Sowing Seeds

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The Bad Seed is one of the scariest movies Stephen King lists from about 1950 to 1980.  Like many movies from before my time, I was unaware of it.  Projecting it back to 1956, when it was released, it’s pretty clear why it had trouble making it through the Production Code Administration.  Showing no blood or gore, this two-hour feature may seem to drag a little but it ends up in a very dark place.  I’ve never read the novel upon which it was based, but I’ve learned that the ending had to be changed because evil doers, according to the PCA, cannot go unpunished.  In fact, the ending is so dark that the director, Mervyn LeRoy, had the cast do a walk-on introduction when the movie was over, assuring the audience that this was just fiction after all.

The shock comes from a child psychopath.  So much so that Rhoda Penmark has become a character in her own right.  A sweet, innocent eight-year-old girl, she lies nearly as well as Trump and has skeletons in her closet.  Skeletons an adult shouldn’t have, let alone an eight-year-old.  Not only is she a sociopath, she’s convinced all the adults that she’s just as innocent as she acts.  The movie moves into psychological territory quite a lot, including a discussion of “nature or nurture” as the source of human evil.  The title of the film gives away the conclusion on that front.  Some children are born bad.  What’s more, this is the result of genetics, according to the story.  Rhoda is the child of an adopted woman—her adoption has been kept secret from her.  Eventually her father confesses that she was the child of a notorious serial killer, abandoned and adopted by loving parents.  Rhoda herself is raised in a loving, stable home, but she is her grandmother’s daughter.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that if they had ended it at the hospital scene it would’ve been scarier.  The book, apparently, ends the scarier way.  I do have to wonder if Alfred Hitchcock was familiar with the tale in some form.  The movie was released four years before Psycho, but then again, that was based on Robert Bloch’s book.  Maybe he’d read the original.  In any case, I’d been watching King’s list of scary movies and mostly finding myself unbothered.  A couple of his choices: Night of the Hunter, and now The Bad Seed, have managed to rattle me a bit.  Even with its nearly seventy-year-old sensibilities, the latter still scares.

Out of Time

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I don’t know about you, but I seldom think of Venezuelan cinema.  I feel a strange satisfaction, however, that the highest grossing movie produced in that country was a horror film.  It’s possible to find The House at the End of Time in streaming services, with subtitles.  And it’s worth doing.  It’s a movie that will stay with you.  Intricately plotted and having a lot of heart, it’s a story of loss and redemption.  After an apparent break-in at her house, Dulce is accused of killing her husband and son, and is sent to prison.  We’re shown, however, that she found her husband already dead, or nearly so, and that her son had been stolen away by a mysterious force.  After three decades, given her age, she’s released to house arrest.  A neighborhood priest becomes interested in her case, believing that she’s innocent.  It’s the house, it seems, that is haunted.  Previous families who lived there experienced similar fates.

I won’t spoil it for you, but this is a horror film with heart as well as smarts.  It also explores the life of the poor and learning to live with past mistakes.  It’s a story about a family.  Unlike many horror movies, the protagonists aren’t “all things being equal,” middle-class people.  In this regard, it reminds me of The Orphanage and The Devil’s Backbone—also both Spanish-language horror films.  And there’s a verisimilitude about the poor as the ones suffering the effects of haunting.  Now even that has become a trendy commodity.  A house haunted sometimes increases in value as ghosts become gentrified.  Obviously, ghosts can haunt anyone, but there’s almost a parable aspect to them.  Sometimes ghosts are all that the poor have.

That may be one of the reasons that The House at the End of Time is also Venezuela’s most internationally distributed movie.  And the reason that an American production company is working on a remake (presumably in English).  The ghosts here aren’t what we’ve come to expect, but religion plays a large part in the movie since the priest pays special attention to Dulce.  The reason why is eventually explained, but he is a non-judgmental cleric.  He attempts no exorcism.  Instead, he researches and seeks to find an explanation for what is happening at this most unusual house.  Catholicism is a large part of the culture in Venezuela, and I do hope that the remake doesn’t remove it.  A sympathetic cleric is often difficult to find.  And in this case, one that really pays off.

Bodies Cubed

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It’s difficult to know where to start with Bodies Bodies Bodies.  It was on my watchlist because it was distributed by A24.  I’ve come to trust them for smart horror, and then I saw that the movie was soon leaving one of the streaming services to which I have access.  Nothing like “leaving soon” to make a decision for you.  An ensemble cast of twenty-somethings (or so they play) gather for a hurricane party at the mansion of one of the group.  They do a lot of drugs and drinking and then decide to play Bodies Bodies Bodies—one of those games where one player is the killer and everyone else has to figure out who the “murderer” is.  They’re about ready to start the next round, but the power goes out in the hurricane.  The accused “killer” in the first game is found, dying for real, outside.  The only car on the property has a dead battery and the friends turn on each other, unsure who the murderer might be. (No bodies are actually cubed.)

All of this is interlaced with internet culture and the panic that ensues when the wifi goes out.  Now, this is categorized as a horror comedy, but the comedy is pretty subdued until the remaining four begin to accuse each other, using trendy jargon to describe relationships and psychological conditions.  The film opens with a couple of girlfriends, Sophie and Bee, who are the last to arrive for the party.  As the morning dawns the two of them are the only survivors, but they have become distrustful of each other because of things said during the hurricane night.  There is a twist ending but the house is full of bodies, bodies, bodies.

Written and directed by women, this horror film again demonstrates how intelligent the genre can be.  As for me personally, I found it pretty good.  I wouldn’t say it’s great.  That’s because of some of my own triggers—one of the trendy words they throw around.  Mainly, in my case, because of the drug scene that makes up the reality of the friends (I’ve never been part of that) and that the game resembles too much my all-time-most-feared childhood game, hide-and-seek.  The friends, convinced that one of them is a murderer, creep around the mansion in the dark, fearful of being found.  This leaves open the potential for jump startles, of course, and I’m not a great fan of surprises.  That having been written, this is a smart movie and the ending does make you think.  And perhaps wonder how well we really know anyone after all.

Hunting

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Every once in a while, I see a movie I should’ve seen a long while ago.  The Night of the Hunter is one such film.  Knowing little about it, I watched and was floored.  Not only could I have used it in Holy Horror (oh boy, could I have!), it uncovered a bit of cinema history for me.  Even just the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on Harry Powell’s knuckles have been referenced in so many places that I felt like I’d been missing a vital clue all along.  Since the movie’s now available on free streaming services, there’s no reason not to see it.  Although not generally considered horror, it is one of the genuinely scary movies of the period.  And it’s a strong blend of religion and horror, even if classified as a “thriller.”

Taking inspiration from a true story, the “Bluebeard” character of Harry Powell is a serial killer.  Styling himself as “the preacher,” he murders widows for their money.  An avowed misogynist, he’s driven purely by greed and love of violence.  Yet everyone accepts him—except children—for what he says he is during the Depression era.  He gives sermons, sings hymns, and leads revivals and even his victims come to believe what he says about himself.  This is such a good commentary on the thoughtless acceptance of religion that it’s no wonder that it was a flop in the fifties.  Since then it has become considered one of the greatest movies of all time by many.  The seamless weaving of terror and religion hearkens once again to the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Some lessons we never seem to learn.  Nobody likes to admit to having been fooled.

In character, the closest comparison I could make would be Cape Fear, which stars the same Robert Mitchum as villain.  That movie I saw in time to include in Holy Horror.  In this one, the only adult who seems capable of seeing through Powell’s lies is a religious widow who informally adopts stray kids during the Depression and raises them with the Bible.  She also keeps a shotgun handy, just in case.  The image of the preacher slowly approaching, singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” is the stuff of nightmares.  I suspect that one reason that seminaries developed in the first place is that the laity weren’t encouraged to trust self-proclaimed religious teachers.  Of course, the town turns on the preacher once they learn, because of the children, who he really is.  If, like me until today, you haven’t seen Night of the Hunter, I can recommend it.  Especially if you have an interest in how horror and religion cooperate so nicely.

Not Fantasy

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There’s a reason I watch horror.  One of the many things you can’t find online is how popular movies were before the internet days.  This is an issue for me because I only just now found out about Phantasm, which was released in 1979.  Granted, I lived in a small town, but I did know about The Amityville Horror—everyone knew about The Amityville Horror.  The films were released the same year, but Phantasm was an indie production and probably didn’t have reach into my local region.  Nobody talked about it at school and I only became conscious of it a few weeks ago.  I learned that it was quite a box office success, but the critics didn’t care much for it (and I can see why).  It was, however, rediscovered and has become a cult classic.  I can see that too.  The thing is, it is a bad movie.  I’m learning to appreciate such things.

Part of the reason the film bothered me is that I really dislike “but it was all a dream” endings.  Even though there’s a final suggestion that some of it “really happened,” or Michael is dreaming within a dream, such endings always make me shrug.  Horror, to really work, has to be in that liminal zone between believability while on screen and the deeper knowledge that it’s fiction.  Phantasm just had too many strikes against it to be believable.  The dwarves were lifted straight from Star Wars’ Jawa.  The Tall Man isn’t scary (this is from a current-millennium perspective, granted) and while you’re just trying to get into the horror mood (the music is appropriate) a flying ball of death, a sudden sci-fi element, is thrown in.  Of course, the plot takes a kind of sci-fi turn near the end.  It didn’t, however, do any heavy lifting.

I was surprised to learn that it became a franchise, no members of which I’d ever heard.  It is interesting that speculation exists that the creepypasta stalwart, the Slender Man, was developed from the Tall Man concept.  Given that I was seventeen when this movie came out it might be someone of my vintage—but from a different vineyard—would find Tall Man scary.  Of course, if I’d seen it when it was first out, and in a theater, I might’ve gotten some chills from it.  I could have included it in Holy Horror since there is some Bible in it, but it isn’t used to its full extent for a movie that mostly takes place in and around a funeral home.  There is some comfort in knowing that even if your work isn’t great, it can still be rediscovered if enough time passes.  And there’s good reason to watch it.

Alien Invaders

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I’ve been pondering genre for some time now.  And since Stephen King assures me (not personally) that Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers is horror, I figured I’d give it a try.  In fact, given the various themes of the movie, I’m surprised I hadn’t seen it before.  The title pretty much gives it away—aliens try to take over Earth with a swarm of flying saucers.  Two scientists figure out how to make their saucers stall, and even though the aliens have a disintegration ray that pretty much destroys anything, the earthlings prevail.  Having summarized it all in less than a hundred words, is there really anything worth comment here?  I think so.

Like many older movies this one makes use of stock footage to fill in action sequences and to keep the budget reasonable.  So there are big guns going off and rockets being launched.  (This was a pre-Sputnik movie and it depicts America having eleven satellites in orbit.)  But the additional footage that stayed with me was a scene of two planes colliding and crashing.  It was clear these weren’t models and the footage was authentic, apart from the flying saucer shooting the planes.  It turns out that this scene was indeed real, and that the pilots of both planes died in the crash.  During an air show outside Spokane, Washington in July 1944 this collision was caught on film by a Paramount news crew and it was reused in this film.  This got me to thinking about war footage—something that really only became possible in the Second World War.  And what we now see today in real time on the internet because the world is wired.

It’s as if those who wage war are fine with it as long as people with a conscience don’t know what happens.  There’s even a phrase used to excuse unspeakable barbarism during combat: the haze of war.  This we know about our species—there’s a tipping point beyond which rationality shuts off and we’re no longer responsible for our behavior.  We also know that war puts people in that zone.  It was fine as long as only surviving warriors were left to tell the stories of their bravery.  Photographing, particularly in motion pictures, combat revealed a much darker truth.  Well, at least in Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers the enemies under attack were fictional.  Except.  Except, some of the casualties were real people whose final moments were caught on camera.  Be sure to get out and vote today, if you’re in the United States.  There’s a party even less understanding than aliens out there, desiring to take over.

Vampire or Not?

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I’d heard that Martin was a depressing movie but I felt I should watch a Romero film that wasn’t about zombies.  I’d read bits and snatches of what happens, but I didn’t know the storyline in total.  Now that I’ve seen it, I’m still not sure what to make of it.  Martin is a young man who believes himself to be a vampire.  He does drink blood, murdering his victims, but there are no fangs, no “magic stuff” as Martin himself calls it.  It seems pretty clear that he’s mentally unbalanced, but he’s brought into his older cousin’s house in Braddock, Pennsylvania.  Cuda, his cousin, believes him to be a vampire, calling him “Nosferatu.”  He has protected his house with garlic and crucifixes, but Martin demonstrates that such things (magic stuff) doesn’t work.  

Daylight and eating regular food don’t bother him.  His cousin gives him a job at the grocery store he runs, while constantly warning Martin about looking for victims in Braddock.  Shy around women, he only has sex with his victims, after he has drugged them.  (This is a pretty violent movie, and the tone is downbeat throughout.)  Since he has no friends, he calls into a radio talk show to discuss the problems of being a vampire, and people love listening to him.  Meanwhile, Cuda arranges for an exorcism on Martin, which doesn’t work.  There are black-and-white sequences that aren’t really explained—either as fantasies or as past memories for a real vampire.  After his cousin becomes too suspicious, he stakes Martin to death and buries him in his back yard.

There are many unanswered questions about this movie.  If Martin is a vampire just about everything in traditions about them is wrong, apart from needing to drink human blood.  When Martin begins an affair with a troubled housewife, his bloodlust lessens, but he still gets “shaky” and has to find victims.  For those of us who tend to find ambiguity both beguiling and confusing, this is a vexing movie.  It makes you wonder what a vampire really is, and, as with most of Romero’s work, there’s a fair bit of social commentary—intentional or not.  Life itself has its fair share, perhaps more than its fair share, of ambiguity.  The only real certainty that Martin gives is that his victims die and he himself dies in the end.  Is his cousin correct?  Is Martin himself correct?  He may be mentally ill, but society is too.  And the working-class people of Braddock should know who the real vampires are.

Still October

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Before October was over, I wanted to watch Knives Out.  Not horror, it’s more of a murder mystery but it’s funny and it makes just about every list of movies to watch in October.  I’m pretty sure that list compilers don’t really understand what I mean by typing in “October movies.”  Or maybe the kinds of movies I’m thinking of simply don’t exist.  More on that later.  Knives Out is the story of the death of a famous writer.  (Given the fantastic house in which he lives, a very famous writer—the majority of us only ever modestly supplement our day job incomes with book sales.)  But this fantasy of being paid enormous sums for what is really hard work is, well, a fantasy.  This writer, who has/had three children, altered his will before his 85th birthday celebration and on this hangs the tale.

The two surviving children, and spouse of the third, have been cut out of the will.  Their means of support—they all relied on their father’s largess—is gone and so when the writer dies on the night of his birthday, by suicide, some questions arise.  There are many twists in the story, and I won’t give away the ending, but the main question that the private investigator asks is why he was hired in the first place.  All the forensic evidence confirms this having been a suicide, and although the adult children’s stories disagree in any particulars, the events surrounding the death seem clear enough.  At the center of all of this is the writer’s private nurse.  She’s an immigrant and she stays out of family squabbles.

The protests over the will bring out the true character of the children, or, in some cases, their spouses.  And although the viewer is clued in early as to what actually happened, like a mystery novel, a vital clue is left out that ties the whole together.  It’s quite well done.  It’s an October movie like Clue is an October movie, or perhaps Murder by Death.  There are some nice shots of trees in color, but it lacks the haunting, melancholy feel that I associate with October films.  Will I watch it again?  I should think so.  Movies like this bear re-watching, if for no other reason than to try to spot “donut holes” (the private detective’s phrase) in the plot.  It’s also a reflection on how money can corrupt.  But also how desperate people can become when their support system is withdrawn.  And that’s truly scary.  Knives Out would work on any dark and stormy night, but it’s not horror.

International Horror

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As someone who has written a couple pieces on Jewish horror for Horror Homeroom, I have developed a natural interest in international horror.  I was one of those who scrambled hard to find The Golem (2018) when it came out, but was able to see it only in 2020.  When I learned about New Israeli Horror, by Olga Gershenson, I knew I had to read it.  The subtitle, Local Cinema, Global Genre, pretty much captures how she approaches the subject.  It also helped me understand a bit better the way filmmaking works.  I once, rather naively, asked a film scholar how many movies had been made.  He responded, “It’s impossible to know.”  Even experts in cinema can’t see every movie, and those of us who watch horror can’t see every horror film.  (I wouldn’t want to.)  I hadn’t realized, however, until reading this book, that in places like Israel it often comes down to state funding.

I’ve written quite a lot about Euro-horror over the past few years.  Often cooperative ventures, these are horror films that aren’t part of the Hollywood system, and they are frequently quite good.  Those of us who enjoy movies may not often think of who pays for them.  It’s kind of like book publishing—someone’s got to pay for all this, and hopes to make their money back in the process.  In Israel many movies are funded by official agencies.  And such agencies tend not to like horror.  New Israeli horror, by Gershenson’s reckoning, began only about 2010.  One of the reasons I’ve turned to writing about horror is that its history isn’t so long as, say, ancient West Asian studies, which reaches back thousands of years.  Reading about something not even two decades old, but still history, is fun.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book.  Of the films discussed I’ve only seen one, the aforementioned Golem.  Before writing Holy Horror, I paid no attention to where films were produced.  I’d seen some international movies, sometimes obvious because of subtitles, but my usual fare is homegrown.  I gather that I’ve been missing a lot by not seeing more Israeli horror.  When you add Jewish horror (Jewish-themed horror, in my way of seeing things) to the mix, there’s a new angle to take on religion and horror.  Many of the films Gershenson reads are about Israel’s army and critique of the militarism that has become part of life in Israel.  I confess to not keeping up on politics because to me it tends to be scarier than horror.  But I can see, from this book, that I’ve been missing some interesting cinema.

Betelgeuse

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So let me see… from 1988 to 1992, what was happening?  Hmm.  I was getting married after moving halfway across the country in a rented car, moving to Edinburgh with no money, and working on a doctorate.  I guess I was pretty busy.  I missed Beetlejuice in 1988 and confused it in my head with Death Becomes Her (1992), which I may or may not have seen.  Some time ago I felt that I really should watch the former, not because of the sequel.  I may have seen bits of it over the years, but I wasn’t impressed with what I remembered.  Maybe part of the draw—the movie did quite well when released—is how different it was then from many things that came after.  Now that I’ve finally watched it, I can see it has some charms but I felt rather like the critics who noted the Betelgeuse subplot seems dissociated from the rest of the movie.

Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice is fun to watch, no doubt.  He doesn’t have much screen time, though.  His backstory, which seems important to explaining why he is how he is, feels shortchanged.  It also doesn’t really explain why the other characters dislike him so much.  When he’s released to save the Maitlands, he does, yet all they want to do is banish him.  I know better than to look for a coherent set of character motivations in such a movie, but for all the fronting of Beetlejuice, the story is really the Maitlands coming to grips with being dead and having other people move into their house.  The Others, while straightforward horror, handles this dynamic a bit better.  Of course, Beetlejuice is a Tim Burton movie, and that comes with a certain inherent quirkiness.

I had a mixed reaction, it’s fair to say.  Part of the problem may be that I’ve seen some of Burton’s better work, which came after Beetlejuice, before seeing the movie.  And other movies have done quite well in the weird category (Parasite, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Poor Things), making Beetlejuice feel its age.  Or maybe it’s all the build-up to Betelgeuse and then giving him so little time for his antics.  Perhaps it was the title of the film, or its confusion in my brain with another dark fantasy comedy, but it just didn’t press all my buttons.  Seeing it in the context of its Zeitgeist may have helped, but I was rather busy then and that part hasn’t really changed since.

Another Frankenstein

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It’s a persistent bias.  Hollywood and the general public (at least critics) still downgrade the work of female directors.  I watched Lisa Frankenstein and loved it.  It’s a movie that was recommended both by a friend and the New York Times.  Okay, so it’s a comedy horror, but it’s well done and again, told from a female point of view.  It reminded me quite a lot of Edward Scissorhands and a bit of Frankenweenie.  But let’s step back a second.  Lisa is a high school senior whose mother was murdered by a maniac with an axe.  She lives with her father, step mother, and step sister in a new town and she’s got Goth sensibilities.  She hangs out in the overgrown cemetery, particularly at the grave of a Frankenstein.  A lightning strike brings the Victorian-era corpse back to life and since Lisa had said she wanted to be with him, he comes to her.

Missing some body parts, including his tongue, he begs Lisa for help restoring them.  This they do through murders (at first, accidental) so fresh parts can be sewn on.  After each addition an electric shock revitalizes the organ and makes the creature more human.  Of course, Lisa goes through the usual high school difficulties and her relationship with her bubbly, cheerleader step-sister keeps her going.  Especially since the step-mother is wicked.  With plenty of nods to classic horror, and an innovative story arc, I found it quite enjoyable.  It isn’t a perfect movie, but it is a very good one.  It shares a writer with Jennifer’s Body, which I discussed not long ago.  The movies have a bit in common, but are distinctly different while dealing with issues of girls becoming women.

I have a soft spot for gothic tales, as regular readers know.  Lisa Frankenstein manages to be gothic while also being funny.  Like Stranger Things, it revels in the culture of the 1980s and the sound track is quite good.  Written and directed by women, it falls into that category of movies that should’ve received more advertising.  I wouldn’t have known about it had not a friend recommended it.  While comedy horrors may be an acquired taste (I still prefer straight-up gothic tales), they often work well.  Another tie-in is clearly Corpse Bride.  There’s a healthy dose of Tim Burton aesthetic here.  Mixed with that pathos we all remember as high school.  The period when our chrysalis begins to crack painfully and we start to take our first steps as adults.  No matter what the cultural bias says, women’s experiences are just as valid as men’s.  And Lisa Frankenstein understands that.

Whence Evil?

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I’m at a stage where horror-comedy, or comedy-horror is becoming appealing.  This sub-genre is really perfect for those horror fans who like to laugh and still get something of substance.  Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a great example of the dangers of stereotyping.  Like Scream, it is very aware of horror tropes, but it makes fun of them in creative ways.  At points it’s laugh-out-loud funny, but it is pretty gory.  It begins with the usual folk gothic scenario of a group of college kids going camping deep in rustic country.  At the last gas station, they encounter Tucker and Dale, whom we’ve been primed to think of as potentially murderous hicks.  In reality, they’re a couple of hapless but nice guys on their way to fix up a cabin they bought as a vacation house.

The college kids end up camping nearby and interpret everything Tucker and Dale do through the lens of assuming hillbillies are inbred evildoers.  It’s kind of a reverse Deliverance.  So it sets up a love story between one of the coeds, Alison, and Dale, who rescues her from drowning.  Meanwhile Alison’s friends assume Tucker and Dale have kidnapped Alison and plan to attack to set her free.  Of course, mayhem ensues.  Dale, who is big and shy, and who suffers from an inferiority complex, keeps on making missteps in trying to convince the other kids that his intensions are good.  That’s the most brilliant part of the movie—it cautions against reading people in the light of our biases.  Often when I find myself in areas where we see lots of Trump signs, the locals, in non-political contexts, are very nice.  I feel sad that one man has decided hatred is the only way to power.  Making people distrust and hate each other so that he can win.

People, overall, are pretty descent.  There are some bad ones out there, for sure, but the number of times I’ve encountered helpful strangers—in both rural and urban settings—reinforces my underlying belief that if we don’t try to set people against one another their natural goodness will come through.  It’s hard to do when all the campaigning, and even the rhetoric from 2016 to 2020 was of distrust of others and personal superiority.  The real hero of Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is Dale, the one with an inferiority complex.  Those who humbly assume that others are better than they are seldom try to hurt other people.  And yet, those who don’t know “salt of the earth” types, who may live in less-than-ideal circumstances, frequently approach them with fear.  It’s a horror-comedy in the making.

Ichabod’s Body

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Maybe you’ve noticed this.  When Halloween comes around, the Headless Horseman and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow reemerge.  There’s a reason for that, and I discuss it quite a bit in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  Right now there seems to be quite an interest, or maybe I’m just noticing it more.  For example, a local theater where we saw a Poe performance last year is offering a Headless Horseman show this year.  Articles have recently been appearing on Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie, given that it was released 25 years ago—online discussion, however, is often eclipsed by the Fox television show by the same name.  And before it switched over to Christmas decorations, Michaels had its share of Sleepy Hollow merchandise.  Halloween and the Headless Horseman go together.  (Read the book to find out why!)

One of the tchotchkes I picked up at Michaels was Ichabod Crane’s tombstone.  In the many renditions of Washington Irving’s legend, Ichabod is treated as the protagonist of the story.  Although Tim Burton’s movie wasn’t the first to have Crane survive, besting the Horseman, the old wives’ tales, according to Irving, had him spirited away by the Horseman.  That’s why I found his gravestone so interesting.  The dates on it (1787–1857) indicate, at least according to this recension, that he died at seventy, surely not the victim of the attack that took place around the turn of the century.  If you’re not familiar with the original story, Irving set it “some thirty years since” the 1820 in which the tale was published, putting the events around 1790.  Burton shifted this to 1799, partially, I suspect, because that was two centuries before the release of his movie.

I do wonder where the maker of the Michaels tombstone got their information.  According to their reckoning, Crane would’ve been but three years old in 1790.  Of course, the story never tells us his age.  Since it is intimated that he relocated and became a judge after dabbling in politics, all of which would seem to indicate that he was a somewhat young man at the time of the tale.  To make Sleepy Hollow scary, though, having Crane cut off in his youth would seem to be more in keeping with the spirit of the season.  Of course, Sleepy Hollow is a legend that has become mythic through its many retellings.  Enough of them that someone could write a book about it all (ahem).  And this is the time of year to ponder it.  

Why, Cathy?

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Learning to appreciate bad movies is a skill like any other.  It takes practice.  “Why?” I hear you ask?  Why climb a mountain?  Actually, there is a motive for seeing bad movies, apart from the good feeling they can leave you with.  (I might’ve actually done it better!)  That’s because they’re often free streaming.  If I had an endless budget I might well be able to avoid bad movies, but what’s the fun in that?  I found out about Cathy’s Curse because I was looking for a movie about a cursed doll.  (Don’t ask.)  I’ve seen many, of course.  Child’s Play and the whole Annabelle series.  But I felt I was missing something.  Wikipedia actually has a page on haunted doll movies, and Cathy’s Curse stood out to me.  Yes, I was forewarned, but I was also curious.

A Canadian horror film from 1977, Cathy’s Curse has become a cult classic.  The story line decidedly makes no sense.  Cathy, a young girl, moves into her grandparents’ house with her father and mother.  Her father’s father had died in a car crash with his daughter Laura, about Cathy’s age, some 30 years earlier.  Cathy’s parents are troubled, her mother having recently had a nervous breakdown.  Laura’s vengeful spirit possesses Cathy through a doll the latter finds in the attic.  For some reason, Cathy kills the housekeepers and attacks other children.  She tries to drown herself.  She kills the handyman’s dog.  The dog, which is clearly male, is explicitly said to be female in the movie, perhaps because one of the favorite words of the writer is “bitch.”  After about an hour and a half of running around screaming, the opening of the cursed doll’s eyes suddenly brings normalcy to the house.

There are some genuinely good things about the movie.  The late fall-early winter mood is nicely framed.  Why people hang out outdoors without coats in freezing weather is never really explained, though.  Neither the writing nor the acting are stellar.  And have I pointed out that the story makes no sense?  But still, there’s something there.  The idea of possession, a young girl under threat, the scary old mansion—these are classic tropes.  It’s unclear why, when Cathy’s father is fixing breakfast, he immediately sends her to bed and it’s suddenly night.  Or why the detective calls him by the wrong name.  Or why nobody can take a doll away from a little girl.  Ah, but that’s it, you see.  The haunted doll.  You have to learn how to appreciate these things, you know.

May I?

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The thing about horror is that it’s an intensely personal preference.  Some people really like a movie while others find it, well, meh.  When the nights begin to lengthen you get lots of curated lists (I’ve never been asked to do any, but I’m working on one anyway) suggesting October viewing.  One such list that a friend sent me appealed to me because it was for movies on Netflix.  Since that’s one of the few streaming services to which I have access, it makes the movies seem free.  This particular list recommended May the Devil Take You, a 2018 movie from Indonesia.  The almost polite title suggests it wasn’t named in English.  In any case, I didn’t really find this one particularly scary and in part that was because of the apparent incongruity of the culture and the monster.  I knew that Indonesia was a highly Muslim majority country, and I know Islam also recognizes the Devil.  Still, Satanism feels kind of out of place here.

The story isn’t terribly deep: a man makes a deal with the Devil, through one of his dark concubines, to become rich, in exchange for the souls of his family.  His wife is the first to go, but he remarries a retired actress who has three children, two young adult.  His only biological child, from his first marriage, Alfie, feels herself estranged.  (It’s unclear to me whether the youngest daughter of the second wife was also biologically his, but it seems so.)  When the father falls into a serious, undiagnosed illness, the children, and actress, all converge on the house where the pact was made.  Of course they open the basement door—locked and with warnings posted—where the Devil’s concubine waits.  The actress becomes possessed and the two older daughters, Alfie and her stepsister, try to fight it off, only to have the stepsister become possessed.  She kills her brother and intends to kill Alfie and her own young sister as well, but the latter two manage to overcome her.

The plot is a bit convoluted but the basic story is maybe too familiar—make a deal with the Devil and all Hell will break loose.  I also wonder if some of the lack of real impact here comes from the subscript translation.  I don’t know how this is done, but I suspect it’s not dissimilar from Google translate.  That may be fine for academic purposes, but it does seem to lead to stilted dialogue among a group of twenty-somethings trying to fight the Devil in Indonesia.  My personal October list is more moody.  Seasonal.  And by no means complete.  The only way to find the movies, it seems, is trial and error via curated lists.