Experimenting with Quatermass

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Hammer films are coy.  In these days of digital rights management, they’re often difficult to locate in the United States.  Even on streaming services.  I’d known about Quatermass since I was a kid.  I’d heard about Quatermass and the Pit as a pretty scary early science fiction-horror offering.  I’ve still never seen it.  Quatermass was a BBC television character, a kind of mad scientist figure.  The Quatermass Xperiment was the first of a set of four Hammer films based on him.  Also known as The Creeping Unknown, it was cast with an American Quatermass (ironically, it turns out) to appeal to American viewers (who can now seldom access the film).  In any case, one of the streaming services finally acquired rights to the 1955 movie.  The special effects were naturally primitive, but that doesn’t stop this from becoming a scary film.

Watching these early movies is like studying history.  Other films were influenced by The Quatermass Xperiment, most notably Lifeforce.  I couldn’t help but think of Night of the Living Dead as well.  Quatermass, a rogue scientist, sends a rocket into space with three astronauts.  Since this was before we had any kind of conception of how this might actually be done, the idea seems implausible, of course.  The rocket returns with only one of the three crew members, and he’s morphing into something else.  Despite his arrogance, Quatermass realizes he has to cooperate with the police to contain the menace.  Inspector Lomax describes himself as a “Bible man,” unacquainted with science, and Quatermass considers his work superior to that or mere police.  When the hybrid is finally located and destroyed, however, it is in Westminster Abbey.

Although the runtime is just over an hour and some of the acting is quite wooden, this is an affecting story.  The scene where the transforming man encounters the little girl’s tea party bears elements of the pathos of Frankenstein.  Without the budget, science, and even acting resources of modern productions, The Quatermass Xperiment manages to fall squarely into horror with a monster I’d been waiting since childhood to see.  In those days you were at the mercy of your local television offerings.  Now that we have worldwide content on the worldwide web, we still restrict viewing so that the most money can be made from a movie that’s seven decades old, and its cohort.  In any case, this experiment has left me determined to find what Quatermass discovers in the pit.  Once that becomes available on a service I use.

Rabbit Hole Crawl

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

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

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

Philadelphia Story

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

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

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

Fear of Puppets

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David Schmoeller is a horror director I discovered only in the last several months.  I watched his first film, Tourist Trap, after having found Netherworld streaming for free.  Perhaps his most famous film is Puppet Master.  Although intended for a theatrical release, it was ultimately shifted to direct to video.  That didn’t stop it from becoming a cult film and from spawning sequels and spin offs.  Like other Schmoeller films, it’s a bit disjointed.  But it’s also fun to watch.  Since this is a film from the eighties, I won’t be too worried about spoilers—fair warning.  So, the puppet master lives in a hotel and brings puppets to life, literally.  He does this using ancient Egyptian magic.  About half a century after his death, four colleagues of Neil Gallagher receive a psychic message from him.  They travel to the hotel only to find he’s dead.

The puppets, released from their hiding place, begin killing the guests.  This is one of the many things never explained.  The puppets don’t appear to be evil, but they are murderous.  Three of the four colleagues become their victims in typical horror fashion.  The last surviving friend, an anthropology professor from Yale, and Gallagher’s widow, discover Neil has brought himself back to life, using the puppet master’s Egyptian magic.  He plans to live forever, but apparently he has to kill his former friends to do so.  As he explains this, and beats the professor and his wife, the puppets realize that he’s a bad man.  They attack and kill Neil when he’s trapped in an old elevator.  The ending reveals that his widow can also reanimate the dead.

Child’s Play had been released the previous year, but the trope of haunted or cursed puppets had been in the horror tradition already for decades.  Dolls and puppets are often residents of the uncanny valley and yet people can’t stop making them.  We often learn to draw by representing our families with crayons.  The fascination of replicating ourselves artistically provides low hanging fruit for horror films.  Fabricated things that look human—and we can add mannikins here—starting to move, or coming to life, scares us.  So much so that even less-than-great movies such as Puppet Master can become their own franchise.  As a horror movie, it isn’t terrible.  It’s also not likely to keep you up at night.  At least one other David Schmoeller film is on my to see list, and I have a fair idea of what to expect.  I watch them duly warned.

Fighting over Chocolate

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It’s really a teen movie, The Chocolate War is.  That may be the sweet spot for dark academia.  I’m maybe a bit old for such things, but being old tends to mean remembering how it was.  Not exactly how it was, though.  Chocolate War takes place in a Catholic boys school, Trinity by name.  Perpetually underfunded, the students have to sell chocolate (now we’re in territory I recall—remember me, Gertrude?) to help keep it running.  Meanwhile, the Vigils, a secret society, have a considerable amount of pull on campus.  Led by a prescient and overly mature boy for his age, Archie, the Vigils assign select students difficult tasks in a kind of high school hazing.  Jerry, a freshman whose mother recently died, is assigned to refuse to sell chocolates for ten days.  He then decides (for reasons never explained) not to sell them at all.

The refusal leads to a financial crisis for the school.  The Vigils try to force Jerry to sell, engaging in harassment tactics.  Nothing works.  Then Archie coerces him into a “boxing” assembly where students pay to have their specific punches thrown by one of the boys (a bully or Jerry) at the other, who simply has to take it.  Before the match begins, Archie, the Vigils’ leader, is tricked into taking the bully’s place.  Jerry, who’s on the football team, knocks him out, sending some teeth flying (probably why the film got an R rating).  In the end, Archie is demoted, but Jerry realizes that with his refusal to comply, he led to the result he was protesting against (the harassment and boxing match led to selling all the chocolate despite his refusal to participate).

Dated, yes (1988), Dead Poets Society, no.  Still, there’s much to ponder here.  Bullying—used by very high offices in this land—seems to be a growing problem.  And yes, when you get a bunch of adolescent boys together, trouble can arise.  It’s believable.  Although considered a flop, critics were kinder than the box office.  There are dark messages to decode here.  The price of nonconformity—an issue that doesn’t disappear with adulthood—and, perhaps looming larger, its effectiveness.  The teacher temporarily running the school, Brother Leon, is part of the problem, as is often the case in dark academia.  He’s not evil, however.  The film places the abuse of power on Archie, although he doesn’t condone violence.  Ultimately violence is used to unseat him.  With the result that the system (Trinity) prevails nonetheless.  Worth considering.

X-Rayed

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If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the comic book ads for x-ray specs.  That’s the idea behind a Roger Corman film that Stephen King thought one of the scariest he’d seen.  X, subtitled The Man with X-Ray Eyes, came out in 1963.  Not to be confused with the X of the modern trilogy, this X follows a Doctor Xavier who develops a formula that allows him to see inside people so that he can accurately diagnose and cure them.  This formula may affect his sanity, however, and he kills a friend who is trying to take the ability from him.  A wanted man, he finds a carnival barker who exploits his gift as a trick.  It was a bit jarring to see Don Rickles in a horror movie, but stranger things have happened.  In the midst of this exploitation, an old friend finds him and drives him to safety.

Then to Las Vegas, where his sight allows him to win unabated.  When the police are called he steals a car and increasingly sees through the fabric of the universe.  He stumbles into a road-side revival where the preacher encourages him to take Matthew 5 literally and he does so as the congregation chants “pluck it out!”  What makes this final scene so arresting, apart from qualifying it for Holy Sequel, is that before the minister tells him to mutilate himself, the doctor says he sees through the darkness to the eye that “sees us all.”  He sees God.  The minister interprets this as the Devil, confusing the most elemental entities that exist one for the other.

The movie has some lighthearted moments, some even apart from Don Rickles.  When the doctor begins to see through everybody’s clothes, it’s presented in a humorous way.  But for the most part, the film is played straight and it manages to raise some serious issues for those who think through the implications.  Our senses evolved to help us survive.  Accessing abilities beyond that is a catalyst for disaster.  Indeed, Dr. Xavier early on notes that he’s approaching godhood because of this newly won ability.  It also means that an individual might know too much.  It seems that at the end he does.  The movie is remarkable even today in several ways.  Technology has made special effects more believable, but the human side of this story remains unaltered.  A doctor wanting to help patients becomes more of a monster than a man, in some respects.  And perhaps the most remarkable aspect is that this is a serious horror film made by Roger Corman for AIP. Scary even to a young Stephen King.

And Bones

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Often making lists of dark academia movies, The Skulls plays right into that territory.  A secret society, an elite college, and something’s definitely gone wrong.  It’s not a great movie, feeling somewhat contrived, but it fits the mold pretty well.  Things are a little too pat in the film, and the writing isn’t the best.  It’s entertaining, if overblown.  The story begins at an unnamed Yale (actually University of Toronto) with working-class Luke being invited to join the Skulls after an impressive rowing competition victory.  From the first, the Skulls meetings seem to lack gravitas.  Rich and powerful, they are above and beyond the law.  The problem for Luke is that his friends, Will and Chloe, are being edged out of his life.  Will, who writes for the school paper, breaks into the Skulls headquarters but is caught by Caleb, Luke’s “soul mate.”

Will is killed in what follows, and Luke wants to get out but it’s too late. Caleb’s father is the head-honcho for the Skulls and decides to have Luke committed to an asylum when he refuses to cooperate over his friend’s death.  Chloe and the second-in-command of the Skulls, Senator Levritt, rescue Luke and he challenges Caleb to a duel.  I’ll leave it off there so as not to spoil too much.  That gives you a sense of the darkness, in any case.  But the film doesn’t feel that dark.  Yes there is a murder, and there are bad guys, but something I can’t define prevents it from having the tone that you might expect from a grim tale.  As I say, things are a little too pat.  The characters’ emotions are a little too close to the surface.

The movie did well at the box office, but the sequels were released direct to video.  As far as the academia side goes, there are, no doubt, secret societies.  Privilege doesn’t let go once it gets a grip.  But the above-ground “Yale” sees a bit too light and airy.  Maybe more classroom and library scenes might’ve helped.  Likely it would’ve been better had it been based on a novel.  Films that are based on books have a solid development on which to stand and it’s often a matter of figuring out what to omit.  The writer and director had gone to Yale and Harvard, respectively, and wanted to portray what secret society life is like.  But that’s the thing about secret societies—you can’t really know, can you?  It’s a matter of imagination.  And dark academia is where such things fit.

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.