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.

Divided by Eight

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Analogies are useful, but never precise.  When Midsommar came out last year, people were saying “It’s like Wicker Man.”  It’s a good analogy, but not precise.  The plots have quite a bit in common and both are part of the genre that we might call intellectual horror.  Midsommar is a slow burn where you know from the beginning that something’s not right, and you can’t quite figure out what.  I’ll try not to give away too much, in case, like me, you’re late in seeing it.  It involves a group in Sweden, the Hårga, who celebrate a Midsummer ritual every 90 years.  A group of five graduate students—and the writers of the movie actually do know what grad school is like—go to study the ritual.  In central Sweden, far enough north that it’s never really night, they discover a pleasant group of white-garbed believers who use a combination of drugs, sleep deprivation, and folk magic to get the pawns into place.

What fascinates here is just how a fictional religion, with some basis in reality, becomes the vehicle for horror.  The deaths of three of the students are all in the service of a belief system that involves runes, fertility rites, scriptures, and ritual suicide.  It’s self-aware enough that one of the students compares it to Waco early on.  If there were no exotic religion here, there would be no horror.  Tragedy, yes, but horror, no.  The entire energy of the genre draws from four of the students (the fifth is from the community in Sweden) not knowing what is going on.  The village of the Hårga is isolated, and there is no law to keep them within the bounds of secular behavior.  By the end of the film you feel that secular is much safer than religious.

Midsommar foreshadows much of the horror in the illustrations that the community readily supplies.  Paintings show what is coming although the viewers, like the students, don’t know what they’re seeing at the time.  Some of the horror is based on shock, but the director doesn’t stoop to startle scares.  Well, maybe once.  This is horror that you can see coming and you’re fully aware that it’s because the white-robed ones truly believe.  The ending is similar to Wicker Man and the message is much the same.  Religion, when taken too seriously, leads to the sacrifice of those deemed outsiders.  And you don’t have to go to Sweden to find it.