Digging Again

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It’s one of those movies that I know I’ve watched before—probably on a sleepy Saturday afternoon—but couldn’t believe I had already seen.  While viewing The Mole People it looked completely new, but in retrospect some of it had seemed strangely familiar.  Had I bothered to check my own blog I’d have noted that I watched it a mere fourteen years ago.  Not that I’d have spared myself again.  I felt like watching monsters in rubbery suits.  Still, as I mentioned in my previous blog post on it, the antagonist are the underground Sumerians.  These Sumerians speak English—a fact that isn’t worthy of remark by the scientists—and express surprise that outsiders can understand them.  Assuming them to be gods because of their bright flashlight, this Gilliganesque story contains, perhaps unintended, social commentary.  The mole people are really the good ones and the “slave revolt” at the end saves our protagonists.

For about the first half of the film they refer to “the goddess of Ishtar” before finally apparently realizing Ishtar is the goddess’s name.  The “eye of Ishtar,” which looks suspiciously like a sideways Star Trek Federation logo, represents where the sun shines down on their ancient kingdom.  (They’ve become albinos from living without sunlight.)  The interesting thing here is that the monsters aren’t the scary part of the plot.  The high priest is.  Elinu is suspicious of the upper worlders immediately and it is he who plots their demise.  He’s also quite willing to depose the king, whom he sees as too weak in his foreign policy.  (In reality the interplay between religion and politics, historically, has been a tug-of-war over power.)  He succumbs to his own plans, however, and the viewer is glad to see the priest go the way of all flesh.

Sometimes billed as science fiction, this is more fantasy horror fare.  It’s literally swords and sandals among the the lackluster Sumerians.  The monsters make it horror, but they aren’t evil, although they do kill one of the protagonists.  To their credit these pre-Civil Rights Act Americans realize that the treatment of the eponymous mole people is unfair.  There is, at the same time, no regret expressed that these scientists have brought the five-thousand-year-old Sumerian civilization to an end.  The Mole People is one of those “so bad it’s good” movies.  Its plodding pace doesn’t make it idea for too sleepy an afternoon, but the story is different than a typical monster flick from the era.  And it is biblically based, as my previous post on it noted.  And a lot has happened in the intervening fourteen years.

Who’s Stalking?

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Television is a hungry beast.  Back before the internet it was probably less hungry, but still the desire for content was constant.  A few individuals worked the monster side of the tube, one of them being Dan Curtis.  Dark Shadows was Curtis’ idea, and it was in that context that he began to have an influence over my life.  I wouldn’t have recognized his name in those days, of course—do we ever really recognize those who become part of the arc of life’s direction when we’re kids?  Curtis produced a television movie that I’d never seen, taking on the vampire tale again.  The Night Stalker isn’t a great film—it was produced for television, after all—but it started something.  That something was the weekly series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

I’ve been watching episodes of Kolchak and realized that I was missing something—the origin story.  As an historian I really like to keep things in order.  Since my research is conducted on my limited free time and limited budget, I still discover things others probably knew long ago.  In any case, I decided to hunt down and watch The Night Stalker.  It introduces, of course, the character of Kolchak.  In a way that seems unnecessary for 1972, it narrates quite a bit of vampire lore.  It even frames some scenes from Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula.  As I watched this period piece for the first time, I realized that the actual night stalker wasn’t originally Kolchak.  In this movie it’s clearly Janos Skorzeny, the vampire.  The movie was based on an (at the time) unpublished novel by Jeff Rice.  And so began a number of cascading things.

I didn’t watch Kolchak as a child.  I do remember other kids talking about it, but it never made its way into our evening television watching.  (My mother was concerned that I had nightmares as a child and didn’t encourage scary things before bed.  Decades on I’m still prone to nightmares, but as I said, arcs get set early on.)  Kolchak is kind of a hapless character, rubbing people the wrong way.  The movie leaves many unanswered questions, but it was good fare for unreflective television monster purposes.  There had been monsters before—I think we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone—but Kolchak made the horror element, always laced with comedy, central.  The television movie received the highest ratings of any television movie to that point.  And we all know that such things lead to sequels.  Television is ever hungry.

Leopard Spots

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There’s always a dilemma involved.  Rent or buy?  Libraries face this when deciding on a subscription or perpetual access deal—is this something you’ll need for a long time?  More than once?  So also with movies.  Do you rent, watch, and forget or buy, supposing you’ll need to go back?  This plays out in my head when there’s a movie I want to see in these days of streaming.  The Leopard Man wasn’t a big hit when it came out in 1943.  There wasn’t really much of a taste for horror during the Second World War anyway.  In retrospect, however, it’s one of those films that has appreciated with age.  Apart from its effective use of the Lewton bus, the movie was well written.  It retains ambiguity and suspense throughout.  And if there is a leopard man who shapeshifts, we never see him doing it.  Spoilers follow!

Following on from his better known Cat People the previous year, Jacques Tourneur kept with the large cat theme in this film.  A publicist who (apparently) has no scruples, encourages his client/girlfriend to upstage a fellow performer by taking a leopard into her act.  The stunt backfires, however, when the frightened cat escapes.  Then mauled women are found and a hunt is on for the leopard.  If you’re adept at this kind of set-up you’ll figure out who the killer is—it’s not the leopard, except in the first case.  It’s implied that, rather like Cat People, the religion of the ancients, as Dr. Galbraith points out, might have some effect on modern people.  His dispassionate remarks about serial killers provides a clue, however, to who’s really behind it.

Religion runs like a thread throughout the movie.  The processions intended to alleviate the guilt for the treatment of the Indians, the ancient religion of those who made the museum pieces, and the Catholicism of the locals all play a part in this.  The question of whether Galbraith really becomes a leopard or not remains unanswered, but I sense it’s strongly implied that he does.  He had no intention of murdering the young woman in the cemetery and certainly had no time to premeditate the carrying of leopard hairs and claws to cover his tracks.  This is a man of science caught up in the spell of a forgotten religion.  Or so it seems to me.  In any case, it’s time to dust off this old gem and bring it back to the light.  It’s probably worth buying just to see it again.

Not Murphy’s Mansion

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One of the dangers of streaming is that you can be talked into a movie by the fact of its availability.  Curiosity drove me to Disney’s The Haunted Mansion movie and that led to the discovery that there had been a reboot.  I’m drawn to haunted houses but not to theme parks, but well, you wonder how they might’ve thought they could’ve done it better.  The original movie failed to rock the critics, so, as the saying goes, try, try again.  Last year’s Haunted Mansion is over the top.  The story is more complex, with an ensemble cast, and not really funny or scary.  Based on a sad premise—two families with deceased spouses—they’re drawn, with three other New Orleans outsiders, to a, well, haunted mansion.  The main ghost is looking for a soul to harvest but as the two hours wend on, the characters reveal their sadnesses (one doesn’t).  Perhaps the idea is catharsis, but there are too many subplots and too many abrupt shifts of mood.

A movie should know, it seems to me, what it wants to be.  You feel for the sadness and loss of the characters but  I know something about using horror cathartically, and this movie doesn’t do it.  There are jokes and running gags, but they’re not really funny.  There’s religion involved, but it turns out to be fake, with even a faked exorcism.  There are literally 100 ghosts.  And really only one bad guy among them.  There’s drinking to drown sorrows, murders, and even adult humor that is somehow deeply disturbing.  There are a few nods to the original movie but the plot is quite different and it leaves you feeling drained.

With a budget of about $150,000,000, stops were pulled out all over this organ.  It doesn’t, however, have a focus.  In the original film, the Evers family really has a need to reconnect.  The mansion does that for them, through its ghosts.  The reboot implies at the end that two broken families might heal each other and that evil leads to its own punishment.  Still it leaves open the question: what is this movie trying to be?  The more cynical might say it’s only for money (the worldwide gross didn’t reach covering its budget), but I have to think that those who make movies do so for more than just a buck.  Coping with death is a profound human need that begins when a pet or, more seriously, a family member dies.  I’m not sure that Disney is the best authority on the subject.  At least not for those of us who use horror as therapy.

Why Weenie?

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Often I ponder how incredibly influential Frankenstein has been.  Even those who don’t care for horror instantly recognize the creature and what he represents.  (At least partially.)  Tim Burton thought of tying Mary Shelley’s story to a pet dog in Frankenweenie.  This was a black-and-white, live-action short released in 1984.  It wasn’t aired much before being locked in Disney’s famous vault.  It wasn’t really what Disney was known for.  Ironically, then, in 2012 Disney released a feature-length version, also black-and-white.  This one was stop-motion animation, however, inspired by Burton’s Corpse Bride characters, at least to a point.  At its core the story of a bereft boy bringing his dog back to life, the original showed the mayhem introduced by crossing the border between life and death.  Not too different from what Shelley was intimating some century-and-a-half before.

The remake, or reboot, was feature length and had to develop the plot a bit.  Along the way there are numerous nods to other horror films.  Critics have noted that horror is an amazingly self-referential genre.  Comedy horror delights in parody.  So, as a Vincent Price-like science teacher inspires Victor with the concept of reanimation via electricity, the boy decides to resurrect his pet.  Other school children find out about the undead Sparky and decide to make their science fair projects reanimated pets.  Or sea monkeys, in a clever take-off on Gremlins.  Naturally, the other pets lack Sparky’s good will, not raised out of love, but out of a desire to win a competition.  One student’s resurrected turtle becomes a Godzilla-like kaiju, allowing for winks at Jurassic Park.  The cat-bat reminded me, anyway, of Gremlins 2.

Ultimately, the story comes to the same resolution as the original short.  Of course, this isn’t scary horror.  Comedy horror is an odd genre.  It permits darker-themed elements to play against fun and fantasy.  Frankenweenie isn’t really laugh-out-loud material, and if you’ve seen the previous version the story arc is already known.  Still, it’s an effective movie.  Although it made millions at the box office, it wasn’t as many millions as Disney has come to expect.  But it is quintessential Burton.  It also has a moral attached—that even scientists need to pay attention to love and the motivation for learning.  The parents at the PTA meeting are scandalized by what science does, in a bit of real-life parody as well.  So Frankenweenie came across as pretty good to me.  I like monster movies.  It did lack, however, the emotional impact of the original.  Of course, the tale of a boy and his dog is its own kind of archetype, I suppose.

The Movie Maker

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Roger Corman has died.  So passes an era.  I’ve always had an appreciation for the speculative films of the fifties and sixties.  Many of these involved low budgets and content intended to shock.  Or at least excite youngsters.  And Roger Corman was a huge name among directors, producers, and promoters of such schlock.  He entered the realm of horror in 1955 with Day the World Ended.   Attack of the Crab Monsters a couple years later put the focus firmly on monsters.  Producing and directing three or more movies a year, he built a reputation for being cheap and quick, but that didn’t prevent him from creating some good movies.  A film’s producer is the one responsible for overseeing the production.  Often they come up with the ideas of what to film.

Roger Corman, publicity still; public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As the sixties were dawning, Corman produced several films “based on” work by Edgar Allan Poe.  I remember seeing some as a young person and wondering what they had to do with the Poe I’d been reading.  Still, he managed to grace cinema with House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death.  These are good films, despite limitations.  At the same time, Corman was still producing creature features as well, wracking up an impressive list of nearly 400 produced films.  As an established player in cinema he also took on the role of distributor from time to time.  When The Wicker Man was being ignored in Britain, Corman undertook the role of US distributor, likely saving the movie from total obscurity.

Circling back to Day the World Ended, we’ve become accustomed to believe that some kind of divine or human ending is in the offing.  These ideas get embellished over time, as I suggested in my new piece on Horror Homeroom.  Corman knew that this putative end would get the attention, whether or not there was any truth to it.  Perhaps that was the genius of his work—he knew how to attract attention.  And he wasn’t afraid to do so.  The business of cinema is one of attracting viewers.  Telling stories we want to hear.  We remember reading Poe, and even if the movies differ from the stories he penned, they are nevertheless reminders, reminiscent of what we’ve read.  If there are monsters they are somehow perhaps even more effective for not really being believable.  In short, Corman was a showman.  He made a living doing what he loved.  And he influenced many lives along the way.

Finding The Exorcist

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This blog is the closest thing to a diary that I keep anymore.  It’s also the place where I remind myself when I read a book or saw a movie.  I started this blog (actually, my niece did, but I started putting content on) about a decade-and-a-half ago.  Most of the books I’ve read since then (but not all), have been featured here.  It didn’t start out that way with movies.  I watch a lot of films.  The other day I was wondering when I first watched The Exorcist.  I figured that it must’ve been something I’d blogged about, knowing me.  It could be that I watched it before 2009, or it could be that the search function on WordPress doesn’t allow me to find the post, if it exists.  You see, I don’t know what else to search for beyond “The Exorcist,” because I can’t recall what I might’ve written about it.  If I did.

So, in case I haven’t, I do want to say a bit more about that experience.  I was only eleven when the movie was released.  Three movies that I grew up terrified to see were Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen.  I finally saw them as an adult.  Since it was the DVD era (preceded by the VHS era, and followed by the Streaming era—all within about three decades) I bought the disc.  In all likelihood this was at FYE, which used to be a thing, just like Blockbuster before it.  Of course by the time I sat down, trembling, to watch it I’d seen many clips, stills, and parodies.  Still, I was afraid.  The movie, some thirty years old, lived up to its reputation.  I was left trembling more than when I started.

Many books have been written about The Exorcist, and although people sometimes laugh at it today, most horror fans I know still speak of it with reverence.  This movie changed horror.  It also changed demons.  Today what we believe about demons derives largely from this movie.  Its explanatory value is that it offers somewhere to turn when nothing else works.  Religion as a last resort.  And, ultimately, religion works where everything else fails.  It is possible, that somewhere in this sprawl of a blog, that I wrote first impressions of seeing it.  It would’ve been 2009, or perhaps I saw it as early as 2006.  I was struggling with my own demons then.  And, as often happens in such cases, precisely when things happened can be a little difficult to determine.

Murphy’s Mansion

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2003 was quite a year for me.  Nashotah House had experienced a fundamentalist takeover and, were I as good at reading writing on the wall as Daniel was, well, you know.  I was still working on Weathering the Psalms and teaching my classes, remaining academic dean as well.  My daughter was still pre-ten and I’d taken a very active interest in geology.  I didn’t have time for many movies.  My recent (if approaching two decades can be termed such) re-interest in horror hadn’t yet begun.  All of which is to say, I had no reason to watch The Haunted Mansion.  Oh, Disney was a big part of our lives, but I was trying hard to raise a child better adjusted than I ever was.  A haunted house movie didn’t seem like a good idea.  Especially at Nashotah.

The critics didn’t like Haunted Mansion, unlike the other Disney ride-inspired movie earlier that year, Pirates of the Caribbean.  We even missed that one in theaters, only catching up with the sequel.  In any case, Haunted Mansion, upon first viewing, isn’t as bad as I was led to expect.  The story has some depth and even seems to recycle the undead from the Black Pearl.  Disney had explored the dark side before, but this was, at the time, the closest they’d come to actual horror.  Well, comedy horror anyway.  I suspect that Eddie Murphy doesn’t tend to bring horror to mind, but he plays his part well enough.  The story is relatively compelling, although some of the elements are standard tropes.  And with Disney’s budget, it was well made.  I’d watch it again.

It seems that it falls into that twilight zone of Disney movies that have become cult classics.  We expect Disney to be either plain old classic or forgotten and locked in the vault.  Those who appreciate darker themes, however, have brought both Haunted Mansion and The Black Cauldron up to the level of having cult followings.  You tend to think well-funded studios would fail miserably when they fail and never speak of such things again.  And yet, The Haunted Mansion got a reboot last year.  Disney’s flirtation with horror speaks to the fact that kids don’t mind being a little scared.  For adults, there’s nothing terrifying here.  There is, however, a story.  A moody atmosphere—although broken up by Murphy’s renowned patter.  And plenty of ghosts and even some musing on Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell.  There’s a bit to unpack here.  So more on that the next time I watch it.  But it may take some time since I’m still catching up.

Influential Horror

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Media has a tremendous effect on society.  We all know that, and every four years elections prove it time and again.  Like an infinite loop or Mobius strip.  The Brits knew this well.  During the Second World War (which we seem eager to repeat), it was against the law to produce horror films in the UK.  Such things can demoralize, don’t you know, old chap?  The first British film to claim horror’s reopening was Dead of Night, released in 1945.  Germany had surrendered in May and Dead of Night, like a breath being held, was released in September.  Although hardly scary by today’s standards, it was an enormously influential film.  It’s an anthology with a framing story that ties all the pieces together.

Walter Craig is an architect called to visit a farmhouse that requires renovation.  Upon arriving, although he’s never been before, all the people at the house are familiar to him from a recurring nightmare he has and vaguely remembers.  He feels that something bad will happen since his dream seems to be a premonition.  Meanwhile, each of the guests tell their own uncanny stories.  Since this is horror, we know that the nightmare will exact its due.  Craig ends up murdering one of the guests before waking in bed.  It was his nightmare.  He receives a call to come to a farmhouse that requires renovation.  When he arrives it reminds him that the nightmare is about to play out in real life.

The movie influenced many others.  The most famous segment—a ventriloquist that goes mad when his dummy takes over—was fuel for many haunted doll stories.  One of the tales was based on a real-life murder than had taken place in Britain in 1860.  As I learned from Wikipedia, however, the most stunning effect the movie had was on cosmology.  You may remember from science class that a debate about the origin of the universe was fought between two models: the Big Bang theory and the Steady State theory.  What they don’t teach in science class is that Fred Hoyle developed the Steady State theory based on this movie of the recurring loop of a nightmare that the dreamer is helpless to escape.  I’ve been saying for years that horror is due a lot more respect than it’s given.  These movies, as an integral part of the media, do have a very real effect on the world around them.  Dead of Night is a good example of that.  And it’s still a bloody good film, after all these years.

Facing Fear

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The relationship between fathers and daughters is intangibly profound.  (I can’t speak for fathers and sons, from either side of the equation.)  That was the angle that Georges Franju took when approaching Eyes Without a Face.  I have to confess that I knew the basic idea behind this movie and it took years to build up the courage to watch it.  I’m squeamish, and the fear that the film might show too much was a very real fear.  After you watch a movie, it can’t be unseen.  Still, it is a classic of the horror genre (although that is disputed) and it gets referenced all the time.  In case you haven’t heard about it, a plastic surgeon is attempting to graft a new face onto his daughter after she’s mutilated in an automobile accident.  Things, as you might guess, don’t go as planned.

Critics didn’t care for the movie when it was first released, but, as we’ve seen from time to time, re-evaluation changes things.  It is now considered good enough to be part of the Criterion Collection and ratings on the usual websites are quite favorable.  It’s often cited for its poetic treatment of the subject, and the response of Christiane, the daughter, seems to bear that out as she moves from complicit in her father’s crimes to sympathetic to his victims.  Indeed, the surgeon himself is conflicted, but that father-daughter relationship is something he can’t ignore.  He seems compelled to help her at any cost—it’s the price of parenting, I suppose.  It’s not for the weak.  But we’re in movie-land, aren’t we?

Christiane is sympathetic to the animals her father uses for his experiments.  When she frees them, after releasing the last intended victim, she’s depicted St. Francis-like, with the doves.  Knowing her own suffering, she can’t bear to impose it on another.  Our bodies are how we present ourselves to the world.  We rely on faces to tell us much of what we need to know, even without words passing between us.  Interestingly, even when wearing her mask, Christiane’s eyes tell the viewer much of what she’s experiencing internally.  Poetic, as the critics say.  If there’s a monster here, however, he’s driven out of love in the context of an imperfect world.  Eyes Without a Face works as a horror film and the reported fainting that took place among viewers early on demonstrate that we tend to feel for others, just as Christiane comes to.  And the father?  Well, that’s the unanswered question.  He’s a victim in his own way.

Which Mountain?

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Disney movies—and I still think of Disney primarily as a movie studio—were part of my childhood.  A small part, but there nevertheless.  We didn’t go to theaters often but we caught some movies on television (do you remember eagerly reading TV Guide to find out what was going to be on that week?).  We did watch The Wonderful World of Disney and some of their series—I recall the one ones on Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket.  Still, I missed a lot.  I didn’t see Mary Poppins, for example, until I was in college.  So the other day I got curious about Escape to Witch Mountain.  I’d not seen it as a child and never saw any reason to watch it as an adult.  I’ve been taking a break from bad movies, and, as it turns out, Disney.  So there may be spoilers below, in case you’re waiting to see it.

I didn’t know the backstory or the plot, so seeing this the first time I wasn’t sure what to expect.  The movie shows its age (I was a mere lad of twelve when it was released), but the story is interesting.  Tony and Tia are adopted but have to be sent to an orphanage.  We quickly learn that they have “powers,” and that adults like to exploit such things.  A wealthy villain has his fixer pose as their long lost uncle to get them to his house, under his control.  The children realize that they must escape to, well, Witch Mountain.  Actually, that takes some time and a sympathetic adult who can drive.  In the end it turns out that they’re aliens, not witches.

Not cheery like many Disney films, Escape to Witch Mountain, although you know it will end well, has a fair bit of tension.  Especially scary is the mob mentality that takes over the locals when they start their literal witch hunt.  Armed and dangerous, those who want to preserve the uniformity of small-town mentality are serious about their convictions.  As usual, they focus on the enemy without getting to know who, or what, they really are.  Obviously, there are larger issues to consider, as there are when anyone has an advantage.  But the kids, aliens, are sweet and mean nobody any harm.  All they want is to get back to their people.  Can humans, however, ever be satisfied knowing that there are others out there more advanced than we are?  Perhaps there’s a reason for cover-ups, after all.  Disney often says more than it’s given credit for saying.  Even if I missed it until now.

Wolfing Hour

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It’s not that I didn’t grow up watching horror; it’s that I didn’t grow up watching horror in theaters.  I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have had it, and besides, we could only afford movies spread apart by wide intervals.  You’d think that now I’m an earning adult (or so I’m told) that I’d have more control but watching is a kind of addiction and money’s still not abundant.  Every once in a while, however, I’ll splurge and pay for a film.  Mostly when they’re not available via any streaming service.  Like many Christians who’ve never read the whole Bible, I know the canon only piecemeal.  So I came to watch Hour of the Wolf, the Ingmar Bergman classic.  Now (at least then) streaming nowhere.  Intellectuals have always flocked to Bergman films since they’re full of symbols and not easy to understand.  (If you want to “get” Robert Eggers, though, you’ve got to do your homework.)

Hour of the Wolf is generally considered psychological horror.  It’s black and white—how scary can it be?  Pretty, depending.  The story of an artist’s wife (Alma) who lives with him in a small shack on an island in Sweden, it’s a tale of unraveling.  Nightmares become difficult to distinguish from waking realities.  The wife reads the artist’s diary, foreshadowing Wendy in The Shining, to discover that he seems to be going insane.  The island’s not abandoned, as they thought.  Soon Alma begins seeing other people too.  And attending their awkward dinner parties.  They speak freely of her husband’s previous affair.  There also seems to be an instance of a real person on the island that the artist keeps secret.

If this doesn’t give you enough to piece it together, well, it’s a Bergman film.  In college we watched The Seventh Seal.  And at least part of Wild Strawberries.  But in 1968 I wasn’t an intellectual and we were poor.  If I’d even heard of Ingmar Bergman it was via reference in some TV sitcom.   I knew to expect strangeness.  These days the box elder bugs are mostly gone from the house.  The weirdness started when, having never seen the film before, I began to pour a glass of water at the very second the artist picks up and begins to pour a glass of wine.  Strange coincidence, I thought.  Several minutes later I saw something edging around my glasses.  A box elder bug crawled right over my right glasses lens.  Like a scene in a Bergman movie.  I knew I’d have to ponder this for some time.

Wondering Wailing

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You have to wonder, it seems to me, if the western, imperialistic gaze sometimes overcompensates for its past sins.  We remain reluctant to say we don’t understand something and sometimes even declare such things superior to what we produce.  That was the feeling that came over me upon reading about The Wailing.  Don’t get me wrong—I like K-horror well enough, but I’m not sure that I would say, with some critics, that it leaves American horror in the dust.  It’s good, yes, and it’s very long (two-and-a-half hours seems too long for a horror film).  The story doesn’t answer all the questions it raises and I was looking for some kind of religious message.  That’s why I watched it in the first place.  

What’s it about?  That’s hard to say.  The best that I can do is it’s about the doomed family of a Korean police officer in a small village.  As others have pointed out, this movie has ghosts, demons, zombies, exorcisms, and other horror standards.  There’s a considerable amount of Christian versus shamanism interplay.  And it seems okay, when someone else is doing it, to suggest a foreigner is the Devil.  None of this is intended to take away from the fact that the movie is effective.  I particularly found the shamanistic exorcism scene fascinating.  The thing is, you never really learn if the self-admitted Devil at the end is working with the shaman or not.  Or if the third potential villain, a woman named “No Name,” is in on it with them.  Or maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.  Maybe the policeman’s family is simply doomed.  Nothing they can do changes that.

The movie suggests that such things are like fishing.  You can’t be certain who’s going to take the bait.  According to those who know, apparently a deleted scene at the end helps to clarify this a bit.  There is a lot of talk about belief, and a Christian clergyman confronting the Devil.  For me, however, I need to be able to follow a story well enough to figure out whether I’m misinterpreting or not.  The problem with a movie this long is finding the time to go back and rewatch it.  It opens with a quote from the Bible and it uses biblical tropes, such as the cock crowing three times, to make some strong points.  In fact, the opening quote from Luke 24.37-39 implies that the ghost may be God.  One thing is certain, I’ll be mulling over The Wailing for some time.  And maybe someday I’ll start to understand.  In the meanwhile, I’ll still watch and appreciate American horror, inferior though it may be.

One Host

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I don’t want to seem an ungracious guest, but I don’t know if I met the right host.  I really need to start keeping track of film dates as well as titles.  I found two versions of The Host and one was free.  (This is the 2020 version.)  Despite what the critics say, I liked it.  It borrows quite a lot from Alfred Hitchcock, and, I’m told, from Hostel (which I’ve never seen).  The plot is complex and, it may be my own naiveté, but it kept me guessing.  It’s the story of how a down-on-his-luck Englishman mistakenly gets involved in a drug smuggling operation.  He travels to Amsterdam where his “hotel” claims they’ve lost the reservation but they can set him up in a stylish house with a local who has extra room.  The local turns out to be a very influential psychotic.  Herein hangs the tale.

For me, I couldn’t guess where this was going.  I thought the drug smugglers were the real scary people but then odd things start happening with the Englishman’s host.  When he doesn’t show up to work on Monday his brother goes looking for him and he too meets “the host.”  The charming murderer is generally a male role, but Vera, the host, plays it well.  It seems to me that those who criticize the movie most strongly have some viewing experiences that I lack.  This is a polished effort and it doesn’t appear to have been cheaply done.  The story has many twists and although it may imitate others, that’s how new filmmakers get started.  Most writers are willing to admit that they borrow.  Doing so with style can make a huge amount of difference.

What remains unclear to me is whether this was The Host I was supposed to watch or not.  There’s a 2013 sci-fi thriller by that title and I also found a 2006 monster film from South Korea.  With a few exceptions, movie titles tend to be short.  You can’t copyright a title.  And sometimes the most appropriate one for your work has already been taken.  Here (the 2020 version) the title maybe gives away who it is you’re intended to watch out for.  The drug dealers aren’t an idle threat, but Vera is a spider waiting in her web.  And the movie has a moral—actions have consequences.  The original apparent protagonist has little to no self control which he blames on an abusive upbringing.  There’s quite a lot of father-relationship analysis going on here as well.  If anything, The Host (2020) may be a little too ambitious, but it’s worth staying a spell.

Haunted Life

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It’s funny what a difference that a few years can make.  I can’t seem to recall from where I sourced my movies in the noughties.  Streaming was extremely tenuous in our Somerville apartment—the plan didn’t include the required speed for it.  Like in the old days when it took twenty minutes to upload a photograph through dial-up.  In any case, I know I’ve watched The Haunting before.  I know it was in Somerville, but having watched it again I have to wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me.  I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House there, and I saw the movie.  But how?  It’s all about mind games, but the mind games are played on a woman who has an abusive family, one that damages her psychologically.  Escape is important to her, even if it is to a haunted house.

I think the last time I watched this I was looking for something that might scare me.  That phase was one of thinking not much frightened me—but this movie is scary.  Even with its “G” rating, its lack of blood and gore, and black-and-white filming.  It scares.  One thing I’ve noticed when reading about these older movies after I watch them is that many improve with time.  Shirley Jackson was known during her life but you become a classic writer only AD—after death.  The Haunting has aged well.  I suspect it has something to do with Robert Wise, the director.  What must the psychology of a man be who directed The Sound of Music, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Haunting?  The latter is all about psychology.

Movies that make you think are those, I believe, that may become classics.  And perhaps there’s a bit of Eleanor inside all of us.  Wanting to be noticed but eschewing publicity.  Needing someone to love us, but pushing away those who try.  Children in bad environments learn unorthodox, and often unhealthy, coping techniques.  Eleanor has difficulty accepting that John is married when she thinks she’s finally found a place that accepts her for who she is.  Even if it’s a haunted house.  Especially if it’s a haunted house.  As a child I’d no doubt have found the movie boring.  There is, however, much for adults to absorb.  And, I expect, I’ll need to go back and read the novel again.  One of the reasons for watching horror is that the viewer is seeking something.  It’s not just thrills.  I didn’t write about the movie the last time I saw it so I don’t recollect when it was.  Or even how.  My thoughts now, however, are that I should’ve paid closer attention the first time.