Virtual Head Sickness

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I think quite a lot about the nature of reality.  Our brains—no, our minds—create reality for us.  I’m reminded of this when I get motion sickness from watching a movie.  I am not actually moving, and I even look away from the screen frequently, but if I don’t realize it soon enough, I become quite ill.  There really should be an advisory warning for people with my condition since I have occasionally lost an entire day recovering from such an experience.  Most recently it happened with V/H/S Viral.  I had not watched any of the V/H/S franchise; indeed, I didn’t realize it was a franchise.  I was watching it under the false impression that it was a Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead movie.  Well, it partially is.  They were responsible for one of the segments—it’s an anthology film.

I made it through an hour and ten minutes, with only eleven minutes to go, when I realized, “I’m going to throw up if I don’t shut this off.”  So I did.  Now, if you have the condition I do, there’s little that you can actually do when the process starts.  You can’t move your eyes much, and even moving your physical body has to be done slowly.  (My sister-in-law, who is a physician, once tried a “tough love” cure when I got motion-sick from a small plane ride.  It didn’t work.  I ended up laying in the dirt by the side of a camp road in Idaho for about half an hour before I could open my eyes and walk, very slowly, back to the cabin.  Once there I slept the rest of the day.)  You might understand why I resent when a movie does this to me.  After maybe an hour, I tried to read.  I was actually reading “Hans Phaal” by Edgar Allan Poe at the time, the part where Hans is hanging upside down outside the balloon.  I had to put the book down.

Although I’d almost gone too far, after a couple of hours I could stand to scroll a bit.  (That often makes me mildly ill, so I need to be careful.)  Then I realized that V/H/S is an anthology series and that various filmmakers are invited to contribute.  Thus the mention of Benson and Moorhead that drew me in in the first place.  I had been trying to complete my viewing of their films.  They aren’t a franchise, but I realized, post-nausea, that I had already seen all of their feature-length collaborations.  They’re philosophical movies, and leave me questioning reality.  The fact that my mind makes my body motion-sick when it’s not moving also does the same thing.

National Nightmares

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Being drawn into the dream of a madman.  Trump’s dream.  It seems like fiction, doesn’t it?  But, as they say, reality is stranger than.  I didn’t come up with this observation of being drawn into a madman’s dream myself.  It comes from Harlan Ellison via Stephen King.  When asked why he writes what is commonly called horror, Ellison pointed to the things happening at the time: Jonestown, Ayatollah Khomeini, etc., and replied something like the world was being drawn into Khomeini’s dream.  So the United States is being drawn in to the mad dream of Donald Trump.  I believe it’s because many people lack imagination.  There’s a reason I write “horror” stories in my spare time.  I prefer not to live in a madman’s dream.  Even if my stories are read by the few who frequent the journals in which they’re published, they are an attempt at viewing the world through unclouded eyes.

Entirely too much of our collective lives have been eaten up by Trump’s antics.  I was looking for an image on this blog going back some eight years and found, you guessed it, posts about Trump.  And here we are on the precipice again, all to stoke one man’s vanity.  And people ask why some of us write or watch horror?  We tend to treat insanity as if it’s rare.  Any self-aware, reflective person, when alone and honest, will admit that some things we do simply aren’t rational.  We’re not, as Silicon Valley moguls like to think of themselves, Mr. Spock.  (And even he underwent pon farr.)  The evidence of Trump’s manipulations is all over the place, but that doesn’t stop yard signs from popping up like toadstools.

We are far from a “sane” species.  We may wonder why deer step out onto the road and stare blankly into headlights, but we do the exact same thing.  Horror writers tend to be pretty clear thinkers.  I suspect it’s because many of them spend time trying to get into the heads of their irrational characters.  They can recognize the madmen and the dangerous among us.  King’s Twitter posts make no bones about his seeing through Trump.  The latter’s public speeches clearly indicate that his mental capacity isn’t sufficient to be given nuclear codes, let alone the reins of the most powerful country on the planet.  He dreams of his own greatness.  His desires are entirely for his own glorification.  Anyone can see that.  But we are creatures who dream.  And it’s difficult to wake up from a dream, even if it’s a nightmare.

Keep Them Open

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“To be is to be perceived.”  That was the summary of Berkeleyian philosophy we were taught in college.  In other words, not to be perceived is not to exist.  So, Don’t Blink kind of runs with that idea.  Before getting started, a spoiler: close your eyes if you don’t want to know something important.  Okay, so no explanation is given.  Ten friends (a lot of names to remember) drive to a resort that is so remote that you arrive with the fuel tank on empty.  The friends explore the resort but there’s nobody there.  Clearly people were there, just shortly before, but they’re all gone.  And then the friends start disappearing, but only when nobody sees them.  That’s the Berkeleyian angle.  The last survivor never does figure out what is going on, although the authorities seem to be aware that something’s up.  For those of us easily ignored, this is a scary movie.

It’s also another potential film for Holy Sequel.  After her boyfriend vanishes, one of the girls finds a Bible and begins claiming that God is punishing their sins.  Given that these are all millennials, this kind of thinking starts to get on the others’ nerves.  It’s not a major event in the film but it reinforces, as so many factors do, that religion and horror aren’t ever very far apart.  And in case you’re wondering, no, she’s not the survivor.  Neither does she suggest this might be the “rapture.”  During said event, the righteous disappear, not twenty-somethings with a weekend of sex on their minds.  The director, Travis Oates, is apparently a Hitchcock fan, so some elements fit into that sensibility.

I only found out about the movie because a friend suggested that it might be good beginner horror.  There are a couple of pretty intense scenes, but overall there’s not a ton of blood and guts.  There aren’t any jump startles, just a dread that continues to grow throughout.  I’m pondering how the Bible is being presented here.  It’s used as an apotropaic device—as protective magic.  Because the Bible is divine, it has, so the belief goes, the power to prevent harm.  Ultimately, in the world of this movie, nothing has that ability.  Although the Bible’s there, the message is pretty nihilistic.  Kind of like thinking about the heat death of the universe.  Still, the acting is good and the premise, although Vanishing on 7th Street also covered the idea of people just disappearing, is engaging.  Even though it doesn’t answer the question of why, or how, it is a movie that underscores the philosophy of George Berkeley as having perhaps been onto something.

Something Somewhere

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A friend suggested I might like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead films.  An unusually intellectual type of horror, these movies challenge perceptions of reality and are tied together with one or two thematic elements.  Something in the Dirt is their most recent offering and as far as existential horror goes, it’s a winner.  The storyline, as with their other films, plays with alternative realities bleeding over into what we think of as everyday life.  There’s a lot going on in this one that will keep you guessing until the end, and even after that.  Levi, a ne’er-do-well, awakes in his cheap apartment in LA and meets his neighbor, John, just outside.  Even this initial meeting has a sense of the surreal about it, but the two strike up a conversation, each trying to weigh the other’s truthfulness.

Levi’s apartment begins to show elements of paranormal happenings.  Neither he nor John have professional careers, so they figure they can use their off times to make a documentary about the phenomena to sell to maybe Netflix, setting them for life.  They each start coming up with theories about what is happening from ghosts to extraterrestrials to Pythagoreans building Los Angeles on an occult geometric pattern.  Ultimately they seem to settle on two basic forces of nature: electromagnetism and gravity.  Both are distorted in this apartment.  Meanwhile, each learns that the other isn’t quite what he seems to be.  Levi has a history of arrests that he downplays.  John is the member of an evangelical, apocalyptic group, but he’s also gay and claims to have made a ton of money that he donated to the church.  (Religion and horror, folks!)  Neither really trusts the other but synchronicities keep occurring, preventing either one from just ending the project.

They bring in occasional experts who have varying degrees of skepticism regarding whether the two are faking what they capture on camera.  After all, they include reenactments along with their actual footage.  I won’t spoil the ending here, but it is pretty much what a seasoned viewer of Benson and Moorhead might appreciate.  These movies are so unusual and so full of hard thinking that it seems odd that they aren’t discussed more often.  If I understand correctly, there is only one remaining film where they appear as writer, director, producer, editor, and director of photography that I haven’t seen.  They are the kinds of movies that if you binge on you’ll either end up enrolling in a graduate program in philosophy or spending the rest of the day blowing dandelion seeds into the wind.  Or maybe there’s something in all this.

Seasonal Poe

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The more I read of and about Edgar Allan Poe, the more convinced I become that he wasn’t as associated with horror in his own mind as he has become.  As one of the earliest American writers, he has become the icon of those who wrote on the dark side.  His contemporaries—Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—did as well, but it was Poe who became iconic.  On a recent trip to Michaels to take in the seasonal ambiance, Poe’s presence was difficult to ignore.  I wasn’t prepared to shoot a photo-essay (I’m not sure how they feel about such things in a store, in any case) so I didn’t photograph all the pieces.  “The Raven” is frequently referenced, with typewriters with the poem emerging and large, ominous black birds about, but Poe himself also appears.  There are, of course, painted busts of Poe.

But Halloween has grown more whimsical over the years.  Arguably for my entire life it has been primarily a children’s holiday, but many have noticed that those of us who grew up with Halloween have retained adult interest in it.  Part of this is no doubt commercial since the captains of industry have learned people will spend more on Halloween than any other holiday except Christmas (I do discuss this in my forthcoming book).  And indeed, the Headless Horseman appears quite a lot as well.  Irving, however, isn’t there on the ground.  Poe is.  The whimsical part comes through in showing the humor of the season.  For example, although Poe is shown in the noble bust format, he’s also portrayed (fully clothed) on the toilet.

Finally, there were figurines of a fanciful tombstone of Poe.  They even got the dates correct.  Now, there’s more to be said regarding the comparison with Irving.  You can find the Headless Horseman on the toilet as well (along with Dracula).  You can find the Horseman in bust format as well.  When it comes to tombstones, however, the fictional Ichabod Crane shows up alongside the nonfictional Poe.  That casts a certain light on Irving’s most famous story.  I’ll save that for another post, however, since authors are expected to repeatedly plug their books.  I left Michaels strangely reflective.  Poe-themed merchandise is fairly typical any given year, but since we’re having our first Halloween party in some years, and since I’ve been exploring Poe’s range as a writer, this clear abundance of Poe as an icon gave me pause.  As if I were coming within view of the melancholy house of Usher. 

Haunted Space

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A haunted house film set in space.  That’s what I thought and then read the same words in a published description of what the writer and director were going for.  In that way it was a clear success, but in others it struggles.  The premise is good, if jarring.  Space travel, which is the most scientific of scientific enterprises (there’s a reason the rest of us say, “I’m not a rocket scientist”) collides with the traditional supernatural.  The results are worth pondering.  Event Horizon has become a cult classic, and like many older films, has been more positively reevaluated in recent years.  So the crew of Lewis and Clark is on a rescue mission to the ship Event Horizon, in a decaying orbit around Neptune.  Neptune’s atmosphere provides lightning for this haunted house.  The crew learns that Event Horizon has been through a black hole and has returned sentient.  Its crew has no survivors and it won’t allow Lewis and Clark to either escape or to destroy it.

Those of us who watch horror looking for religion—and even general viewers—can’t help but notice that Event Horizon ended up in Hell and returned.  It plagues the rescue crew with hallucinations of their regrets and failures.  Weir, the scientist who designed Event Horizon, is more or less possessed and stops at nothing to save the ship, which has brought Hell back to this dimension.  Again, it’s a bit jarring, like vampires in space.  (Yes, I know it’s been done.)  There’s even a point where Weir informs one of the crew that the crewman doesn’t believe in Hell.  Heck, they’re in outer space on a ship technology built.  But what if there is a spiritual reality—“dimension,” in the film’s lingo—out there?  What if some traditional religions are right?

The movie’s not apologetic, but it’s offering a reminder that to be human is to be spiritual.  No matter how much science “proves,” there’s always potentially more “outside.”  Hell in Event Horizon is beyond the bounds of the universe.  It is another place but a place it is.  It costs some of the crew their lives, but does it claim their souls?  Event Horizon is one of those movies that the studio ordered severely edited, and for which the edited footage was lost.  Movies ever only show us what directors, producers, and studio execs want us to see.  People crave stories.  And when a movie, like Event Horizon, raises more questions than it answers, viewers want to know—what really does happen in a haunted house in space?

Some Body

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Many period movies are reevaluated and found better than originally critiqued.  (It feels strange to write that about a 2009 movie, but that was a decade and a half ago.)  I’d read about Jennifer’s Body before, but the title put me off from watching it.  Then, of all places, the New York Times recommended it last year during one of their autumnal forays into the horror genre.  Interestingly, it’s a possession movie with a few twists.  Demons are quite malleable monsters, of course.  So Jennifer and Anita (Needy) are best friends.  Jennifer is the girl all the guys want, and Needy, well, isn’t.  One night they go to hear a band at a local bar, and Jennifer leaves with them.  We later find out—spoilers about to appear—that their intention is to sacrifice a virgin to Satan to help them succeed as an indie rock band.  Jennifer’s no virgin, though, and demonic transference took place—i.e., Jennifer is possessed although the band gets their boost.

Then Jennifer has to eat people (high schoolers, of course) to survive.  She eventually tells Needy all of this, and her friend researches the occult and realizes her former friend is seriously dangerous.  And she decides to stop her.  I won’t give away the ending (it was only 15 years ago), but I will say that the overall result is somewhat unusual for a demon movie.  There’s plenty of religious imagery, but nothing really explicitly showcased.  For example, Needy’s mom has religious paraphernalia around the house.  There are no clergy in the story and Needy teaches herself what she needs to know about dispatching demons.  In other words, it’s a strangely secular possession movie.  And in the end demonic ability leads to justice.

The critical reappraisal is largely based on the feminist message and complexity of female relationships in the movie.  Both written and directed by women, those aspects aren’t unexpected.  And the movie is a horror comedy.  The funny parts tend to come from aspects of the dialogue since the acting is played straight.  This isn’t so much a scary movie as it is a smart one, which is probably why the Times critic recommended it.  Demons aren’t always scary monsters in horror, and what you end up being afraid of here is that the relationship between Jennifer and Needy might end since it seems to be the foundation on which two young women’s lives are built.  Is it a good movie?  Well, it’s not bad.  I tend to lean on the side of the reappraisers—it still has something to say. 

Another Host

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Several months ago I wrote about The Host, a movie I enjoyed but had watched by mistake.  By that I mean that someone had recommended The Host (2006) and I watched the completely unrelated The Host (2020).  (You can’t copyright titles.)  I waited long enough that the right Host became available on a service I use so it was, in essence, “free.”  This one is a Korean monster movie, directed by Bong Joon-ho.  I’d previously seen his excellent Parasite, and The Host didn’t disappoint in either the social commentary department or in the heart-felt monster tale.  In the latter department it has some common ground with Godzilla Minus One.  The Host begins with chemicals poured in the Han River causing a mutation that becomes a big problem.  This monster kills many, but the story focuses on the Park family where a ne’er-do-well father (Gang-du) disappoints his daughter and siblings.  Then the monster carries off his daughter.

The government, wishing to hide the origins of the creature (an American military facility did the chemical dumping) invent a virus story to keep people away from the river where they have trouble locating the monster.  Meanwhile Gang-du learns that his daughter is still alive, being kept as a future meal in the creature’s lair.   His father, sister, and brother all come together to try to find her, having to work around the corrupt government response to the crisis.  In other words, there’s a lot going on here.  The monster is believably rendered and its interactions with crowds of people don’t strain the imagination.  I do have to wonder if the creators of Stranger Things were familiar with this film.  Again, there’s some overlap there.  There are some holes in the plot, or it may be that I didn’t quite get everything (quite likely regardless).

It’s easy to see why the movie won so many awards.  The question that haunts me is whether this is a horror movie or not.  There are definitely horror aspects, but the overall feel is a meaningful monster movie, which isn’t really a recognized genre.  Monsters sometimes—often, in fact—bring out the best in people.  Without giving too much away, we can say that about this movie.  A family torn apart is reunited by a monster.  It doesn’t end well for them, but they have learned something by the experience.  And the movie is impressive from a cinematic perspective as well.  So now I’ve had two Hosts and although quite different from each other, both are recommended.

Burial Zone

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I don’t always believe the statistics.  Numerically, the number of horror films—depending on how the term is defined—declined into men (and sometimes women) in rubbery suits in the 1950s.  Indeed, it’s often opined that had not Hammer joined the horror business in the mid fifties that the genre born only twenty-something years earlier might’ve died out.  There seem to have been some good horror films made then, though, even if overlooked because of their B status.  A friend recently directed me to I Bury the Living, after reading my post about Carnival of Souls.  I have to confess to having never heard of I Bury the Living.  (Stephen King mentions it in Danse Macabre.)  Produced as a B movie it was itself buried among the various other efforts of the late fifties.  It’s not a bad movie, however.  In fact, it’s better than the title might lead you to believe.

The plot is something of a period piece—a well-respected department store supports a cemetery committee for Immortal Hills, the town’s graveyard.  Robert’s turn as chairman of the committee arises and he tries unsuccessfully to get out of the duty.  The caretaker, Andy, doesn’t want to retire, but he’s aging out.  The movie, however, revolves around the map.  The sold plots are marked with white pins while the plots already occupied have black.  When Robert accidentally puts black pins into newly purchased plots and the couple dies, he believes he’s cursed with an ability to kill those he black pins.  He substitutes a black pin for a white one at random.  The person dies.  In all, seven people succumb.  Convinced he’s murdered them, Robert decides to bring them back to life but putting the white pins back.  Only at this point does Andy confess that he’s been killing the victims in retaliation for being forcefully retired.

The ending is a little weak, but the psychological tension as it builds up is believable.  One critic compared it to an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, a comparison that has also been made for Carnival of Souls.  I would concur with that observation.  Although Twilight Zone wouldn’t air for another year, that kind of unsettling tale was already in the air.  No zombies appear, but the palpable belief that they might is what really makes the horror work in this instance.  The first half is an eerie story, but when Robert sticks in that first white pin a shift takes place.  Of course, modern viewers have been primed by Night of the Living Dead, so we know the possibilities.  Perhaps the power of Night gives life to older movies.  After all, anything can happen in the Twilight Zone.

Dancing with King

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There are books you wait too late to read, but which you read at just the right time for you.  That’s how I feel about Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  This book is endlessly cited in more academic treatments of horror and I knew I should read it.  And one thing I immediately appreciated is that even early in the eighties King expressed my long-term concern: many genres fall into horror.  He, perhaps rightly, considers horror a subspecies of fantasy.  Or course, fantasy has come to mean something quite different in the intervening half-century.  Still, the reader is treated to thrillers, sci-fi, and weird fiction.  There’s also a dose of the gothic and speculative as well.  King sets his four classes of monsters early: the vampire, the werewolf, the thing without a name (Frankenstein’s creature), and ghosts.  These are all very broadly conceived.

It will become clear in coming weeks, for anyone who’s interested, that the movies I “review” here have been influenced by King’s list.  And in the longer term, the books as well.  And I tend to agree with King’s antipathy toward television, although I disagree with his assessment of The Twilight Zone.  Danse Macabre is a book of its time, of course.  I would be curious as to the master’s reaction to such more recent classics as The X-Files.  I loved that he treated Ray Bradbury as a sometime horror author and it becomes clear that each of us finds different things scary.  The thing was, I found myself anticipating my too scarce reading time each day for the month it took me to read the book.  I often start books that I soon find myself approaching with a kind of duty to finish.  Love him or not, King is a talented writer and will keep you coming back, just like birds to a feeder.

I learned that King, too, appreciates bad movies.  He grew up about a decade and a half before I did, but the small-town culture I experienced as a child was not so different, although Sputnik was already up and the Cold War already on.  I guess what I find so engaging here is that this is a guy who speaks my language.  My tastes differ, of course, but there’s something comforting about whiling away the pre-dawn hours with a guy who can say “The Thing” and you know immediately what that vague phrase means.  And it was strangely reassuring to be reminded that the world of the seventies, which I experienced as a teenager, was just as scary as the world is right now.  And if King ever looked me in the eyes, I think he’d recognize something about me, although a sometimes critical fan.

Other Worlds

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There are any number of movies out there, and you find some that have evaded much comment by checking out the freebies on Amazon Prime.  That’s how I found Netherworld.  It’s not a great movie.  In fact, it’s about the opposite, but it is more southern gothic and since I’ve been watching Louisiana horror, well, why not?  It was free.  The story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, which is a pity because the ideas seem to have some potential.  So, Cory Thornton has inherited his father’s Louisiana estate.  He didn’t know his father and the estate is run by an improbable staff of one.  (One suspects a low budget had something to do with that.  For the film, not diegetically.)  The estate abuts a brothel where one of the employees turns evildoers into birds with the help of magic.

Meanwhile, the young master finds hints how to raise his estranged father from the dead, which, for some reason, he decides to do.  There are dream sequences and perhaps shades of Papageno.  Lots of birds in this film.  Cory—not very bright—only discovers late in the movie that his father was evil.  Hm, no hints of that in his admitted sexual dalliances and his desire to be resurrected.  No siree, none at all.  By the end I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was released directly to video.  But I was led down the rabbit hole by David Schmoeller, the director.  Schmoeller has received notice of such people as Stephen King, and has given the world some notable cult movies.  It’s fair to say he never made it big in Hollywood, but he worked on some films of repute, even drawing in Klaus Kinski at one point.

There are several tiers to the creative life.  There are those who attain fame, and layered down from them, those who produce movies, songs, novels—any kind of creative output—to those most of us have never heard of.  I find this profoundly hopeful.  Nobody is known to every single person on this planet.  Even the famous aren’t known by everyone.  I like to think I’m reasonably informed, but I keep on hearing about celebrities in art forms I don’t follow and have no idea who they are.  So before watching Netherworld I never paid attention to David Schmoeller, but then I learned he’d nevertheless made a career out of doing what he enjoyed, without becoming a famous director along the way.  There are some practical obstacles, of course.  Getting that first book published, or first movie distributed, but if you can get over that wall there may be a possibility of doing what you like.  It may not make you rich, but you’ll have accomplished something important.

Not What It Says

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The title sounds promising.  Gothic Harvest.  But the movie in no way lives up to it, even with its vampires vs. voodoo theme.  So, during Mardi Gras a group of four coeds decides to party in New Orleans.  Of course, this is the capital of American voodoo.  While drinking themselves to oblivion, one of them gets picked up by a local and taken back to the family home.  There, of course, she’s kept as food for the “vampire.”  An aristocratic woman who fathered a child with a slave has received a curse—she and her child remain alive, she aging, while the rest of the family is arrested at their present age.  (Really, the story makes little sense, so don’t ask.)  They need young blood to keep the aristocrat alive so that they can continue living.  In the right hands such a story might’ve made a passable horror film.  These weren’t the right hands.

It’s a good thing I’m trying to develop an aesthetic for bad movies.  The acting is bad, the dialogue is bad, the writing is bad.  Is there a moral here?  Don’t go partying during Mardi Gras since you might get picked up by a family under an ancient curse?  And  would it really hurt to do a second take of scenes where an actor stumbles over their lines?  I don’t know about you, but to me the title Gothic Harvest suggests that lissome melancholy of October.  You can start to smell it in the air in August and you know something is coming.  Honestly, I’m not sure why more horror films don’t capture that successfully.  I’m always on the lookout for movies that will catch my breath in my throat with the beauty and sadness of the season.  They are few and far between.

So, like a clueless coed during Mardi Gras, I’m lured into movies whose titles promise such things.  One of the movies that I, inexplicably, saw when I was young was the James Bond flick, Live and Let Die.  Roger Moore had taken the reins from Sean Connery but that film set my expectations for both the Big Easy and voodoo.  I’ve only been to New Orleans once, and that during a conference.  It was before the revival of my interest in horror.  Successful horror has been set there, of course.  The one thing Gothic Harvest gets right is the evocative nature of Spanish moss.  And the opportunity to try to learn to appreciate bad movies.

Teaching Horror

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Critics who complain that Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway has nothing new really have no appreciation for parables.  An Irish found-footage film, The Devil’s Doorway is, as it clearly states, a lament over the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.  I’d never heard of these institutions that existed until less than 30 years ago.  Founded by the Catholic Church, these “asylums” were places where women in trouble were essentially treated as slave labor.  Women, who often have difficulty hiding the results of sexual promiscuity (something men more easily get away with), were put to work in these reformatories.  I don’t know if the conditions were as bad as presented in the movie, but they provide a springboard into a perfectly serviceable horror film.  The horror tropes may be familiar, but that’s true of most horror of these days.

Two priests are sent to a Magdalene Laundry to investigate a reported miracle of a bleeding statue of Mary.  Please pardon my invocation of Alice Cooper here, but “Only Women Bleed” would be appropriate to consider.  Fr. Thomas, older and skeptical, doesn’t believe in miracles while Fr. John, the “techie” (it’s set in 1960) films the proceedings.  The priests uncover layer after layer of hypocrisy and deceit.  The Mother Superior, who shows no deference to the priests, insists that many of the pregnant women that have passed through the asylum were impregnated by clergy.  But there’s more.  As the statues bleed, a young woman, a pregnant virgin, is found kept in a dungeon.  Ghosts of murdered children cavort through the night.  A satanic niche for a black mass is discovered.  And the pregnant virgin is also possessed by a demon.  There’s a lot going on here.

To mistake all of this as “just a horror movie” is to miss the point.  Such is the way with parables.  Clarke, the director, was an unwed mother at 17 who realized that, had this happened a few years earlier, she could well have found herself confined to a Magdalene Laundry.  The movie doesn’t, it seems to me, condemn Catholicism per se.  For example, the two priests documenting the activities seem to be good people.  Fr. Thomas, as it turns out, had been born in this selfsame institution.  Raised as an orphan, he became a priest who, not surprisingly, doesn’t believe in miracles.  He too, was a victim.  Religious horror serves many purposes.  Often the very unfamiliarity of religion itself can drive the fear.  Another purpose, however, is to educate.  The Devil’s Doorway educated me, and I appreciate the parable.

Who Recommended?

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A couple of things: one-word titles can be confusing, and I need to start writing down where I get movie recommendations.  Trying to live reasonably on an editor’s salary, I can’t afford purchasing movies all the time, so I stream what’s free, now only when it’s on my list.  That’s how I had the misfortune of watching Shiver (2012).  I’m not sure it was the right movie, but I couldn’t find any others by that title near the top of IMDb and I couldn’t remember where I got the recommendation.  Although it uses many standard horror tropes, this flick veers a little too much into torture porn for my liking.  Also it’s very poorly written and many of the scenes are improbable (to put it mildly).  The police are totally incompetent (how many times can a serial killer’s intended victim be assured she’s safe by police when they can’t even get the perp to prison in good order?), almost to a Keystone degree.

And this isn’t some Hannibal Lector, either.  He’s kind of a psychopath that’s been making a living selling jewelry to his eventual victims.  Of course he’s a sexually frustrated guy who was bullied as a kid.  See, there are some moments of trying to establish some kind of social commentary, but the writing and most of the acting keep getting in the way.  The violence toward women goes unremarked, and that’s probably what most requires comment.  So I’m sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out who, or what, might’ve suggested this movie to me.  Or is there a different Shiver?  Did somebody leave the “s” off the end?  (I’ve already seen that one.)  I really do need to keep better records.

Bad movies come in many varieties.  This one was disturbing from any number of angles.  I don’t tend to watch serial killer movies.  Violence against women bothers me a lot.  Every main character had a bad childhood.  (One of the stories is simply told and then dropped.)  It’s a movie that might helpfully come with trigger warnings.  As I watched I wondered.  I wouldn’t been watching this if someone, or some respected publication, hadn’t recommended it to me.  Who and why?  Since I watch movies on weekend mornings, mostly, a bad one can start the day off on the wrong foot.  Someone, or some source, suggested Shiver.  Or maybe someone forgot a letter.  That’s the problem with one-word titles.

Outside Invisible

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Some of us are fated, it seems, always to be outsiders.  I have no inside knowledge of the film industry.  I barely keep up with the movies I want to see.  Although I write books about horror films, the main players in the field don’t know those books.  It’s like being invisible.  I had hoped to see The Invisible Man some four years ago.  The reboot, I mean.  And having finally caught up, I was impressed.  This is a scary movie that hits all the right buttons.  Most of us, by cultural assimilation, know the bare bones of the story.  A guy has figured out invisibility.  What does he do with this?  Uses it to assert his will over everyone.  In the original, the monocaine made Dr. Jack Griffin insane.  In the remake, an already controlling, self-centered millionaire (Adrian), unknown to anyone but his brother, perfects an invisibility suit.  When his girlfriend (Cecilia) leaves him, he uses it to try to destroy her.

Everyone believes she’s insane.  More than that, criminally insane.  Cecilia knows he was an optics genius and he leaves her subtle clues that he knows where she’s hiding.  He hurts those close to her and they assume Cecilia is causing the harm.  Then it escalates to murder.  Placed in an institution for the criminally insane, she knows Adrian is there with her.  Nobody will believe her, however, since, well, he’s invisible.  This is a movie nearly as harrowing as The Dark Knight.   An unstable genius with unlimited resources and the ultimate alibi forces his abused ex to suffer for ever having loved him.  It’s pretty incredible.  (Has to be seen, I’m tempted to say, to be believed.)

Now, I’m no insider so I didn’t realize that Universal had been attempting to build a Dark Universe franchise based on the original Universal monsters.  I had completely missed that Dracula Untold was the first of the reboots.  I did watch it but fell asleep.  (Hey, I was watching with friends who started it too late for my outsider schedule.)  I never got around to seeing it with my eyes fully open.  Although it made money, it wasn’t, I hear, very good.  Then three years later, The Mummy bombed.  I confess that there’s so many Mummy movies that I’ve lost track of them and I didn’t know this one existed.  Or flopped.  Invisible Man was intended as the third and the movies were to be interlaced into a Dark Universe.  Plans for that franchise have been dropped, but individual movies will continue to be made.  I guess I need to go back to the beginning again.  It only took me a decade to learn this, as is the way with outsiders.