promotes alternative views on horror films.  Adrian Schober’s treatment of The Omen doesn’t disappoint.  Each time I read one of these little volumes I’m always amazed at how many ideas can be packed into such a small space.  Schober’s take on the film is that Damien’s role is left intentionally ambiguous.  There was disagreement between the screenwriter (David Seltzer) and the director (Richard Donner) on that point.  Donner wanted it to be left up to the audience whether Damien was the Antichrist or not.  Seltzer, not being a believer himself, wanted to be clear that the boy was evil.  As portrayed in the final film, however, Damien seems awfully vulnerable, in retrospect.  (I rewatched the movie before reading the book.)

I’ve seen The Omen a number of times.  It has never been my favorite movie and I actually read the book (a novelization) before I ever saw the film.  Having grown up as a fundamentalist, I believed that we were in the end times (which only really seemed likely starting in November 2016).  The movie had to wait until I was an adult (I read the novelization when the film first came out).  I can see the ambiguity now, having read this book.  There remain, however, some things difficult to explain about the presentation—how Fr. Brennan knows Katherine is pregnant and that Damien will be the cause of her miscarriage.  The extreme coincidence of both the priest and the boy having the same birthmark that looks like 666.  And that someone would go through the trouble of burying a jackal and Thorn’s actual son in an obscure Etruscan cemetery just in case the Ambassador ever got suspicious and wanted to check it out.  

Interestingly, different markets altered the ending, enhancing the ambiguity.  The final scene had originally been shot with three coffins rather than two, and that changes things, doesn’t it?  Movies are, of course, subject to interpretation.  Any form of media is.  The fact remains that many viewers flocked from theaters believing Damien was the Antichrist.  Schober’s book would give pause, however, about rushing to conclusions.  The idea for the movie was suggested initially by a marketer who was a true believer in premillennial dispensationalism (essentially the worldview of Keith Jennings in the movie), and some Catholic officials objected.  Different Christian sects have very different interpretations about the end of the world.  And this movie is subject to different interpretations.  This brief book might just change your mind.

Not a Peep

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Time changes everything.  Peeping Tom, which has been on my list for some years, was castigated when it was released in 1960.  Now it’s considered a classic.  Indeed, it’s frequently discussed in books analyzing horror films, and it had a bit of influence on Alfred Hitchcock.  Films like this must be watched as period pieces, of course, but there’s so much psychology here to unpack that I wonder if it’s used in mental health courses.  Mark Lewis is a loner who inherited a spacious London house from his father.  He lets out the downstairs rooms but keeps to himself upstairs.  One of the reasons is that he realizes that he’s mentally unstable.  He’s a serial killer, in fact.  His young downstairs neighbor takes a shine to him and he reveals, via film, that his father tormented him as a child to film his fear reactions.

As an adult, Mark works in the film industry.  He also kills women while filming them to capture their fear reactions—taking his father’s work a step further.  Although shy, he is charming enough to others.  When he sees a fear reaction, however, he feels compelled to murder.  The neighbor downstairs doesn’t suspect him, but her ocularly challenged mother does.  Thinking back over it, many moments reminded me of a racier version of Hitch.  Racy because Mark picks up money on the side by taking boudoir photographs that the local news shop sells to certain customers.  This is a creepy film and perhaps the creepiest scene is where a local girl, well underage, comes into the news shop to buy a candy bar just after the owner sells an older man a pornography book.  We don’t like to admit that such things could happen.

There is so much going on in this movie that it’s clear, at least to me, why it has garnered such acclaim.  I spent the first twenty minutes or so wondering whether I should really be watching, but as I stayed with it I couldn’t look away (which is one of the very self-reflective issues that the film addresses).  The analyses I’ve read never really went into detail regarding the plot, so there were plenty of places where I wondered what would happen next.  The pacing is more in keeping with the turn of the sixties, but the mind work seems ahead of its time.  Some call it a precursor to slashers, but it doesn’t linger on the actual bloodshed (which is minimal, considering).  It does take its time to make you think while you watch.  And somehow it makes viewers complicit, it feels, with what they’ve seen.

Filming the Void

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Once you move away from major studios, it turns out that Lovecraftian horror is rather prevalent.  Seeing that The Void was rated higher than many offerings on FreeVee, well, why not.  It was compared to the intellectual works of Benson and Morehead, but to me it matches more closely with Older Gods.  Like many movies in this genre, The Void isn’t easy to follow and having commercial interruptions doesn’t help.  (In movies made for television, directors know to offer cues at specified times to allow for a break.  I’m not sure that those at FreeVee, or Tubi, or Plex, or their ilk, or even Hulu, know how to do this well.)  So there are these mysterious cultists—somehow “new religionists” just doesn’t seem to cut it—who apparently want to bring about the apotheosis of their leader in a rural setting. 

Meanwhile a local sheriff finds a young man fleeing from a couple of guys who are killing people and takes him to the hospital.  This hospital, however, is being closed down and there’s only a skeleton crew there to handle emergencies until it can be decommissioned.  Once the guys trying to kill the young man arrive, the hospital is surrounded by the cultists.  By the way, there will be spoilers—just saying.  It never is adequately explained how these killing guys know who these cultists are, unless it happened so fast that I missed it.  In any case, all trapped in the hospital there’s the problem with a monster that has tentacles (Lovecraftian) that takes over the body of a nurse, then a tries to get a state policeman.  Lots of axes and gunfire, and the numbers in the hospital are reducing.

It turns out that the kindly old doctor is the leader of the cult and he’s trying to raise the old gods so that he can bring his daughter back to life.  The sheriff, who’s been the protagonist all along, knocks said doctor into the eponymous void, leaving only two people alive in the hospital.  It’s not really explained where the cultists, who made it into the hospital, went.  Nevertheless, this is a good example of horror and religion (which is ironically Lovecraftian).  The doctor’s unconventional religion is the cause behind the hospital mayhem, and, apparently the killings being conducted by the interlopers are attempts to stop it.  As a horror film it’s effective, if a bit disjointed.  It seems that there’s still a lot to unpack from films that try to bring Lovecraft’s ideas onto the silver screen, major studio or not.