Breakage

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

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

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

Not Just a Visit

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

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

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

Big Bites

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Although Jaws takes place on or near the fourth of July, it’s not holiday horror.  Holiday horror draws its source of fear from the day, and although Mayor Vaughn—like many politicians—insists holiday income is more important than a few lives lost, the fear derives from the shark.  I can’t remember when I first saw Jaws.  It couldn’t have been during its initial theatrical release (I was too young), I do know that I read the book first.  I wasn’t expecting Hooper (then my favorite character) to survive.  I was also surprised when I heard people starting to refer to Jaws as horror.  When I first saw it, whenever that was, I wouldn’t have called it horror—it’s just a movie about a shark.  Since thriller and horror bleed into each other I’m more open to the designation now.  Besides, animal attack horror is its own well-established category these days.  Jaws, half-a-century old this year, is experiencing a comeback but the shark never left.

JAWS, 1975

My wife surprised me by suggesting we watch it last weekend.  We’d seen it together on television many years ago.  A number of analyses have been appearing in the media, highlighting the importance of the movie, and I noticed a few things watching it again.  Probably the most obvious shift, for me, was finding Quint the most engaging character.  I don’t know how many times I’ve read Melville’s Moby-Dick, but it’s been at least two times since seeing Jaws the last time.  The connection was much clearer with this viewing.  Quint is after sharks because of their attacks on crewmen of USS Indianapolis in World War II.  Quint was a survivor but his life’s mission is revenge on sharks.  So much so that he smashes the radio to prevent Brody from radioing in an SOS.

So here was a confluence.  I watch horror movies.  My favorite novel is Moby-Dick.  Jaws falls somewhere between the two.  The mainstream success of the latter may have been an early contributing factor to the grudging admission that horror can be good cinema.  Just in the past two or three years standard media outlets have been valorizing some horror and in this summer’s movie season, eyes have turned back to Amity and its local Captain Ahab and great white.  The great white shark, mainly feared because of this movie, is considered a vulnerable species.  As with Moby Dick, I felt sorry for the animal, watching the movie.  Both seem to have revenge on their minds as well, whether it’s a holiday or not.

Dark Lovecraft

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There is no shortage of Lovecraftian horror movies out there.  I watched The Unnamable because I found it on a list of dark academia movies.  And also, well, it’s horror.  I’ve most likely read Lovecraft’s original story at some point in time, but I didn’t remember it at all.  The dark academia part comes in because it involves college students and a haunted house.  A low-budget offering, this is hardly great cinema.  It’s not sloppy enough to qualify as a bad movie.  That puts it somewhere around “meh.”  The film opens with Joshua Winthrop being killed by the monstrous daughter that he keeps locked in a closet of his house.  Then, in the present day (the movie is from 1988) three college guys talk about it and the skeptic decides to spend the night in the house to disprove the monster tale.  He is, of course, killed.  Although his two companions don’t go looking for him, others end up in the house.

A couple of upperclassmen looking to score with freshmen coeds, talk two women into going to the house with them.  As they start to enact their plan, the monster kills them one-by-one, leaving the virginal final girl alive.  Meanwhile, the other two students whose friend was killed, also come to the house.  They manage to rescue the final girl and escape the creature by invoking the Necronomicon’s spells.  The music cues are often comical, suggesting that this isn’t to be taken seriously.  They also spoil the dark academia atmosphere.  For me, a horror film works best if it’s either clearly horror or clearly comedy horror.

It did, however, raise a question in my mind.  Dark academia and horror do have some crossover.  H. P. Lovecraft often had professorial types as his protagonists.  Was he writing a form of dark academia?  It’s difficult to say.  Lovecraft’s work was known as “weird fiction” in his time, and it has become its own kind of genre.  (Just try to publish in the rebooted Weird Fiction without your Lovecraft cap on and see how you fare.)  I’ve been pondering genres for quite some time, and since I watch movies because they’re free or cheap, often, I see some unconventional fare.  There’s no question that The Unnamable is horror.  When the movie ended I was sad for the monster.  She’d been living according to her nature, and really didn’t deserve the treatment she received from a bunch of trespassers.  Not a great movie, it nevertheless made me think.

Re-Ruins

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I discovered Scott B. Smith’s The Ruins after having seen the movie version.  The film is scary but the book is scarier.  I wrote about the movie last year, so I won’t worry about spoilers here.  I will say that even with its bleak ending the film has a happier resolution.  If you read my post, and remember it, the following summary may not be necessary, but here goes: two couples and two friends vacationing in Mexico set off in search of one of the friends’ missing brother.  They travel to a very remote location and discover that the missing brother is dead.  Worse, that he was killed by the natives for trying to escape a vine-covered ruin.  The vine is carnivorous, and, unlike in the movie, clearly intelligent, and sentient.  It tricks the young people into harming themselves and then it begins to eat them.  It especially preys on open wounds, but it can smother a person if it so desires.

The book is full of tension.  Although a couple of injuries take place early on, it’s over halfway through before someone actually dies.  And the others don’t follow quickly.  The narrative asks probing questions about ethics and mercy.  When (if ever) is it okay to kill someone who clearly has zero chance of survival?  Is it still murder?  Complicating things, for me, was the fact that I couldn’t remember clearly how the movie ended.  Eventually it came back to me, but this is one of those cases where the film and book, although with the same writer, diverge a bit.  The characters are clearly sketched here but defy expectations and stereotypes.  And it is sometimes the case that you aren’t sure who might be telling the truth and who might be trying to protect themselves through prevarication.

An effectively written novel, it had me looking askance at plants from time to time.  We have a quite aggressive vine in our yard that seems determined to be the Trump of all the plants.  I suspect someone planted it long before we moved in, unless it’s simply a successful exploiter of happy happenstance.  I’ve tried uprooting it every year, but I can’t seem to get to the brain of the operation.  It’s easy to believe that if plants were sentient, and could move a bit faster than they tend to, that such a scenario as in The Ruins might unfold.  The question remains whether the local Mayans simply can’t eradicate it or if they might indeed have some worshipful regard for it.  The two may end up being nearly the same thing as human power is unable to tell nature what to do.

Don’t Let Go

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We watched Hugo, as a family, over a decade ago and quite enjoyed it.  At that time I only really blogged about horror movies or those with a religion element that I could spot.  Over the years, I’ve taken to reflecting on movies themselves and so, since we rewatched Hugo recently, I thought it might be time to talk about it.  This is one of those movies that was critically acclaimed but a box office flop.  It’s still a wonderful film.  As a side note, working in any media (including academic publishing) introduces you to familiarity with the project, such as a book or movie, that becomes widely praised but just doesn’t sell.  Public taste is very difficult to predict (note who’s in the White House) and sometimes a book, movie, record album, or any media hit, becomes highly acclaimed while losing money.  Hugo is worth re-watching and, despite the financial hit, is quite good.

Hugo is based on a children’s book, Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which I would like to read).  The movie is a paean to early filmmaking and involves some real history, especially around the life of George Méliès.  Watching the film a second time, I was struck with how Hugo ends up reenacting several scenes from early films in his own life.  The film also captures how movies are more than simply entertainment.  They have become an integral part of life in some cultures, and, for some of us, a source of meaning.  That’s why I wanted to see Hugo again.  It struck me as a compelling story—a redemption story—bringing a sense of meaning to a life where George Méliès went from fame to obscurity because his contribution to film was unrecognized since movies hadn’t yet become a major industry.  Look at Disney today and wonder, dear reader.

Or consider Hugo itself.  With a gross profit of “only” about 15 million dollars over the budget, it barely covered its costs.  Lots of people are involved in making a movie and this is quite an expensive venture.  Anyone who earns a paycheck knows that the net is always disappointingly lower than the gross earnings.  Cinema in general struggles with the need to adapt to streaming culture where profits are parsed out in small bits rather than drawing large crowds to fill seats.  And yet, movies act in many ways like the modern mythology.  They tell important stories.  They provide touch-points for society.  Unfortunately, however, this is often only the case when they make a lot of money.

Hitchcock’s Freud

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When you can’t have horror, Hitchcock will sometimes do.  Having seen most of the big classics, Marnie came to the top of our list, and I found it had some triggers.  I suspect that’s true for those who have experienced childhood trauma and who sometimes do things as an adult without knowing why.  At least that’s what I took away from it.  To discuss this will require spoilers, so if you’re behind on your Hitchcock you might want to catch up first.  Here goes.  Marnie’s mother was a prostitute who turned to religion.  The reason is that one night during a storm young Marnie was frightened and one of her mother’s clients tried to comfort her.  Supposing he was molesting her daughter, she attacked him and when he hurt her, young Marie killed him.  All of this was repressed in her memory and now, as an adult, Marnie is a kleptomaniac who has the many phobias that that night impressed upon her.

Then along comes Mark.  Although he knows Marnie is a thief, he falls in love with her.  From a wealthy family, he’s influential enough to get charges against her dismissed, which he does once they marry.  He tries to unravel why Marnie won’t sleep with him, why she can’t stand red, why thunderstorms terrify her.  In a very Freudian move, he recognizes that her relationship with her mother is the key.  Hiring a private investigator, he discovers what happened to Marnie as a child and then takes her to confront her mother.  Marnie has never felt her mother’s love, but she didn’t remember the incident and didn’t know that her mother took the murder rap for her and subsequently distanced herself from her daughter.

I have to admit that I found this more disturbing than most Hitchcock films I’ve seen.  The ending, which I revealed in the first paragraph, brought quite a few of my own childhood issues to the surface.  Parents try to do the best they can, at least most of the time, but we damage our children psychologically, generally unintentionally.  And trauma in your youngest years never leaves you.  I can mask and pretend—that’s the way you survive in this world—but a number of my experiences as a pre-teen affect me every day, whether I realize it or not.  Where I choose to sit in a room.  How I respond to unexpected events or sudden changes.  Why I immediately have to know what that noise is and where it came from.  These are all part of the legacy my childhood left me.  I think Marnie would understand.

Scary Father’s Day

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Given my circumstances, I never really celebrated Father’s Day growing up.  By the time I was old enough to get the concept, my father was long gone.  My step-father, some years later, was no real father.  Besides, we were poor and it was hard to think what such a celebration might entail.  All of which is to say that I never really expect much from the day myself.  My wife and daughter suggested we try Nightmare in New Hope again—this is the horror movie museum in New Hope, Pennsylvania, which had been closed last time we tried.  It was an appropriately rainy day, the kind we seem to specialize in around here.  I suspect that the museum will show up in a future blog post or two, but suffice it to say that it’s an impressive little collection.  It’s an odd feeling, this human desire to be in the presence of something you’ve seen in a movie.  I recommend it for any horror fans who happen to be along the mid-Delaware.

Not being large enough to take all day, we considered what we might do that afternoon.  In keeping with the theme, a visit to Vampa: Vampire and Paranormal Museum was suggested.  This museum is in Doylestown, which is only about a quarter hour from New Hope.  There’s more to it than just the museum, so it too will likely come up in future posts.  This museum contains a truly impressive array of artisanal vampire hunting equipment from Europe, dating between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.  I’ll try to put together a photo essay of it soon.  But that’s just the first room.  A second deals with demonic possession.  Then rooms have displays of occult and other esoteric artifacts, along with creepy suggestions to be careful of engaging too much with them.  The final room is dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, and it warns that the struggle with evil is real.

Both places had a steady stream of visitors yesterday.  It would be fair to say that by the time we finished I was over-stimulated.  You have to understand that I personally don’t know many people interested in horror.  Going to these places was the sacrifice of a rainy Sunday afternoon for my family but will likely become one of those pleasant, lingering memories of the unusual that take on a rosy afterglow over the years.  This blog quite often ponders over why such things take on meaning for someone interested in religion and belief.  Being in the presence of artifacts, as noted above, puts you in touch with a kind of earnestness that mere electronic reading on the internet lacks.  If you happen to be along the mid-Delaware, the side trip to Doylestown is a worthy add-on, Father’s Day or not.

Night Voices

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So this is really why I watched The Lady in the Water.  A friend had recommended The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, by Michael Bamberger.  The book was published in 2006 and I found a “very good” used copy on sale for six bucks.  It’d been on my to read list for a year or two.  The book arrived and I discovered it was about a Shyamalan movie I’d never heard of.  I have friends who refuse to even mention his The Last Airbender.  (I’ve seen the original animated version and it’d be difficult to think a movie would improve on it.)  Indeed, The Lady in the Water was a box office disappointment, and The Happening (which I kind of like) and The Last Airbender were critically castrated.  M. Night Shyamalan’s name does draw crowds, but I prefer his horror to his fantasy, but that’s just me.

In any case, reading Bamberger’s book was like cinematography 101.  It’s a nonfiction account of how this movie was made, written by a sports writer also from the Philadelphia area.  He begins by narrating how he met Shyamalan at a party.  How that meeting led to the idea of writing a book about his movie-making process.  Lady in the Water isn’t Shyamalan’s best work, but this book goes through how terribly personal the project was to the writer-director.  It’s a gripping account, especially for those who try to create any form of art.  It also gave me a renewed respect for what Shyamalan tries to do with his movies.  Early career success made him rich, and then he was in a place to follow his dreams.  Or bedtime stories.  Of course, a book written nearly a two decades ago couldn’t project where Shyamalan would be today.

His career surged again, beginning with The Visit—definitely creepy—and has continued to ride fairly high.  Although I haven’t seen all his films, I was interested enough to read about his creative process.  Although The Village wasn’t as highly regarded as The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, it’s still my favorite among his movies.  Part of that is because it was the first of his films I saw.  It was recommended to me by my brother, which also helped.  Mainly, that movie made me trust Shyamalan as a writer-director.  I’m not sad to have seen The Lady in the Water so that I could read a book about it.  The whole thing was a lesson in creativity.

Water Lady

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Being creative poses the very real threat of being misunderstood.  I can’t help but think that some of this was going on in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Lady in the Water.  Initially cudgeled by critics, it nevertheless seems to me that the perceived arrogance is overstated.  I generally like Shyamalan’s movies.  I think he does horror quite well, and I thought that maybe there’d be some horror elements here.  There were a few, but the story is kind of long and rambling, kind of like the stories I told my daughter at bedtime.  The movie begins by laying out a legend of a narf (water nymph) who will bring the world peace.  She is attacked by a scrunt, the monster in the film, but has to deliver a message to humans and has to be protected by the maintenance man at an apartment complex in Philadelphia.  And complex is right.

Since this isn’t a widely-known story, we have to be told, in pieces, by a number of the ensemble cast.  A lot of it is unbelievable, even for a fantasy movie.  At the same time, it contains a good message and I get the sense that this is why Shyamalan made it.  He does have an important role in his own movie (which is why it is said to be arrogant), but the style is reminiscent of his other movies.  The scrunt seems like a good idea for a monster and a couple of the attack scenes veer briefly into horror territory.  There’s even an element of Scream when Bob Balaban’s character explains (incorrectly) why he will survive an encounter with the scrunt.  The story has some likable elements but when so much of a fantasy world is being revealed piecemeal it’s sometimes hard to keep your focus.

Based on a bedtime story Shyamalan told his own children, it does resemble that genre of story.  Personal.  When my daughter was small, I made up nighttime stories for her pretty much on a daily basis.  They had a kind of rambling, plodding nature to them.  I made up creatures, as in this movie, and, as Balaban says, kept it family-friendly.  Classic stories do tend to follow a trajectory that is well known to literary scholars.  Something entirely new thrown into that area will sometimes emerge  beaten up.  It wasn’t a waste of time to watch The Lady in the Water.  Not one of Shyamalan’s best, it is nevertheless a film that makes you think a little while afterwards.  And that seems to be what it was intended to do.

Addams Family Research

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After having binged on Wednesday earlier this year, and wanting something lighter to watch, we finally saw The Addams Family.  Neither my wife nor I watched the television series too much when we were kids, but it’s probably no surprise that I watched it more.  As with Wednesday, if you didn’t see the television show, or read Charles Addams’ cartoons, you can still enjoy the movie.  After all, some of the salient aspects of the eponymous family are never explained.  Why are they so wealthy?  Things like that.  Although the movie, which is family friendly, can’t be called horror, it is a dark humor piece that scratches a certain itch.  For several years I’ve been pondering how horror has become such an amorphous genre that it really tells us little about a movie.  Taken literally, this one would be horror.

Not having grown up as a particular fan, I never really attempted to research the Addams family, but the basic idea was that they were people who lived as they liked, not caring what others thought of them.  They remain happy and cheerful in their macabre tastes.  The humor in such a situation is obvious.  The ultimate non-conformists, they are wealthy enough not to have to worry about fitting in.  Also, they tend to have some supernatural abilities.  Watching the show growing up, the character that never seemed to fit  the macabre image was Pugsley.  Often a partner in crime for Wednesday, his “monstrous” nature seldom seemed obvious to me.  Maybe it was his outfit.  In any case, not fitting in is what the show is all about.  Not fitting in and not worrying about it.

The plot of the movie is surely well known by now.  Gomez’s brother Fester is missing and a criminally minded Abigail Craven sends her lookalike son Gordon to take Fester’s place to get access to their riches.  The humor, apart from the madcap plot, often comes from subverted expectations.  A character points out a gloomy, macabre, or scary situation followed by a comment of how much they enjoy it.  As I’ve noted, taken literally such things define horror.  Horror and comedy can work well together.  In fact, I’ve reviewed many horror comedies on this blog.  I would have never thought to have watched this movie, however, without the prompting of Tim Burton’s Wednesday.  She’s an underplayed character in the series since the focus tended to be on the bizarre adults, as far as I can recall.  As Christina Ricci’s second feature film, her Wednesday laid the groundwork for the Burton series.  Maybe it’s time to do a little more research into family history.

Split Decision

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Sometimes advertising and packaging can make you ill-prepared for a movie.  I know that M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Split, and Glass are considered a trilogy.  Without knowing the story, I saw the first film and discovered it was a superhero movie.  That’s fine, of course.  It’s not really horror much at all.  That’s maybe the reason Split caught me off guard.  It is brought into sequel territory right at the very end, but the story is tense and scary.  Kevin Crumb is a man with DID, dissociative identity disorder—what used to be called a split personality.  Quite apart from the inherently fascinating phenomenon (and the criticism the movie received for misrepresenting it), the idea that a person shifts and you don’t know who s/he is, is frightening.  A couple of those personalities have teamed up and become criminal.  Kevin abducts three teenage girls for a purpose that only becomes clear later.  Their efforts to escape create a great deal of the tension, and the quick shifting of identities that Kevin displays makes any kind of reasoning with him impossible.  

There are any number of avenues to discuss here.  One is that Kevin’s disorder stems from how his mother treated him as a child.  (Unintentionally I’ve been watching movies that trigger me that way lately.)  He developed personalities to protect himself from the pain and they continue to multiply.  Meanwhile, the kidnapped girls can’t figure out what’s going on but Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy—my first clue that this was horror instead of a superhero movie—)realizes that she has to treat the different identities in different ways.  Another avenue is to consider what “the beast” (one of the personalities) asserts: only those who’ve been broken are truly evolved.  Some children make it through difficult childhoods by becoming resilient while others don’t.  Casey, it turns out, also had an abusive relationship in her childhood.  Movies like this always make me reflect on how difficult being a good parent can be.

The person not in control of their own actions (ahem) is among the most frightening of human monsters.  Those with mental illness, however, seldom fall into this category.  I understand why mental health providers found this film problematic, but it showcases Shyamalan’s horror chops.  It was the scariest movie that I’ve seen in quite some time.  After I ejected the disc I felt bothered (and trapped) for quite a few minutes.  And I realized that if this is a trilogy then superhero and horror combined await in the third part.  We shall see.

Deadly Seven

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

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

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

Not Fragile

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

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

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

Horror Time

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In case anyone’s wondering (ha!), I haven’t lost interest in horror.  I’ve been discussing quite a few dark academia movies lately since that’s where I seem to be, but what’s really lost is time.  I’m no great consumer of social media.  I spend literally five minutes on Facebook daily.  Less than that on Bluesky and Twitter.  I don’t have time.  I love watching movies, but they take time.  I often discuss this with family—I’m not sure where the time goes.  In my case it’s not social media.  Much of it—the lion’s share—is work.  When a three-day weekend starts to feel like just enough time to get everything done before starting it all over again, I think there’s an elephant in the room.  If I can just squeeze past your trunk (pardon me) I would note that I spend as much time as I can writing and reading, but even that drains too quickly.

I read a lot.  And I read about writing.  Those who do it best have time to put into their craft.  If they’re working long hours, have a family, and weeds that love all the rain we get around here, they’re better than I am.  Home ownership (if you can’t afford to hire groundskeepers) is itself a full-time occupation.  As is writing.  And, of course, work.  What’s been suffering lately has been my time for watching horror.  Part of that’s money too.  I’m not sure if anybody else has noticed, but prices haven’t exactly gone down since January, and movies aren’t always free.  I have a long list of horror films I want to see (quite a long list), but tide, time, and money wait for no-one.  I even had a four-day weekend not long ago during which I had no time to watch horror.  Horrific, isn’t it?

I’m at a stage of life where the shortness of it all stares me in the face.  I was a late bloomer and my career never really took off.  It ended up taking time and not rewarding that time at the usual exchange rate.  I’m watching friends and family retire and some finding too much time on their hands.  Hey, brother, can you spare an hour?  I think of my farming ancestors where every minute was filled trying to stay alive in a world where leisure time really is a luxury.  I have no right to complain, but I do wonder where the time goes.  I suppose if I didn’t blog I’d have a little more time for horror, but I just can’t face giving up all this fame.