If You Do

Leave a comment

Folk horror is particularly open to religion.  The powerful Euro-horror film, The Damned, is nearly worthy of Robert Egger status.  Indeed, the movie reminded me of Egger’s work, so perhaps Thordur Palsson is his Icelandic incarnation.  Set in a fishing station in a remote arctic bay in the 1870s, the owner’s widow oversees the operations of six fishermen and the woman who cooks and keeps the house.  Her husband died at sea the previous year, and the fishing has been very poor, threatening their existence.  They need to eat their catches, as well as their bait, trying to stay alive until spring.  Eva, the young widow, sees a ship foundering on the distant, jagged rocks.  The men insist that if she orders them to help, their food supplies will quickly be depleted, and the rescue operation would put them all at risk.  Lured to the wreck by a food barrel that has washed ashore, they encounter more men than they can keep and have to fight them off of their small fishing boat, killing one in the process.

The helmsman of the boat falls overboard and drowns as the survivors try to climb aboard.  The small boat manages to escape, however.  Helga, the housekeeper, warns Eva of the draugr, a monster of Nordic folklore that is a kind of zombie.  If it gets into your head, she warns, it will led to death.  Skeptical of folktales, Eva begins to change her mind as her small group of companions begins dying off.  Helga disappears.  One of the men dies after being stopped from killing a companion.  Eva is now left with only four men.  One of the men insists they are paying for their sin, and begins erecting a large cross as an act of penitence.  After seeing a man in the mist, the new helmsman dies by suicide.  Now convinced the draugr is real, Eva leads an expedition to find and destroy it.  This leads to the death of yet another crew member.  The three remaining people decide to flee by night in the boat.  Eva, however, encounters the draugr in the cabin and destroys him by fire.  A spoiler follows.

The shocking end reveals that the draugr was actually a survivor of the shipwreck and his presence explains the “supernatural” events they believed the monster caused.  Eva, delusional, kills the man.  The story plays heavily on both the isolation of the fishing station and the guilt the characters all undergo after leaving their fellow sailors to die on the jagged rocks.  Their fear transforms fevers into deadly paranoia as they kill one another and themselves off.  This is set against the stunning arctic scenery of the fjord that houses the station in a stark winter landscape.  And the conflict between religious systems is right there on the surface and deep within the minds of those isolated, far from civilization.

Precedes Essence

Leave a comment

Lars von Trier makes existentialist art films that sometimes veer into horror.  Antichrist was such a film, and one of the more disturbing that I’ve ever seen.  Melancholia was initially welcomed in a kind of reserved way, as I recall, when released in 2011.  A few years ago I sat down to watch it and didn’t quite make it halfway through.  The pacing wasn’t terribly moving and the story depressing.  These days Melancholia has been upgraded to one of the best movies of this century, so far.  It was a rainy Saturday and I decided to steel myself to try again.  It is an art movie, but not horror.  There are horror elements, but it is more about the torment of existence—existentialism again—as two sisters anticipate and face the collision of the earth with a rogue planet called Melancholia.

The ultra-slow montage at the beginning lets the viewer know that earth will not avoid or survive this collision.  Then Justine, one of the sisters, is shown heading toward her wedding reception.  She’s already depressed and the first hour or so of the movie shows the troubled interactions at the reception.  When things finally begin to wind down near dawn, she refuses to consummate the wedding and sends her new husband away.  Cheerful stuff.  The focus then shifts to Claire.  She and her husband John, and their son, are enormously wealthy.  They are also aware that Melancholia is approaching.  John insists that the calculations show it will be a near miss, but one nobody would want to miss seeing.  Claire isn’t so sure.  Justine comes to stay with them.

As the effects of the larger planet’s proximity begin to be felt, John realizes the calculations are wrong and dies by suicide.  Claire and Justine have opposite views of the impending end, with Justine declaring life is evil and should be wiped out (again, existentialism).  Then worlds collide.  This is a disturbing, but beautifully shot film.  I found out that it is, after Antichrist, the second of von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy.”  As someone seeking joy in melancholy, I’m glad to have seen the film.  I knew the planet collision plot, but I try not to read about movies in advance, so I wasn’t sure if this would be horror or not.  It was pretty clear from Antichrist that von Trier suffers from depression.  Melancholia confirms this and is a poignant cry of distress at being helpless in an uncaring universe.  And it invites viewers to ponder this as well.

Quatermass Again

Leave a comment

Quatermass, as I’ve noted before, is a name I knew from boyhood, but with no frame of reference.  Having watched The Quatermass Xperiment, and still seeking Quatermass and the Pit, I found a freebee of Quatermass 2 on a commercial streaming service.  Hammer films are notoriously difficult to find in the United States, unless you’re willing to pay serious money for them.  In any case, Quatermass 2 is a passible bad movie in the sci-fi-horror genre.  Quatermass is supposed to be a likable character, but for the film versions American “tough guy” Brian Donlevy played Quatermass in the first two movies.  But I need to take a step back.  Quatermass was a BBC television serial.  There were four series, each eventually made into movies.  The first three were reshot and the final one (The Quatermass Conclusion) was cobbled together from the serial rather than being refilmed.

Of this set of movies, The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass and the Pit are considered proper horror.  Brian Donlevy doesn’t garner a ton of sympathy in Quatermass 2.  This is mainly because of poor acting and a small budget.  Reputedly suffering from alcoholism, Donlevy has trouble with his lines and often appears curt and short-tempered (he was replaced in Quatermass and the Pit).  Even so, Quatermass 2 has monsters and some reasonably scary moments.  Here’s the story: alien invaders are taking over a secret government plant preparing for moon colonization.  Quatermass discovers the base and finds that everyone acts odd.  Interestingly, they’ve stolen his plans for the base.  The aliens take over people, body-snatcher style.  Quatermass and an angry mob manage to get into the base where the alien-infected fight them.  Eventually the huge monsters break loose and Quatermass has his own rocket converted to a bomb to destroy the mothership in geosynchronous orbit.  The infected people return to normal.

It’s fairly easy to see why few people comment on Quatermass 2.  I wouldn’t have watched it had I not stumbled across a clip showing some of its horror chops.  I’m glad, in a strange way, that I saw it.  I knew Quatermass was a telinema [link to Fire Walking]  product, but I wasn’t quite sure how the television serial fit together with the movies.  Quatermass 2 was bad enough to make me look it up.  From all my reading about horror movies, Quatermass and the Pit is the scariest of the four.  At least at this historical moment it’s not available on streaming services.  And that, I submit, is why we still need DVDs.  Digital rights management is rather like an alien invader…

Rabbit Hole Crawl

Leave a comment

Rabbit holes can be fun.  They can also leave you scratching your head.  David Schmoeller directed some third or fourth drawer horror films, among which is Crawlspace.  Having fallen down the Schmoeller rabbit hole, I found it streaming at the cost of frequent commercials.  Hey, that’s how I watched movies as a kid, so why not?  I was drawn to the movie by Klaus Kinski.  He is arresting on camera and directors knew it.  He was also famously difficult to work with.  Schmoeller apparently tried to get Kinski fired from Crawlspace, but without him it would’ve been a nearly complete waste of time.  That’s because Schmoeller’s story (he also wrote it) doesn’t make a ton of sense, even if it introduces some fascinating themes.  So Gunther (Kinski’s character) is a landlord.  He rents rooms in his house to young women that he murders, after spying on them through the eponymous crawl space.

Why does he murder?  Because his father was a literal Nazi and Gunther has tendencies in that direction.  He’s conflicted, though.  A medical doctor, he saved lives.  He also killed.  Caught up with the God-like power of determining life and death, he explores it at the expense of young women.  And their erstwhile lovers.  And occasional visitors.  Kinski pulls off this double life persona, making him believable.  Even so, the story doesn’t have much other depth.  There’s a lot of crawling around HVAC vents and inventing of insidious ways of murdering and tormenting people.  When Gunther finally loses it and puts on make-up and dresses as a Nazi it’s clear that this is the endgame.  I won’t spoil the ending, but I can say there’s a bit of irony there.

I first became aware of Klaus Kinski through his mesmerizing performance in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre.  His is one of the best vampire portrayals in all of cinema, in my opinion.  I wonder at the confidence of someone so difficult to work with and yet who appeared in more than 130 films.  I’ve been fired for doing a good job at least three times.  But then, I’m not a professional actor.  At least two of the directors Kinski worked with (Herzog and Schmoeller) made documentaries about how difficult he was.  There were rumors that both wanted him killed.  And yet he made a living acting.  (He was also married, and divorced, thrice.)  I’ve seen him in a handful of films and he does, in what makes it through to the final cut, command attention.  Without him Crawlspace would simply be a hole in the ground.

Philadelphia Story

Leave a comment

I’m guilty of a little home-state pride when I consider Philadelphia as a seedbed for diverse filmmakers.  Perhaps the most famous is M. Night Shyamalan, but I recently watched Tayarisha Poe’s first feature, Selah and the Spades.  Poe (and Edgar Allan also lived in Philly) is an African-American woman, and like Shyamalan, writes and directs her own movies.  Selah and the Spades came out in 2019, just as we were settling into pandemic life, but it is a gentle kind of dark academia.  A coming of age story set in a fictional Haldwell Boarding School, it features three African-American leads.  The violence is mostly offscreen, but there is a darker story here.  Selah heads the Spades, one of five factions of student-led extracurricular life on the elite campus.  She’s a senior who doesn’t want to face college—she enjoys her power and doesn’t want to appoint a successor.

The factions plan communal pranks, and each has its own specialization.  The Spades supply the alcohol and drugs to the student body.  This involves some violence, as is to be expected.  Selah has a record of ruining her protégés before they can become her successor.  The movie focuses on Selah’s relationship with Paloma, a transfer to the school who seems a promising new leader.  But Selah has difficulty letting go and the drama plays itself out in a student-led prom after the administration cancels the official prom due to the factions’ actions.  There are lingering shots and some art house elements to the film, making it a drama rather than a thriller.  Dark academia encompasses several genres and this is, as I say, a tamer one.

Philadelphia is a city with a generational history for me.  My mother, who was born in New Jersey, lived in Philly for some time as a child.  She found the city a scary place and unwittingly passed that fear onto me.  I’ve been to Philly several times, of course.  My main concern is driving there—the traffic is always intense and I don’t know my way around very well.  It is a diverse city.  While it’s too early to tell if Tayarisha Poe’s work will center around eastern Pennsylvania (I can’t find a summary of her second movie, The Young Wife, that states outright where it is set), it does underscore that the cinematic world is reaping some benefits from the city of sibling-like love.  And such things happen best when diversity is given a place to shine.

Breakage

Leave a comment

Glass makes me wonder; can any member of a trilogy really stand alone?  As someone who consumes fiction, the question always arises as to who really controls the meaning of individual units.  Scholars have given us reader-response theory that posits meaning rests with the reader (viewer, listener, etc.) rather than with the creator.  Being on an M. Night Shyamalan kick—I was brought in through his horror movies—I watched Unbreakable.  I vaguely knew it was a trilogy, but when I saw Split I was caught off guard.  Unbreakable was a super-hero movie.  Split was a horror film.  I knew Glass brought them together, but I wasn’t sure which way it would break.  It turns out the trilogy is a horror sandwich on super-hero bread.  It’s also surprisingly thoughtful.  And over two hours long.  There are horror elements, but it made me wonder since Split is horror, could it stand alone without the other two.

Having read about the development of this a little bit, Unbreakable could have stood alone.  It did for sixteen years.  Split could also, but for the reveal in the last few minutes.  And Glass manages to pull the whole thing off with a characteristic Shyamalan twist ending.  I’ve written about the other two movies in their own posts, but I really don’t want to give any spoilers for the last one.  I can say it ends with a message that is worthy of the Matrix.  It shows what movies can do.  Or at least it was taken that way by this viewer.

Given what movies are, and what they represent, I have to wonder if there’s not a good dose of racism in the criticism of Shyamalan’s work.  His movies are intriguing, without fail.  I haven’t seen all his films, but I have watched eleven of them now.  Some multiple times.  Here’s a guy with stories to tell.  I know, as a fiction writer who has trouble selling anyone on my vision, that a story can take over your life.  And you want to tell that story and see if it resonates with anyone else.  Those of us who make up tales generally recognize when something we write isn’t good.  My list of unfinished or unpursued stories dwarfs the stack of those I’ve had published, or tried to.  When you release a story out there in the world, you hope that others will get it.  I trust certain auteurs.  Even if not all of their films appeal to me, I like to think I see what they’re getting at.  This trilogy is well worth watching through to the end, even if it isn’t horror.

Not Just a Visit

Leave a comment

I’ve been on a bit of an M. Night Shyamalan kick lately.  When The Visit showed up on a streaming service I could access, and it was a rainy afternoon when yard work was impossible, I decided to give it a try.  I first became aware of Shyamalan as a horror auteur.  The Village was his first movie I saw, followed by Signs and The Sixth Sense.  (I knew about The Sixth Sense because of the press around the trailer accidentally being shown to underage audiences in theaters.)  I’ve seen some of his movies that aren’t that scary: The Happening, Unbreakable, The Lady in the Water, for example, and others that are.  Knock at the Cabin, Split, and now, The Visit.  The Visit has a twist ending and I’m pretty sure that spoilers will make their way into paragraphs below, so if you’re holding off seeing it, you might want to wait before reading further.

The set-up is innocent enough.  A mother estranged from her parents is letting her two children, both minors, visit their grandparents while she takes a cruise with her new boyfriend.  (The children’s father had left.)  Becca, the daughter, plans to make a documentary of the trip.  The movie is found footage.  Sending the kids off by train, they make it to the grandparents’ house in Chester Springs, completely remote from wifi, to stay for a week.  Initially the stay goes great.  The grandparents, however, have some strange issues.  The grandmother’s sundowning disturbs the two kids, and the grandfather also displays elements of dementia.  As the week goes on, these things grow more intense.  Once the mother returns home, they Skype her (there is ethernet at the house) and when she sees the grandparents she realizes (spoiler follows!)

that the people watching her kids aren’t her parents.  They are a couple escaped from a mental institution.  Not only that, but they have also killed the actual grandparents and one of the visitors to the house.  The mother calls the police, but the insane couple makes their move to take care of the kids.  The youngsters are more resourceful than it seems, and are able to get out of the house just in time.  The police and their mother arrive, shuttling them to safety.  As with Split, the fear derives from a situation of mental illness.  There are some disturbing scenes in this film and it manages to bring in some legitimate scary stuff as well as a few effective jump-startles.  I guess I still see M. Night Shyamalan as a horror auteur.

Deadly Seven

Leave a comment

Seven, styled Se7en, shades more toward the thriller end of the stick than horror.  The two are very closely related, of course, but as a gritty cop drama, the main horror element is the gore.  And the serial killer.  Indeed, it’s often compared to The Silence of the Lambs, a card-carrying horror club member.  My main complaint is that much of the movie is shot so dark that you can’t see what’s going on.  The unnamed city is about as cheerless as Bladerunner, and even when people aren’t being stalked by the serial killer they’re being murdered anyway.  So this dark setting brings together two detectives, one retiring (played by Morgan Freeman) and one with anger issues (Brad Pitt) set to take over.  The two are only supposed to overlap seven days, but the seven in the title refers also to the seven deadly sins.  

A literate cop drama—Freeman knows his literature (Milton, Chaucer, Dante, and even Thomas Aquinas)—it is a step above the standard crime drama.  The fact that Freeman spends his nights in the library may be the reason some people consider this dark academia.  The academic part is otherwise absent.  In any case, it is Freeman who recognizes that victims are being killed for their embrace of one of the seven deadly sins.  An obese man is fed to death, a greedy lawyer has to cut off a pound of his own flesh (in a hat-tip to Shakespeare).  When Freeman’s character tells Pitt’s that it’s from the Merchant of Venice, the later says “I’ve never seen it.”  Not read it, but watched it.  It’s Freeman who recognizes the endgame that the serial killer is playing and tries to warn Pitt.  But Pitt’s wrath is also a deadly sin.

The seven deadly sins aren’t biblical.  They emerge in early Christianity, taking shape through such writers as Tertullian, Evagrius, and Pope Gregory I.  They have remained in Catholicism as  pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth (which sounds like the profile of some narcissists in the news).  They’ve been used in proper horror films as well as in thrillers, giving a convenient number of infractions to pursue.  Seven is one of those films that has become more highly regarded over time.  One might say that a prophet is without honor in their own time.  In any case, the movie is gripping and sad and a bit bloody.  It doesn’t unfold exactly as you might expect.  And no matter its genre, it can leave you thinking.

Not Fragile

2 Comments

One of the problems with auteur theory is that you cast directors into an expected genre in your mind.  Or at least I do, and that is unfair to directors since they, like those of us who write, sometimes explore different genres.  My first exposure to M. Night Shyamalan was The Village.  Next was Signs.  And finally, The Sixth Sense.   (I was one of those creeped out by the “I see dead people” of the trailer for the latter, and it took several years for me to get over that.)  These were enough to solidify Shyamalan as a horror auteur in my mind.  I think the other films of his that I’ve watched, The Happening, Knock at the Cabin, have all been horror as well.  While some have classified it that way, many consider Unbreakable to be a thriller instead.  These two genres are very closely related, in any case, and I’d been wanting to see it.

Unbreakable is a movie to get you thinking.  It’s old enough that I’m not going to worry about spoilers here, so be warned.  David Dunn, after surviving a train wreck that killed everyone else, runs into Elijah Price, an art dealer and comic book aficionado, who is, literally fragile.  A rare disease renders his bones weak and since his childhood love of comic books informed his outlook, he wants to find a hero.  Dunn seems to be the man.  Never sick in his life, he survived a car crash with no injuries and his only weakness seems to be water (he nearly drowned as a child).  Price tries to convince him that he is indeed a superhuman, but his partially estranged wife disagrees.  Their son, however, believes.  The twist ending has us realize that Price has been conducting terrorist activities in order to find a hero and he “confesses” once he’s certain Dunn is real.

There are definitely some very tense moments in the film.  There aren’t any monsters, and Shyamalan wanted this to be known as a comic book hero movie (which it is).  He has directed some others in this genre as well, none of which I’ve seen.  I watch hero movies now and again, but they often lack the depth of good horror.  Unbreakable, however, does have depth.  At least it makes you think.  Is the good of convincing a hero that he can help people worth the hundreds of deaths it took to find him?  Price’s motivation seems pure, but his methods are evil.  These kinds of dilemmas are inherently thought-provoking.  But I will still probably continue to think of Shyamalan as a horror director.  Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

What the Devil

2 Comments

Apart from being one of the most controversial films of all time, The Devils is also devilishly difficult to locate.  For as influential as it was (you can’t tell me nobody in Monty Python saw this before making Holy Grail) it has largely been buried, at least in the United States.  It doesn’t stream and to get a viewable copy you are limited to a Spanish language import DVD and have to manually select English as the language if you want to hear it as produced.  The question is if you do want to see/hear it.  Written and directed by Ken Russell, it is over-the-top.  Chaotic and cacophonous, it’s almost distracting and somewhat boring for about half its run time.  Then it turns incredibly violent and grotesque.  So why did I watch it?  Well, for one thing, it was something I knew I could’ve included in Holy Horror, had I been able to access it then.  For another thing, I’d read about it many times and was determined to find it.

Based on historical events (but stylized to the point of abstraction), the film is about the Loudun possessions of 1634.  Nuns in an Ursuline convent began displaying the kinds of tics that girls would display in Salem some 58 years later.  A local, unconventional priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching them and was burned at the stake.  The film makes much of the political machinations taking place, and revels a little too much in the behavior of the nuns.  It also enjoys portraying medieval torture methods and has an almost Clockwork Orangesque feel to it.  Released in 1971, it was given restrictive ratings where it was permitted to be shown, and although some horror has surpassed the excesses in recent years.

Religion’s relationship to horror is a frequent topic of discussion on this blog.  This movie is a textbook example of that.  After my nerves stopped jangling so much, I recollected that Ken Russell was also responsible for Lair of the White Worm.  Another story of debauched nuns and religion gone awry, it made me wonder what Russell’s personal interaction with religion might have been.  He apparently converted to Catholicism and then converted away again.  It certainly doesn’t get much sympathy in his movies.   Father Grandier is somewhat heroic in The Devils, but the overall institution is clearly corrupt.  In some cases religion is the means of fighting horror.  In other cases it is the cause of the horror.  Here the latter is clearly on display, and even that is, unfortunately, over the top.

Remembering Winter

Leave a comment

There’s a deep satisfaction at attaining a goal, no matter how low the bar.  Having rediscovered the “Beast Collection” after looking to see if Snowbeast was on it—it was missing from another DVD collection I have—I determined to watch my way through.  It took two or three months, maybe four, but I finally finished it out with Snowbeast itself.  One of a spate of Bigfoot films from the seventies, this was a made-for-television movie.  Many retrospectives show a movie going up in critical estimation over the years, but this one seems to have sunk down into the “bad movie” category.  But still, of the seven (!) Sasquatch films in the pack, it is clearly the best.  A low bar, as I say, but still, it has the advantage of being relatively well written.  Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay, was one of the minds responsible for The Outer Limits.  He also had credit for writing the screenplay for Psycho. 

Decent writing can help redeem bad movies.  But more than that, you can actually care for the characters.  In some bad movies you have a difficult time raising any feeling for the people portrayed—that’s true for more than one of the other films in this collection.  Here are people that doubt themselves, but have good hearts.  The story isn’t complex (one of the reason modern critics scorn it).  A ski resort in Colorado—much of the movie shows people either skiing or snowmobiling—a young woman is killed by the eponymous snowbeast.  When the owner of the lodge insists on keeping it open for a festival, the current manager (her grandson) is reluctant to kill something that’s so human.  There’s a bit of a moral quandary here, which provides some traction on a slippery slope.

The beast then kills a member of the search and rescue team, and they know they have to destroy it.  The principal characters track it down, and after the beast gets the sheriff, they shoot it.  As I say, not much of a plot, but the characters have some depth.  It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it doesn’t leave you feeling as if you’d have more enjoyed doing your taxes.  And that’s saying something for a collection of movies that cost less than most single DVDs.  Now if that makes me sound old, keep in mind that this movie was from the seventies.  And even if most re-appraisers think it has grown worse over time, I’m willing to disagree.  After all, I just accomplished something by watching it.

Father of Yeti

Leave a comment

“Always steals women.”  So Subra mutters high in the Himalayas.  Perhaps one of the most unintentionally funny bad movies, The Snow Creature does hold a place in history.  It was the first abominable snowman, or yeti, movie made.  It’s also incredibly cheaply made with a costume that most twelve-year-olds could’ve fabricated better.  As the antepenultimate movie in the “Beast Collection,” I felt obligated to watch it one snowy weekend.  Spouting colonialist and sexist values like a Republican, the story is tedious even at eighty minutes.  But funny at times also.  So a botanist travels to the Himalayas to study plants at 10,000 feet.  His fun is interrupted when a yeti kidnaps the head sherpa’s wife, causing the sherpa to take charge and start to hunt the beast.

The American scientist decides to capture the yeti instead so that he’ll have something to give the foundation sponsoring the expedition.  Leaving behind a female and baby yeti, both killed, he drugs the snowman until a special refrigerated container can be built—gee whiz, Americans can do anything!—to bring the beast back.  And they fly west from Bombay to California, where, when they land the beast is held up in customs (I kid you not).  There’s a debate about whether he’s human or animal and while the debate goes on, the creature escapes.  The hapless police can’t find a seven-foot tall yeti wandering around Los Angeles at night, harassing the women.  Finally they figure he’s using the storm sewers.  They trap him but, alas, have to shoot him.  At this point they completely lose interest in the corpse and exchange meaningless banter as they drive off.

This movie seems to be what the Trump administration wants America to revert to.  Bossing around BIPOC people in their own countries, women being helpless without men to rescue them, and corporations buying what is arguably a human being.  Sounds like a playbook to me.  Also, it was extremely cheap.  What amazed me is that United Artists distributed it.  People must’ve been pretty hungry for entertainment back in 1954.  Having said that, it is worth watching for a laugh.  Now that streaming exists, you can find this free on various services.  If you like very wooden acting, and superior Americans having their way in Asia just because they’re, well, Americans, you might find this a passable way to spend a snowy weekend (wait til winter to watch it; it’ll keep).  Only a word of advice: be sure to lock up your women before you do, because the beast always steals women.

Unusual Autopsy

Leave a comment

I avoided The Autopsy of Jane Doe for some time because, well, autopsy movies just aren’t my thing.  Besides, I thought it might be a “true crime” sort of movie and those aren’t my favs either.  That didn’t stop the recommendations, so I gave in.  I’m glad I did.  It’s a cut above a lot of what’s out there, and although it does rely on a few more jump-scares than I like, it isn’t all about them.  And it turns out that it’s Holy Sequel material.  Here’s how the story goes: a father and son mortician team, who have the morgue in their basement, specialize in determining cause of death for the local sheriff.  When four bodies are found in one house and none of it makes sense, the sheriff brings the most suspicious body, Jane Doe, to the morticians for their assessment.  Externally the body has no marks, so what killed her?

The majority of the movie is the attempt to solve this mystery.  The father and son find impossible things—evidence that the woman had been tortured, but there were markings on internal organs without any damage to the skin.  They soon determine this is bad juju and when lights begin shattering and corpses get up and walk around they know they were right.  They’re trapped, however, in their basement.  It’s clear that this Jane Doe isn’t quite through with them.  I’ll try not to spoil the ending here, but I did mention that the Bible comes into it.  How so?  Well, it turns out that one of the impossible things in the body is a charm that has Leviticus 20.27 written on it (the passage about not allowing witches to live).  And although it invokes Salem, it does so in a way that suggests the witch hunters were to blame.

This movie was actually out before Holy Horror was finished, but as I point out in that book, there is no website or repository listing horror films that use the Bible.  To write a book like that, you have to do a lot of watching.  I love watching movies, but it takes both time and money, items in constant short supply in my life.  When I do watch, I try to make connections.  It would also be interesting to write a book on how Salem is portrayed in horror movies.  What with the work-a-day world in which I live, I’m not sure how many more books I can crank out.  Especially when they don’t sell.  The important thing is not to let the title of a movie put you off, for autopsies can reveal much.

Late Night

Leave a comment

If you lived through the seventies, Late Night with the Devil will take you back a bit.  It’s one of the more creative possession movies I’ve seen, but what really makes it stand out is the insider winks plentifully on offer.  Jack Delroy is a late-night variety show host wanting to top Carson.  His ratings have been up and down, and he decides to make his 1977 Halloween episode his ticket back into the game.  His guests that night include a psychic, a James Randi-like debunker, and a parapsychologist and her demonically possessed charge, Lilly.  A character resembling Anton LaVey, Lilly’s father, had raised her to be a child sacrifice to the demon Abraxas.  The broadcast even mentions Ed and Lorraine Warren, as well as The Exorcist.  Someone knows what the paranormal scene was like in the seventies.

The psychic has authentic contact with what he believes is Delroy’s deceased wife and while the debunker, well, debunks him, the psychic nevertheless dies after a mysterious attack.  Delroy insists that the parapsychologist summon Lilly’s demon, while on stage.  The debunker claims that what the audience saw was a case of group hypnosis, but the demon finally attacks, killing everyone but Delroy and Lilly.  Toward the end the layers of claimed deception become so deep that it’s difficult to know, at first, how to interpret the ending.  Or whether you are supposed to “believe” the climatic demonic attack, of if you’re supposed to conclude that it was part of the mass hypnosis.  What is certain is that religion is front and center in this horror, but the demon ensures that in any case.

The taped pieces between segments of the show make it clear that this is all about ratings.  Indeed, Delroy sacrificed his wife’s health and life to try to break into the lead.  The real demon here is capitalism.  The desire to be on top has outweighed every other and hints are given throughout that Delroy isn’t as innocent as he pretends to be.  Still, the main thing is that the movie gets the paranormal seventies in America just about right.  The disturbing implication is that people are suggestible to the point of not being able to distinguish reality from manipulation.  That pall hangs over the entire movie plot as well as the ending.  This kind of meta critique isn’t intended to detract from what is really quite a good horror movie.  It is believable in the context of the world it devises, and that world includes demons.

Lights, Cam

Leave a comment

Techno-horror is an example of how horror meets us where we are.  When I work on writing fiction, I often reflect how our constant life online has really changed human beings and has given us new things to be afraid of.  I posted some time ago about Unfriended, which is about an online stalker able to kill people IRL (in real life).  In that spirit I decided to brave CAM, which is based on  an internet culture of which I knew nothing.  You see, despite producing online content that few consume, I don’t spend much time online.  I read and write, and the reading part is almost always done with physical books.  As a result, I don’t know what goes on online.  Much more than I ever even imagine, I’m sure.

CAM is about a camgirl.  I didn’t even know what that was, but I have to say this film gives you a pretty good idea and it’s definitely NSFW.  Although, having said that, camgirl is, apparently, a real job.  There is a lot of nudity in the movie, in service of the story, and herein hangs the tale.  Camgirls can make a living by getting tips in chatrooms for interacting, virtually, with viewers and acting out their sexual fantasies.  Now, I’ve never been in a chatroom—I barely spend any time on social media—so this culture was completely unfamiliar to me.  Lola_Lola is a camgirl who wants to get into the top fifty performers on the platform  she uses.  Then something goes wrong.  Someone hacks her account, getting all her money, and performing acts that Lola_Lola never does.  What makes this even worse is that the hacker is apparently AI, which has created a doppelgänger of her. AI is the monster.

I know from hearing various experts at work that deep fakes such as this can really take place.  We would have a very difficult, if not impossible, time telling a virtual person from a real one, online.  People who post videos online can be copied and imitated by AI with frightening verisimilitude.  What makes CAM so scary in this regard is that it was released in 2018 and now, seven years later such things are, I suspect, potentially real.  Techno-horror explores what makes us afraid in this virtual world we’ve created for ourselves.  In the old fashioned world sex workers often faced (and do face) dangers from clients who take their fantasies too far.  And, as the movie portrays, the police seldom take such complaints seriously.  The truly frightening aspect is there would be little that the physical police could do in the case of cyber-crime.  Techno-horror is some of the scariest stuff out there, IMHO.