Found Unfound

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I think I need to swear off found footage films.  My first horror attempt this October failed with Hell House LLC.  I was watching at the behest of a friend.  Hopefully one who isn’t aware of my very low dizziness quotient.  Extreme camera motion!  I was determined to try to make my way through because the Bible was introduced early on, earning it a place in Holy Sequel, but I could only make it half-way through by watching about half of that first half out of the corners of my eyes.  Even that wasn’t enough to help.  I understand they’re going for “authenticity.”  I know that walking with a camera makes it difficult to keep still, but hey, Steadicam was invented for a reason.  But instead of enjoying my weekend, I’m lying absolutely still in a darkened room.

I’m guessing demons are involved, from what I’d been able to see.  Demons that move a clown dummy around.  From the Wikipedia summary it sounds like I’m not far wrong.  So let’s step back a bit: Paul, with his girlfriend Sara and a staff of three, are setting up a haunted house attraction for Halloween at Hotel Abaddon.   The property is a fixer-upper, but sufficiently creepy that they don’t need to do a ton of work on making it unsettling.  Since it’s a hotel, they stay on site while getting it ready.  They hire scare actors and things are progressing, but the cameraman (especially) is getting freaked out, mainly at night.  That’s as far as I got.

The framing story is that a mysterious accident occurred on opening night leaving 15 people dead.  The “found footage” explains what happened.  They do make reference to Abaddon as a demon who guards Hell.  The Good Book actually uses the term as a reference to Hell itself also.  One of the scare actors informs Paul that the hotel really had the reputation for being haunted before they started setting it up as a haunted house.  Of course, the movie spawned a franchise.  Perhaps my condition is getting more acute as I age—I watched Blair Witch without any trouble—but as I write this a few hours later I still have to be careful about moving my head too much.  I can scratch it, though.  And I wonder as I do so if a little less camera motion would’ve ruined the effect they were going for.  To me the most frightening aspect is being nauseous for the remainder of the day, especially when weekends are precious free time.

On October

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October has come quickly this year.  September was quite transitional.  Mostly pleasant, but we shivered through the recent sunless days of the nor-easter around here.  Between work and full weekends, I wish the approach of my favorite month could feel more regal.  I know die-hard horror fans watch movies in that genre every night of this month.  My schedule won’t allow it, and I’ve been so busy that I’ve fallen behind on movie watching.  Most of the time the movies I discuss on this blog are ones I’ve seen the previous month or two.  It seems I have lots of other things to write about.  And I’ve been trying to step up my reading this year.  Goodreads tells me I’ve finished sixty books so far in 2026.  And so October snuck up on me.

For scholars of religion, and those of us who pretend to be such, October starts in earnest the planning for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting.  It will be in Denver this year.  Last time it was there I shivered the whole time.  A colleague recently asked me to contribute to a volume on Ugarit.  I had to decline, being so out of date.  I could’ve said, “My mind is preoccupied with October.”  Horror movies and Halloween.  The changing of the leaves.  Jacket weather and reading gothic novels.  Pumpkins and apples. October is the month when many in this climate feel that they come alive, just in time for the darkness and cold of winter to settle in.

For many years I’ve been pondering the spirituality of the dark.  I don’t mean “dark powers” or Satanism or anything like that.  I mean the restorative, contemplative nature of being in the dark half of the year.  Since the equinox it’s been more dark than light.  We spend half of each year in this way.  Instead of cursing the dark, it seems to make sense to try to find its spiritual benefits.  In the Middle Ages monks used to awake in the night to say their prayers.  Even today spiritual writers occasionally venture into the realm of asking what we might learn to appreciate in the dark.  October’s a good time to think about such things.  Others have also begun to explore the spirituality of horror films.  This began to occur to me, in rudimentary ways, when I was a student in seminary.  So suddenly October is here.  Hopefully it will have some time tucked away for reflection.  Between watching horror movies, of course.

B’s and Q’s

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A friend who read my review of The Stuff recommended Q: The Winged Serpent.  The former was the first Larry Cohen movie I’d seen, one that I stumbled upon while looking for something free to watch.  I was favorably impressed—it was a comedy horror that worked.  Q was earlier and was more of a low-budget horror, but with elements of satire in it.  As well as social commentary.  If you can handle stop-motion animation, and you want to see the inside of the Chrysler Building dome, you might enjoy this monster flick.  And there was a good deal of theology in it.  It’s certainly worth talking about in the context of horror and religion.  One warning in advance: if you’re like me, all the camera motion—many aerial shots of Midtown Manhattan, it might make you a little woozy.  It did me.

The movie follows a petty criminal who discovers the lair of Quetzalcoatl inside the Chrysler Building.  Meanwhile, a priest of Quetzalcoatl is sacrificing willing victims in Manhattan to bring the deity back.  A cop who’s willing to believe (Detective Shepard) researches beliefs in the Aztec god and tries to connect the sacrificial murders with people who are disappearing—often from Manhattan rooftops.  The question arises: is this a god or just a monster?  That’s a freighted question these days.  This idea is that if it can be killed it’s just a monster.  If not…

The story has its shortcomings and the direction isn’t great, but overall it’s not bad.  A creature-feature with some thought.  As Shepard chases down experts he starts to understand that even if this is just a monster, there are devotees of Quetzalcoatl in Manhattan killing (willing) victims.  At one point Shepard says, upon seeing a victim with his heart cut out, “All we have to do is eat the bread and drink the wine,” or something similar.  This is fairly sophisticated coming from a B movie.  Religion is also behind some of the humor as well.  When the Aztec priest comes after the petty criminal he can’t kill his victim unless he says a prayer.  The criminal refuses, and in doing so saves his life.  Interesting thought.

While having the trappings and feel of a B movie, Q gives the viewer of religion and horror movies something to think about.  The movie doesn’t reference the Bible or quote it, so it can’t make Holy Sequel, but it’s worth a lazy weekend afternoon to give you something to think about.

Eating Sin

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Although a good example of religion and horror, and a member of Holy Sequel, The Order isn’t a great movie.  For a plot that delves into Catholicism, it doesn’t have a great understanding of religion.  It misuses the term “theosophy,” to boot.  So, Fr. Alex is a Carolingian priest, one of two remaining.  He says the mass in Latin with his back to the congregation.  Then he’s sent to Rome by a corrupt Cardinal to investigate the suicide of his mentor.  Before setting off for Italy he invites his last fellow Carolingian, Fr. Thomas, to come.  A woman who escaped a mental institution after shooting him during an exorcism also comes.  Once the investigation begins, Fr. Alex determines a sin-eater killed his mentor.  The Cardinal gives him a special, ritual knife that is needed to kill the sin-eater.  His associate, Fr. Thomas, knows how to get underground Catholic knowledge leading to said sin-eater.

The sin-eater convinces Fr. Alex to seek what he wants.  The priest wants the girl who tried to kill him, so he renounces his vows to sleep with her.  The sin-eater wants to die—he’s been at this for five centuries and is weary.  He attacks the girl, making it look like suicide, so Alex has to eat her sin to get her to Heaven.  He then kills the sin-eater.  The corrupt Cardinal had made a deal with said, dead sin-eater, that if he arranged for the sin-eater’s release, he’d become Pope.  Alex, who has now taken over as the sin-eater, foils this plan and decides to use his now power for just causes.

All fairly convoluted.  Of course, the sin-eater idea would be picked up a few years later in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.  That’s where I was first exposed to the concept.  A sin-eater is a folkloric concept going back at least to the seventeenth century, mainly in the British Isles.  It has been under-explored by academics (it has “history of religions thesis topic” written all over it).  It’s an interesting idea but isn’t handled well in this movie.  There’s the trope of esoteric Catholicism at play, and interestingly, The Da Vinci Code came out that same year.  Dan Brown’s novel played into the Zeitgeist regarding things the Catholic Church didn’t want laypeople to know (supposedly).  The novel sold an obscene amount of copies.  For all that, we’re no closer to learning the actual history of sin-eaters.  Thesis topic calling!

Not Really

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Some horror films just have trouble finding their way.  Blessed is one such movie.  The writing is one problem.  The misunderstanding of religion is an even larger issue.  Samantha and her novelist husband Craig can’t have children.  When he gets a large advance for his first book (dream on) they visit a fertility clinic in upstate New York where Samantha becomes pregnant with twins.  The lake scenery in a light winter (actually in Romania) is the best part of the film.  It’s quite evocative.  The clinic, in any case, shares facilities with a cloning company.  And Craig gets introduced to a tycoon who works in multiple industries, including publishing and, hmm, cloning.  As Samantha grows visibly more pregnant Craig becomes more focused on his writing, neglecting her and visiting the tycoon in the city whenever he can.  It’s implied that they have an understanding, but that doesn’t hold with the ending.

An Italian priest starts to warn Samantha about the evil at the clinic.  Not only that, but the tycoon tells her about his fascination with saints, including Ambrose who killed an angel—Lucifer—whose blood was sealed in a vial recently stolen from the monastery in which it was kept, as per the Italian priest.  That blood made its way to the cloning clinic and so, yes, Rosemary, Samantha’s carrying twin children of the devil.  The priest kidnaps Samantha and prays with her, insisting that she take poison to banish the evil.  He then tries to burn her to death and he also drives into the clinic and sets it on fire.  Samantha survives the fire and her twin girls kill another child at a Halloween party a few years later in Manhattan.

This is one of those movies that tried to improve on Rosemary’s Baby and although some of it is eerie, it’s not really scary and many elements are simply dropped or stuck in for no apparent reason.  The novelty was twin Antichrists who were both girls.  They, like Adrian, appear only late in the movie and the visual cues for what is happening are off.  It’s an interesting attempt to bring science and religion together in horror, but it has trouble understanding the religion it represents.  Quite often in horror, and perhaps other genres, a veneer of religion is used without any kind of research into what any tradition actually believes and/or does.  The, presumably, Catholicism here is strange.  There maybe a scene with the Bible, so I’ll add it to Holy Sequel, in the maybe category.

Wooly Sleuthing

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The Sheep Detectives is a family-friendly movie (for the most part) and a sweet story.  I’ll try not to reveal whodunit.  George is a vegetarian shepherd.  He raises sheep for wool, not meat.  He lives just outside the small village of Denbrook, in England.  One night he’s murdered.  The local policeman (singular) doesn’t seem very bright and has to be shown that it’s murder.  The sheep, who loved George, decide to investigate.  (The sheep talk, among themselves.)  George used to read them detective novels in the evening, so they get quite good at deducting things.  Led by Lily they investigate.

One day the sheep head to town.  They can roam freely with nobody suspecting them.  They initially decide on the wrong suspect.  They help the detective come up with a method of investigating by leaving hints for him.  Lily was George’s smartest sheep.  Sebastian is the most world-wise.  And Mopple is the sheep who never forgets anything.  As Sebastian leads Lily and Mopple into the churchyard for the first time, they have the following conversation:

Sebastian: This is the church, where someone named God lives.

Lily: Who’s God?

Sebastian: It’s a bit confusing, God is a shepherd.

Mopple: So he could be our shepherd?

Sebastian: No. Because he’s also a lamb.

Lily: What?

Sebastian: And he’s also invisible. And he’s made of bread. And he damns things.

Lily: Dams things? Like a beaver?

Sebastian: Yes.

Lily: So God is a big invisible lamb beaver, made of… bread?

Sebastian: Yes. And they eat him on Sundays.

The movie is a comedy, of course, but this passage should be exegeted.  Many people believe God lives in churches.  The 23rd Psalm is invoked (“the Lord is my shepherd”), but is complicated by Jesus—the lamb of God.  Of course, God can’t be seen and is therefore invisible.  Made of bread?  Communion, of course.  And the homonymous nature of “damn/dam,” which confuses kids, lead to the conclusion that God might be like a beaver.  This is a fair bit of theological humor for a lighthearted movie.  

The film was based on a novel, written originally in German, but I’m tempted to read it to see if this conversation comes from the book.  In any case, the movie is about acceptance and finding your place in the flock.  And learning not to be mindlessly led to your slaughter—one of the darker themes in the story.  I even enjoyed the good-natured use of “vegetarian” intended as slander.  A fun movie that leaves you with green pastures, it seems to me.  And a message worth considering.

Who’s Calling?

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I learned of this movie from Victoria Jaye’s Hell, Horror and Despair.  (She discusses several movies that I’d missed.)  The Calling immediately went into Holy Sequel.  Not because it was a great movie, but because it uses the Bible.  Indeed, it begins with a quote from “Revelations”—the plural is always a sign that someone hasn’t done their homework—and concerns the birth of the Antichrist.  It goes down like this: a young American woman falls in love with a wealthy British television personality and they get married on the Isle of Man.  She gets pregnant on their wedding  night, the same day a young boy is murdered.  As their son grows, he excels at speaking backwards and has an ability to harm others he dislikes without touching them.  And he’s cruel to animals.  Kristie, the mother, is sent away on business to London a lot so the boy, Dylan, is left with her husband Marc.

Kristie notices that Dylan is very close to Marc and she is being excluded from the family.  On her way home after missing Christmas with her family—when Marc crucified Dylan upside-down to prepare him—the taxi driver starts to reveal that Dylan’s father is Satan, not Marc.  Kristie thinks he’s crazy but soon learns her best friend was murdered while she was away.  (Man is an island with a population well below 100,000.)  She begins to suspect something’s not right.  By discovering a piece of another Bible—this is so Holy Horror!—from the taxi driver, she learns that Dylan is not what he seems.  The taxi driver convinces her to kidnap and drown this son of Satan before he becomes the Antichrist.  A spoiler follows.

When she emerges from the Irish Sea after drowning Dylan, Marc shoots Kristie.  In the hospital (she survives) she tells the story to a priest.  Then on television they see that Dylan, three days after his death, and not coincidentally Easter Sunday, is resurrected.  The news tells of how both the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury are becoming convinced Dylan may be the second coming of Christ, but Kristie flees with the priest as they know he’s the Antichrist.  Now, this isn’t a great movie.  It came out just at the millennium, capitalizing, as Jaye suggests, on the end of the world mania.  Nevertheless, despite the poor acting and inexplicable elements (a parish priest willing to miss Easter Sunday mass to sit with a possibly insane woman in the hospital?) it is a very good example of the way the Bible appears in horror.  I should’ve watched it years ago.

Child Snatcher

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Folk horror, like folklore, is a commonplace of the human condition.  We are afraid and some of our fears are deeply rooted.  Some go back to traditional monsters.  The Moogai is an Australian folk horror film.  It’s based on the fact that from the turn of the twentieth century until the seventies indigenous children were taken from their parents to integrate them into white society.  The moogai is a character like the boogeyman that comes to steal children.  Set in present-day Australia with an adult child of one of these stolen children, the movie concentrates on a parent’s fear of losing her own children.  It also sets up modern medicine against folk wisdom.  Sarah is embarrassed by her birth mother Ruth.  She doesn’t like the ideas she puts into her own daughter’s head about the moogai.  At the same time, Sarah’s unable to sleep and has been seeing things not easily explained after the birth of her second child.

This leads to her husband and others questioning whether she’s experiencing from postpartum psychosis or whether something real is happening.  Then her husband sees the moogai while Sarah’s restrained in a psych ward.  When her husband is arrested for breaking her out of the hospital, Sarah realizes that she has to get to her birth mother to destroy the moogai since no “rational” people will believe her.  Using traditional methods, Ruth and Sarah confront the moogai and rescue her children.  In the process, Ruth dies.  Belief comes at a price.

As a horror film this was recommended by the New York Times.  The moogai is shown perhaps a little too clearly to be scary, but his two faces are creepy.  The really valuable part of all this, however, is the folk tradition.  And the “social programming” that stands behind the horror.  The white men stealing children are the real moogai.  It’s a movie with a conscience.  Similar assimilation efforts were made with indigenous peoples of the Americas.  There’s a horror is being told, “Assimilate or die.”  Capitalism, of course, can allow no other systems to survive.  How can you get rich if everyone doesn’t agree to play along?  Movies like The Moogai ask that trenchant question: what if native peoples know something that the power-hunger interlopers do not?  What if there really are monsters out there?  Of course, in the movie the moogai is symbolically white, just as are the government men at the beginning who come to snatch the children from an indigenous settlement.  Heavy lifting by folk horror.

Waking Up

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Moody, gothic, and intriguing.  These are words that might describe The Awakening.  It’s also an ambiguous, somewhat confusing ghost story.  To discuss this some spoilers will be necessary, so please be advised.  When you’re on the lookout for a movie to watch on an afternoon when staying awake is a struggle (which, in all honesty, is just about every afternoon), on a weekend I’ll open my long list of movies to see and compare it against what’s streaming for free on the couple of services I pay for.  Seldom do the list and offerings coincide at all.  In any case, when I find something off-list that looks intriguing I usually check IMDb to see how many stars it’s earned.  On some streaming services four out of five stars will translate to three out of ten on IMDb.  The Awakening had 6.5, which is pretty good.

So, set just after the First World War, Florence Cathcart is a seance buster who doesn’t believe in ghosts and who’s written a book debunking the whole thing.  She’s then invited to a boarding school where a ghost has been frightening the boys, one of them to death.  Her own past is deeply repressed, however.  So deeply that she has a screen memory of an event that never happened to mask it.  After setting up all her equipment she does find evidence of the inexplicable.  Robert Mallory, a teacher and wounded veteran, believes in ghosts.  He says that those who went through the war see them.  He and Florence fall in love—her fiancé was killed in the war—and during the school holiday, she’s left alone with him, Maud the housekeeper, and one student.  Here come the spoilers…

The one boy left behind is the ghost of her step-brother.  Florence grew up in that house and Maud was the housekeeper, and mother of the boy.  Her unhinged father killed Florence’s mother and was trying to shoot her as well but accidentally shot his son by the housemaid.  He then killed himself.  Florence has to remember her past to realize she’s been seeing ghosts she doesn’t believe in.  It’s an eerie film but the plot is bit confusing.  It brings religion into the story, and even the Bible.  The tale of Holofernes’ beheading from Judith is represented in a painting.  Her debunking book is kept next to the Bible.  By the end we’re asking ourselves if Florence is a ghost.  This is a good, spooky film.  A bit ambitious, but it gets more stars than the usual freebie on a sleepy afternoon.

Annabelle yet Again

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

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

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

Everything Theory

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Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  More recently in time, I’ve become a fan of dark academia in several of its forms.  One of those forms is the biopic of famous, often challenged, academics.  The Theory of Everything is offered as such a biopic.  The darkness is, of course, Hawking’s Motor Neuron Disease.  The movie was critically acclaimed, and watching it made me think it was from before a time when academia fell under sustained fire from various governments.  So much of what we know of the world, indeed, the universe, derives from those rare individuals paid to pursue the life of the mind and take the rest of us the places they discovered.  In the case of Hawking, it seems that without his tragic disease his fame may well have never taken off.  Few people, in my experience, are really interested in physics or cosmology.

The movie, of course, dramatizes the life of Stephen and Jane Hawking.  It deftly focuses on the dynamics and strains of their relationship.  The academic part also plays a role, of course, but this is more of a personal story.   As usual, such films make me miss the academic life I’ve been denied.  I was never good enough at math to manage a career in the sciences.  Some of us have brains that focus much more clearly on the humanities (which, of course, sustain the heaviest fire from critics, despite being the grounds upon which higher education itself was founded).  Many, if not most, dark academia biopics focus on scientists or mathematicians.  Perhaps their lives are naturally more dramatic.  Their discoveries are more often newsworthy.  (Newsworthiness is, however, not the sole measure of importance.)  I’m wandering off topic (how human of me!); this is a very good movie.  It does play off of the fact that Hawking’s atheism was a bit of a difficulty for Jane’s Anglicanism.  Interestingly enough, she was a humanities student and did, in real life, earn her doctorate in literature.  Hers, while not as famous, would also be a life worthy of dark academic exploration.  

The acting in The Theory of Everything is pretty incredible.  And the film does make you interested in learning more about these very human people caught in a tragic, but somewhat heroic, situation.  Ironically, the religion and science fields perhaps come closest in cosmology.  This shows up in the final lines of A Brief History of Time, and continues to be a point of discussion in academia, both dark and light.

Monster Drink

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

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

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

Period Exorcist

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

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

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

Underground Sydney

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

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

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

Sun Cut

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

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

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