Dusk’s Early Dark

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It may be the strangest vampire movie ever, and that’s saying something.  To understand this, you have to realize that I read as little as possible about a movie before seeing it.  I try to avoid trailers, and recommendations from well-wishers play a big part in my choices.  I came across From Dusk till Dawn in a couple of online lists and when I saw it was Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney, I doubted the vampire part.  Indeed, for the first twenty minutes to half hour I was convinced I’d stepped into Pulp Fiction 2.  (Tarantino wrote it, after all.)  Those kinds of movies unnerve me, and just when I was wondering if I’d made a mistake, it became a monster movie.  An action horror film.  Lots of vampires and, surprisingly lots of talk about God.

In case you haven’t seen it, Clooney and Tarantino are brothers out on a crime spree.  Harvey Keitel is an ex-minister out on a road trip with his teenage kids.  After his wife’s death, he lost his faith although he still believes in God.  (Classic theodicy.)  The criminals abduct the family to get them into Mexico where they’ve made a deal with a guy.  They meet at about the most salacious strip club you can imagine, one that caters only to truckers and bikers.  It turns out that the staff and strippers are all vampires and they prey on the patrons.  Okay, so the story doesn’t hold together.  Clooney’s character, which is hardly the sort you’d want anywhere near you, tells Keitel’s that unless he re-finds his faith none of them will make it out alive.

There’s quite a bit of humor packed into the over-the-top fight scene, including dialogue about how to defeat vampires.  A couple of the patrons, it turns out, are pretty adept at that sort of thing, but the human holdouts keep getting bitten and have to be killed.  Finally, the titular dawn arrives, leaving just Clooney and the minister’s daughter alive.  I couldn’t help but to be reminded of Willy’s Wonderworld, in overall story arc, but the two are completely different in tone.  The fact that the movie is 28 years old and that I’d only heard of it recently really surprised me.  Especially since religion is so heavily involved in the story.  Not only that, but the message about religion, in service of the story, is that belief is good.  And this from a murderer and a thief.  Strange indeed, but not easily forgotten.

Old Dracula

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Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the “old movies” about which I posted some time back.  I’ve seen it at least a couple of times, and I wrote a previous blog post about it (October 11 2009).  This is a film about which I have conflicted feelings.  It has immense visual appeal and it influenced a tremendous number of followers.  It also did exceptionally well at the box office.  Since 1992 was a year in which I’m pretty sure I saw no movies in the theater (finishing a doctorate, moving back to America, and commuting weekly from Champaign-Urbana to Nashotah House drained my time and energy.  Besides, still being fairly newly married, I had not transitioned to horror movies again (that’s a different story, also involving Nashotah).)  Being a former literalist, when I first saw it I resisted the title since it takes significant liberties with Stoker, but the overall story is probably the closest of any vampire movie I’ve seen.

The strengths of the movie include its interaction with religion.  Vlad begins by renouncing God and becoming an agent of evil, stabbing a cross, and drinking the literal blood that pours out.  A number of Stoker’s own religious elements are also portrayed, and the ending brings God back into the picture, implying a kind of redemption for the defeated vampire.  The stylishness and opulence of the movie also make for engaging viewing.  It doesn’t have the gothic feel that it might—there seem to be some almost Burtonesque elements to it and some of the casting decisions feel ill fitting.  Anthony Hopkins just doesn’t do it for me as Van Helsing.  His one-liners feel out of place, and his interpretation of Van Helsing as a whole doesn’t resonate with me.

I do like Gary Oldman’s Dracula, however.  He’s right up there with Lugosi (but not quite at that level).  The conflicted vampire is an appealing character—much more intriguing than the pure evil kind.  This Dracula forsakes God because church rules about suicide keep his Elisabeta out of Heaven.  Even now the rulings seem not to allow for much nuance.  At heart, the vampire is a religious monster.  Fear of the crucifix may go back to Bram Stoker, but this movie tries to give it a backstory.  It’s a question of theodicy—why bad things happen to good people, essentially.  This is probably the biggest reason people end up turning away from religion, and it’s something theologians ponder.  While it isn’t my favorite vampire movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is stylish and accurate to a degree.  But it also turns back the pages a bit further than Stoker’s book does.

Car Talk

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Body horror isn’t my favorite sub-genre, but Titane (French for titanium) had been recommended in several places.  Body horror directed by women takes on a particular cast, especially since pregnancy is, I imagine, kind of scary.  Certainly from a male perspective it can be, so I suspect such major body changes must involve some psychological adjustments for women as well.  The story is strange.  Alexia, after a childhood car accident, has a titanium plate in her skull.  After being released from the hospital, she starts to really love cars.  I mean, really love.  She works as a car model and ends up making love to her showroom car one night.  After that she becomes pregnant.  Emotionally distant from most people, including her parents, she becomes a serial killer.  She’s not a complete sociopath, however, because she realizes this is wrong.

Wanted by the authorities after killing everyone at a house party, she tries to change her identity by cutting her hair, breaking her nose, and wrapping her torso in body tape to pass herself off as a man.  A firefighter chief whose son has been missing for a decade, believes Alexia is his son and he takes her in.  She won’t speak, which he supposes is part of the trauma.  He gives Alexia work among the other firefighters, who are generally sexist and not a little suspicious.  Especially since the chief gives Alexia preferential treatment even though she doesn’t know what she’s doing.  In one scene he tells the firefighters he is God to them and Alexia is his son.  One of the firefighters quips later, that Jesus is white and gay.  (Alexia is pretty and the broken nose only makes her appear androgynous.)

Her painful pregnancy, which involves motor oil, eventually forces her father to acknowledge that she’s not his son, but the lonely man still vows to care for her.  When it’s time to give birth the baby is part titanium (as is Alexia’s distended belly).  She dies in childbirth but her “father” accepts the hybrid baby as his own.  This art-house Euro-horror won several awards.  Exploring issues of both sexism and women’s body changes during pregnancy—particularly an unwanted one—the movie has something to say.  And it’s something that a male writer-director simply couldn’t do.  There are no jump-startles here, and the horror is a slow dread as the viewers’ sympathies tend to be with Alexia.  The first murder we’re shown is when a fan attempts to make love to her (it doesn’t go as far as rape), despite her lack of interest.  She has a motivation and it doesn’t seem evil.  And, of course, there’s a good deal of fantasy at play.  Like most Euro-horror, it leaves you thoughtful.

Finding Vampires

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Parents always dread when their child will ask them the inevitable question: where do vampires come from?  A number of people have undertaken to answer that question, and Mark Collins Jenkins attempts it with aplomb.  Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend is quite a romp through the fields of the undead.  Ranging from the chewing dead through epidemics, Montague Summers, movies, Varney the vampire, the origin of the word “vampire,” where zombies come from, and practices of dealing with corpses, this study may not convince the reader that the mystery has been solved, but it will provide lots of information.  I’ve been pondering vampires lately, and this book ties many of these loose threads together well.  Jenkins has a talent for beginning a chapter on an apparently unrelated topic and then weaving it into the growing, ever expanding vampire tapestry.

I’ve read, many times, that vampires have ancient origins.  That really depends on how you define “vampire.”  This book explores those ancient roots, but unflinchingly points out that our modern idea of the walking dead drinking the blood of the living springs from the Balkan peninsula, largely in the eighteenth century.  This isn’t a strictly chronological study, and it isn’t limited to Europe and the lore that grew from that region between Asia Minor and Western Europe.  That doesn’t stop Jenkins from going back further in history.  It was a journey on which I learned much.  I also confess that I was nearly grossed out a time or two.  The vampire requires a stout constitution to study.  Interestingly, it seems that the word “vampire” might’ve derived from a word denoting “heretic.”  Religion and horror belong together, as I’ve said many times.

There’s always a danger with wide-ranging studies, since it’s not possible to turn a specialist’s eye toward all the cultures and historical periods under scrutiny.  Those who’ve tried it, such as James Frazer (of Golden Bough fame), come to be viewed with suspicion by later specialists.  (I discuss this in my little book on The Wicker Man, by the way.)  Jenkins does rely on Frazer a time or two.  Writing a general history on this subject almost necessitates that, however.  Even with the internet and “experts” being those who can gather the largest followings, academia has rightfully demonstrated that to get the real story you need to bury yourself with resources around a very small subject and be willing to live and breathe it for years.  Even then you might get it wrong.  But I digress.  This is a fine study of vampires and their possible origins.  It was a learning experience for me and I now have a better idea how to answer that dreaded question.

Finding a Spot

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Sometimes you’re not born among your tribe.  I live where I’ve moved out of economic necessity, not where my family’s located.  My family’s not quite sure what to make of me anyway, so I seek my tribe.  At first it was among the United Methodists, but when I was in seminary they let me know what they really thought of me.  The Episcopalians seemed more welcoming to my academic aspirations and my doctorate led me to believe my tribe was those who studied ancient West Asian religions.  I wrote papers, led conference sections, knew people.  When I had to step out of academe, however, they tended to fall away.  (Ironically my most-read work, according to Academia.edu, is my dissertation, revised edition.  It has had over 8,000 views.)  I still have many scholar friends, but I’m clearly no longer part of the club.

That’s why I turned to horror (as a field of study).  I was seeking my tribe.  I wasn’t at all sure Holy Horror would get published.  I was encouraged when The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture published “Reading the Bible in Sleepy Hollow.”  Then I discovered other academics (still not part of the club) were studying religion and horror.  Ironically, it was people on the horror side, rather than the religion side, who made me feel most welcome.  In the meantime, I wrote some horror stories (still do) but the fiction publishing tribe seems to be at war against the rest of the world.  You can’t breach their bulwarks.  I’ve been trying for a decade and a half.  So I continue to write books that move more toward horror, and move away from religion.  Still, hard-core horror fans don’t really pay much attention to my books, still I try, but as an outsider.

Since Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is in production, I’m working on my next projects.  I’ve been indulging in fiction again, where I’d really rather be, for a host of reasons, but unless I succeed as a double agent, I’ll remain unpublished.  My tribe, I think, would welcome more nonfiction like I’m writing.  These books haven’t been selling well, but they may eventually get referenced.  Now, many years after the fact, the ancient West Asian studies tribe cites my work and asks me to contribute more.  I’m afraid that island was abandoned years ago, former tribe-mates.  I was lonely and so I rowed across the ocean into horror territory.  If you’re looking for a tribe too, I’ll be glad to try to introduce you around.

Going Below

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Indiana Jones in National Treasure, in found-footage horror format.  That’s the feel of As Above, So Below.  Only Jones is a woman.  There’s plenty of religious imagery in this movie, but the story’s not that great.  One of the reasons is that it’s too difficult to swallow, although it does score serious points on the claustrophobia scale.  At the beginning I wondered if I was going to make it through since Dr. Dr. Scarlett Marlowe’s cell phone is constantly moving as she continues her father’s search for the philosopher’s stone.  Surviving the situation in Iran, the remainder of the film takes place in Paris, especially the catacombs.  My level of impressedness went up when I learned that the movie really was shot in the catacombs.  Unfortunately it didn’t really help the story.

Alchemy, as part of esoterica, is purposefully difficult to understand.  Marlowe is continuing her dead father’s search for the philosopher’s stone that can change things into gold.  Her friend George (who repairs the clockwork for the bells at Notre Dame) is forced into the catacombs with her and her cameraman Benji.  They’re led by three Parisian cataphiles and some shots look like they were lifted directly from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, including the use of her father’s notebook.  Instead, the group enters the gates of Hell.  There are lots of scary things down there, many of them unexplained.  Some reflection reveals that they are all having to confront their pasts—or at least some of them are.  One of the cataphiles is killed before we learn her secrets.  And one of the survivors has no real backstory.  Six go in and three come out.

The movie plays with some interesting ideas, but it’s hard to swallow that an actual bona fide archaeologist would go on an illegal treasure hunt.  And that she knows of a secret chamber in the catacombs that has remained undetected by specialists.  I began scratching my head.  And when the group (or some of them, anyway) begin finding artifacts from their personal pasts in the catacombs, credibility is strained even further.  The idea that it’s important to come to terms with your past is a good one.  But once the young people begin dying and the rest have to keep going deeper and deeper to get out, the illusion is broken by Marlowe just dashing back to get a different stone to save George.  If it were just a matter of popping back, wouldn’t they have tried that earlier?  There are some Bible quotes, making this a candidate for the also unlikely Holy Sequel.

The Next Phase

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Sometimes I get things backwards.  You have to understand that in the pre-internet era finding information was somewhat dicey.  Those of us from small towns had limited resources.  The movies I saw were on television, with a rare trip to the theater being a treat.  Books, on the other hand, could be had for a quarter or less at Goodwill.  There I found the sci-fi horror Phase IV by journeyman writer Barry N. Malzberg.  I knew there was a movie, which I hadn’t seen, and I assumed it was based on this novel.  Actually, the book was a novelization of the movie.  But it’s more complex than that.  The movie was based on an H. G. Wells story, screen-written by Mayo Simon, then novelized. That novelization made a real impression on me as a kid and I knew that I would eventually have to see the movie.

Some scenes from the novel were still alive to me before watching the film.  It occurs to me that maybe you don’t know what it’s about.  Intelligent ants.  Some cosmic event boosts ant intelligence and two scientists are sent to Arizona to sort it out.  A local family ignores an evacuation order, and when one of the scientists destroys the oddly geometric anthills, a war is on.  (I remembered the destroying the anthill scene.)  The war is both of might and wits.  Meanwhile the family is attacked—I remembered the scene of the ants eating the horse—with only a young woman surviving.  She’s found by the scientists after the first pesticide is released.  The ants attack, intelligently, the research station.  We never do see the expected ants popping out of Dr. Hubbs’ infected arm, but it’s clear by the end that the ants have won and we’re living in Phase IV.

A few observations: this is a scary movie, even if seventies’ fare.  The sci-fi elements dampen the horror down a bit, but it is still scary.  And it also references religion.  I watched the movie a few weeks after seeing The Night of the Hunter for the first time.  What does a Depression-era serial-killing preacher have to do with ants?  The hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  Now, there’s a project out there for someone inspired by (if such a thing exists) Holy Horror.  Is there a discernible pattern of how hymns are used in horror?  I suspect there is.  That hymn is used so differently in these two movies that I’m convinced something deeper is going on.  If you’re interested, the idea’s free for the taking.  I’ve just spelled out two of the movies for you.

Out of Time

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

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

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

Hunting

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

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

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

May I?

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

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

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

Another Ghost Story

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Quiet horror films are sometimes thoughtful little gems.  I’d completely missed Lake Mungo when it came out.  An Australian indie, it’s a mostly gentle ghost story that leaves you with an eerie feeling, and perhaps a little sad.  Ghosts can be so resonant.  Yet the Poe-esque death of a beautiful woman—a teen, in this case—makes it kind of poetic.  The Palmer family is having a Christmas picnic (remember, southern hemisphere) at Ararat, where there’s a dam that allows for swimming.  The two teens, Mathew and Alice, go into the water but only Mathew comes out.  It takes some time for search and rescue divers to locate the body.  Filmed as a mockumentary, the movie slowly adds details that make it all seem much more complex than an accidental drowning.

Alice, it turns out, has a life that her family knew nothing about.  As various family members see her ghost, and even try to document it with cameras, their own motivations emerge.  Mathew, wanting to help his parents cope, fakes a couple of photos and films suggesting his sister is still at the house.  Everyone in the family experiences ghostly noises and a presence and they even consult a psychic, but nothing definitive comes to light.  They do learn that Alice was more troubled than she ever let on.  It was while at camp at the eponymous Lake Mungo that her own ghost came to her in a premonition of her death.  Finally, the Palmers decide to move but in their final photograph of the house, a shadowy Alice can be seen remaining inside.

Ghosts are, by their very nature, religious.  The deal with that universal that all religions address—what happens after death.  The Palmer family is traumatized, but as the closing credit scenes make clear, Alice has really been there.  The one church scene has some of their religious friends say that they don’t know how to comfort a family that doesn’t attend church.  There’s a lot going on here.  Even the name Ararat and the dam have meaning.  This quiet, haunting film is not dissimilar from A Ghost Story, in some respects.  Both reflect on the loss that a death has on loved ones, making them quite poignant because this is so very true of being human.  Horror films can be a source of wonder rather than the slashers they’re generally assumed to be.  I learned about Lake Mungo by word of mouth and I’m glad to have learned of it since, although fiction, it has something true to say.

Keep Them Open

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“To be is to be perceived.”  That was the summary of Berkeleyian philosophy we were taught in college.  In other words, not to be perceived is not to exist.  So, Don’t Blink kind of runs with that idea.  Before getting started, a spoiler: close your eyes if you don’t want to know something important.  Okay, so no explanation is given.  Ten friends (a lot of names to remember) drive to a resort that is so remote that you arrive with the fuel tank on empty.  The friends explore the resort but there’s nobody there.  Clearly people were there, just shortly before, but they’re all gone.  And then the friends start disappearing, but only when nobody sees them.  That’s the Berkeleyian angle.  The last survivor never does figure out what is going on, although the authorities seem to be aware that something’s up.  For those of us easily ignored, this is a scary movie.

It’s also another potential film for Holy Sequel.  After her boyfriend vanishes, one of the girls finds a Bible and begins claiming that God is punishing their sins.  Given that these are all millennials, this kind of thinking starts to get on the others’ nerves.  It’s not a major event in the film but it reinforces, as so many factors do, that religion and horror aren’t ever very far apart.  And in case you’re wondering, no, she’s not the survivor.  Neither does she suggest this might be the “rapture.”  During said event, the righteous disappear, not twenty-somethings with a weekend of sex on their minds.  The director, Travis Oates, is apparently a Hitchcock fan, so some elements fit into that sensibility.

I only found out about the movie because a friend suggested that it might be good beginner horror.  There are a couple of pretty intense scenes, but overall there’s not a ton of blood and guts.  There aren’t any jump startles, just a dread that continues to grow throughout.  I’m pondering how the Bible is being presented here.  It’s used as an apotropaic device—as protective magic.  Because the Bible is divine, it has, so the belief goes, the power to prevent harm.  Ultimately, in the world of this movie, nothing has that ability.  Although the Bible’s there, the message is pretty nihilistic.  Kind of like thinking about the heat death of the universe.  Still, the acting is good and the premise, although Vanishing on 7th Street also covered the idea of people just disappearing, is engaging.  Even though it doesn’t answer the question of why, or how, it is a movie that underscores the philosophy of George Berkeley as having perhaps been onto something.

Something Somewhere

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A friend suggested I might like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead films.  An unusually intellectual type of horror, these movies challenge perceptions of reality and are tied together with one or two thematic elements.  Something in the Dirt is their most recent offering and as far as existential horror goes, it’s a winner.  The storyline, as with their other films, plays with alternative realities bleeding over into what we think of as everyday life.  There’s a lot going on in this one that will keep you guessing until the end, and even after that.  Levi, a ne’er-do-well, awakes in his cheap apartment in LA and meets his neighbor, John, just outside.  Even this initial meeting has a sense of the surreal about it, but the two strike up a conversation, each trying to weigh the other’s truthfulness.

Levi’s apartment begins to show elements of paranormal happenings.  Neither he nor John have professional careers, so they figure they can use their off times to make a documentary about the phenomena to sell to maybe Netflix, setting them for life.  They each start coming up with theories about what is happening from ghosts to extraterrestrials to Pythagoreans building Los Angeles on an occult geometric pattern.  Ultimately they seem to settle on two basic forces of nature: electromagnetism and gravity.  Both are distorted in this apartment.  Meanwhile, each learns that the other isn’t quite what he seems to be.  Levi has a history of arrests that he downplays.  John is the member of an evangelical, apocalyptic group, but he’s also gay and claims to have made a ton of money that he donated to the church.  (Religion and horror, folks!)  Neither really trusts the other but synchronicities keep occurring, preventing either one from just ending the project.

They bring in occasional experts who have varying degrees of skepticism regarding whether the two are faking what they capture on camera.  After all, they include reenactments along with their actual footage.  I won’t spoil the ending here, but it is pretty much what a seasoned viewer of Benson and Moorhead might appreciate.  These movies are so unusual and so full of hard thinking that it seems odd that they aren’t discussed more often.  If I understand correctly, there is only one remaining film where they appear as writer, director, producer, editor, and director of photography that I haven’t seen.  They are the kinds of movies that if you binge on you’ll either end up enrolling in a graduate program in philosophy or spending the rest of the day blowing dandelion seeds into the wind.  Or maybe there’s something in all this.

Haunted Space

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A haunted house film set in space.  That’s what I thought and then read the same words in a published description of what the writer and director were going for.  In that way it was a clear success, but in others it struggles.  The premise is good, if jarring.  Space travel, which is the most scientific of scientific enterprises (there’s a reason the rest of us say, “I’m not a rocket scientist”) collides with the traditional supernatural.  The results are worth pondering.  Event Horizon has become a cult classic, and like many older films, has been more positively reevaluated in recent years.  So the crew of Lewis and Clark is on a rescue mission to the ship Event Horizon, in a decaying orbit around Neptune.  Neptune’s atmosphere provides lightning for this haunted house.  The crew learns that Event Horizon has been through a black hole and has returned sentient.  Its crew has no survivors and it won’t allow Lewis and Clark to either escape or to destroy it.

Those of us who watch horror looking for religion—and even general viewers—can’t help but notice that Event Horizon ended up in Hell and returned.  It plagues the rescue crew with hallucinations of their regrets and failures.  Weir, the scientist who designed Event Horizon, is more or less possessed and stops at nothing to save the ship, which has brought Hell back to this dimension.  Again, it’s a bit jarring, like vampires in space.  (Yes, I know it’s been done.)  There’s even a point where Weir informs one of the crew that the crewman doesn’t believe in Hell.  Heck, they’re in outer space on a ship technology built.  But what if there is a spiritual reality—“dimension,” in the film’s lingo—out there?  What if some traditional religions are right?

The movie’s not apologetic, but it’s offering a reminder that to be human is to be spiritual.  No matter how much science “proves,” there’s always potentially more “outside.”  Hell in Event Horizon is beyond the bounds of the universe.  It is another place but a place it is.  It costs some of the crew their lives, but does it claim their souls?  Event Horizon is one of those movies that the studio ordered severely edited, and for which the edited footage was lost.  Movies ever only show us what directors, producers, and studio execs want us to see.  People crave stories.  And when a movie, like Event Horizon, raises more questions than it answers, viewers want to know—what really does happen in a haunted house in space?

Some Body

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Many period movies are reevaluated and found better than originally critiqued.  (It feels strange to write that about a 2009 movie, but that was a decade and a half ago.)  I’d read about Jennifer’s Body before, but the title put me off from watching it.  Then, of all places, the New York Times recommended it last year during one of their autumnal forays into the horror genre.  Interestingly, it’s a possession movie with a few twists.  Demons are quite malleable monsters, of course.  So Jennifer and Anita (Needy) are best friends.  Jennifer is the girl all the guys want, and Needy, well, isn’t.  One night they go to hear a band at a local bar, and Jennifer leaves with them.  We later find out—spoilers about to appear—that their intention is to sacrifice a virgin to Satan to help them succeed as an indie rock band.  Jennifer’s no virgin, though, and demonic transference took place—i.e., Jennifer is possessed although the band gets their boost.

Then Jennifer has to eat people (high schoolers, of course) to survive.  She eventually tells Needy all of this, and her friend researches the occult and realizes her former friend is seriously dangerous.  And she decides to stop her.  I won’t give away the ending (it was only 15 years ago), but I will say that the overall result is somewhat unusual for a demon movie.  There’s plenty of religious imagery, but nothing really explicitly showcased.  For example, Needy’s mom has religious paraphernalia around the house.  There are no clergy in the story and Needy teaches herself what she needs to know about dispatching demons.  In other words, it’s a strangely secular possession movie.  And in the end demonic ability leads to justice.

The critical reappraisal is largely based on the feminist message and complexity of female relationships in the movie.  Both written and directed by women, those aspects aren’t unexpected.  And the movie is a horror comedy.  The funny parts tend to come from aspects of the dialogue since the acting is played straight.  This isn’t so much a scary movie as it is a smart one, which is probably why the Times critic recommended it.  Demons aren’t always scary monsters in horror, and what you end up being afraid of here is that the relationship between Jennifer and Needy might end since it seems to be the foundation on which two young women’s lives are built.  Is it a good movie?  Well, it’s not bad.  I tend to lean on the side of the reappraisers—it still has something to say.