Honeydew: Very Little Meat And A Whole Lot Of Filler

Horror is, in my opinion, a genre that benefits strongly from the short story. It certainly isn’t impossible to do long-form horror well, but the longer the story the bigger the risk that you’re going to overexplain or bog it down. Short stories get in, set up a situation, and then take it to some fucked-up place, getting out while the shock still lingers. And I notice something similar in film - one of the most common weaknesses of horror films that I’ve observed over the many years I’ve been flinging my opinion out into the void is a tendency to drag in the middle or to whiff the ending, and I think that’s in part because sustaining feelings of tension or dread or unease or whatever for that long is tough. And for my part, I haven’t spent nearly as much time watching short films as I could be. I’m going to try and rectify that, though it’s tough since they rarely appear on streaming services.

But Honeydew is a great example of this exact problem. It starts off pretty strong, but then it drags into an absolute crawl at the end. It’s the poster child for full-length horror films that would have been better off as a short.

It opens on still shots of woodlands, a lone barn, sprawling wheat fields, steam rising from the ground. There’s an old woman grinding seed into flour. There’s a loaf of bread in an oven. A young woman eats, and scratchy religious music plays on an old tape recorder. It’s nicely cryptic. Then there is a funeral, a few mourners gathered around a simple wooden cross. It all creates a burgeoning sense of rural unease. A poacher skins an animal, wanders into a nearby barn, and discovers something he shouldn’t have.

And now we’re watching an informational film about sordico, a fungal infestation of wheat. It’s being watched by a botany student named Rylie, She and her boyfriend Sam are driving through the country, headed for some kind of getaway. And as is often the case, they make a wrong turn. And as is often also the case, they lose cell reception and their GPS stops working. So they camp for the night, only to be woken up by someone who says they’re on his land. He gives them directions to get where they’re going and tells them he’ll be back in awhile to make sure they’re gone. So they pack up and head out again and what do you know, they happen across a farmhouse! Do we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next? Is that farmhouse going to hide a terrible secret?

Yes we do, and of course it will.

I know, I sound dismissive, but I think it’s because the opening of the film showed a bit of restraint - it created a sense of unease without spelling everything out in the first ten minutes, using just isolated images juxtaposed against each other. And it’s mostly good about showing instead of telling. Sam and Rylie have a somewhat strained relationship, but it’s communicated through small things. The farmhouse is home to the old woman we saw earlier making flour. And she’s nice enough, but she’s also pretty strange right off the rip. There’s maybe a little too much silence between the things she says, an oddness. There’s her very strange son who communicates only in grunts, and his face is bandaged for some reason. He really enjoys old Popeye cartoons. We know that there’s something not right here (if only because we know we’re watching a horror movie), but exactly how it’s all going to go down isn’t immediately obvious. Should they stay? Of course not. Do they stay? Of course they do. So, dumb protagonist behavior aside, it’s a strong opening.

But after that, it starts to go downhill.  It’s hurt most by an almost complete lack of tension, because it’s only got one pace – slow. Which, at first, is fine. The evocative opening and the unhurried pace initially give the film time to build some atmosphere, but then it never tightens up or takes off. It just keeps going at that same slow, methodical pace, and so even though the setting’s good and the performances are suitably restrained and everything gradually unfolds into something that gets stranger and stranger, it starts to feel lethargic and aimless. It is never a good sign when I doze off in the middle of a film and let me tell you, that is exactly what I did. It feels like someone took a short film and stretched it out to almost two hours without actually adding anything, and pretty much the entire second act feels like the film is waiting around until it hits a certain running time before it moves on to something like a climax. And when it does reach a climax, it…continues to sort of plod along and then the whole thing just sort of stops. There’s no tension, no stakes, just a bunch of things happening with entirely too much time in between each thing, and then the third act explains what’s going on and the film ends.

And it’s too bad, because I think the filmmakers have some chops. The cinematography is suitably moody – rural vistas, dimly lit basements, shabby country squalor – and the soundtrack is mostly spooky minimalism, all thumps and clatters and wordless chanting. The editing is a standout, it’s almost percussive in a way and makes use of split-screen to mostly good effect.  I really think all the best bits could have been compressed into no more than an hour, and probably less and it would have worked a lot better. It would have gotten in, set up a situation, dropped in the protagonists and snapped the trap shut before they had time to realize what was going on. As it is, there good things about it, there are a number of good moments, but overall the whole thing just feels inert.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

I made this observation a few weeks ago, but it continues to interest me how you can start to pick up on particular cultural touchstones once you’ve watched enough horror movies from a particular country or part of the world. Spain really likes demons and demonic possession as the prime mover behind its horror, Japan has its nods to animism, the importance of the family unit, and water as a symbol for the presence of the supernatural, England does a lot with ancient beliefs and pagan tradition. This doesn’t describe every film from these places, of course, but they pop up enough to seem like things particular to those places.

And I’m starting to figure out some stuff about Indonesian horror as well. It’s interesting how much of it serves as cautionary tales about what happens when you don’t live a pious life – curses that follow generations when someone violates Islamic traditions are pretty common – and just how…wacky…it is. At their best, Indonesian horror films, whatever they might lack in technical polish or savvy, have a wide-eyed earnestness to them that carries the films over rough spots, like an Islamic Chick tract. It’s very no-fucks-given, and Siksa Kubur (Grave Torture) is one of the better examples.

Sita and Adil are brother and sister, who until recently worked in their family bakery. But something terrible happened, something driven by religious fear, and now they’re orphans, taken in by an Islamic school where they are taught a trade alongside being taught how to be good Muslims. But Sita isn’t having it – it was religion that got her parents killed, stories about the torment that the impious suffer even as they lie in their graves. The soul is tortured in the afterlife, the body is tortured after burial. She’s angry and determined to believe that it wasn’t her parents sinning that got them killed – it was religion that killed them. Her teachers can’t answer her questions, they just call her a sinner for her troubles, and she doesn’t want to stay there. She grabs Adil and they head for a tunnel that’s supposed to take them off the school grounds, but it goes on a little too long, it gets a little too dark, and they meet someone there. A young boy named Ismail…

…which just happens to be the name of a former student who died under mysterious circumstances.

Probably this film’s biggest strength is the way it plays around with conventions of the genre. Normally Indonesian horror films are pretty straightforward, but this one isn’t afraid to leave the whole “protagonists have to return to some kind of cursed village to undo something terrible” story in the dust and set everything much more firmly in the modern world. It’s a story about the tension between faith and doubt, how religion is used as justification for violence, the way unresolved grief can become obsession, and the nature of morality. Which is a lot to pack in, but it doesn’t really feel forced, everything plays a role in getting the audience to the end of the story, which takes detours through revenge stories, attempts to apply scientific methods to the supernatural (an obsessed sibling out to disprove supernatural phenomena gives this some definite Oculus vibes), meditations on aging and mortality, and stories about the wealthy and powerful attempting to cheat hell. You think you know where it’s going, but there’s a real WTF-ness in how the story unfolds in some surprising directions as it goes, but without ever feeling jarring – everything emerges from what precedes it, while packing in the requisite moments of supernatural menace and a walloping dose of “say your prayers and you won’t get tortured in the afterlife” that is becoming, to me, an absolute staple of Indonesian horror films.

Another staple of Indonesian horror films is energetically janky effects work and this film is no different in that regard. In this case, though, the production values are really good otherwise so it’s a more jarring contrast than in other Indonesian films where the whole thing feels sort of grungy and so relatively primitive effects work blends right in. In a couple of places it’s especially glaring, almost comic when it shouldn’t be. Blackly comic, but still. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that do a lot with less – voices where there shouldn’t be any, little bits of creepy business in the background, an especially grisly game of hopscotch – which buy the film a fair amount of goodwill for the moments when things don’t really land. The performances are a little variable, but the actors playing Adil and Sita – as children and adults – do a really good job and keep the film feeling grounded. And even when the performances aren’t as strong as they could be, there’s a lot of raw emotion in them which gives the whole thing a feeling of intensity and genuine unease that you don’t always get in horror films. Sometimes the story feels like it’s turning on a dime but it manages to make it work in the end, especially in a third act that gets seriously weird in places – I can’t remember the last time I saw a film actually pull off nested nightmare sequences this well.

Apart from the uneven effects work, there are a couple of other problems – the end is an absolute head-scratcher, the setup for the central conceit is a little convoluted (like, that’s a lot of work and planning just to prove a point), but it manages to stay away from easy jump scares, has some nice moments of visual flair, and some surprisingly heartfelt acting that manages to elevate it above your basic ghost story and your basic Indonesian religious tract. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s nice to see something a little more contemporary-feeling from this corner of the world.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Milk & Serial: J/K Bro, It’s Just A Prank

I don’t think this is any kind of huge revelation or anything, but some of the best horror films being made right now are not coming out of the studio system. Which makes sense – studios are in the business of making profitable films, and when you’re in the business of making profitable films, you aren’t going to want to take chances. You want product that’s going to bring in an audience. Has this lead to a glut of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and (ugh) franchises? Yes. A lot of slick, glossy exercises in jump scares. And there’s an audience for that, but I’m not it. So in an environment where there are actual alternatives to the studio system and consumer-grade cameras and editing software are getting better, you get people willing to take chances and pursue their vision and actually getting it out there in front of eyeballs like mine, and it’s refreshing.

Milk & Serial is a great example of this. It’s a sharp, nasty, unnerving bit of short horror that does a really good job of working within its limitations and making its apparent amateurishness an asset.. And it’s on YouTube, of all places!

The whole thing picks up in medias res, as a dude nicknamed Seven is setting up some kind of a prank as part of his buddy Milk’s birthday party. Milk and Seven have a YouTube channel called “Prank Bros,” where they are…well, two bros, pulling pranks. It’s a pretty involved stunt, using bullet squibs and an actual handgun firing blanks. Seven’s invited some rando to Milk’s birthday party, someone he knows from, well, somewhere else, and Milk isn’t happy about it. While they’re arguing about it, there’s commotion from the living room and they run in just in time to see this rando holding a gun on their friend Naomi. He fires and Naomi goes down. And then, once the initial shock has passed, she pops back up and they all start singing “Happy Birthday.” Those kinds of pranks.

The party is brought down a little when someone knocks on the door to complain about the noise. Nobody recognizes him, and after they placate him he goes away, only to be discovered hanging around outside.

The next day they find him sitting in their living room.

It’s a little more than an hour long, clearly shot on a shoestring budget, and it ends up being really impressive – it doesn’t have much to work with, but it tells a story that doesn’t need much to work well. It’s a story told through the cameras that Milk and Seven use to film their pranks, which are consumer-grade camcorders, there are phone cameras, there are even spy glasses at once point – it creates the feeling that everything these two guys do is recorded to be turned into content. At the same time, it’s pretty clear pretty quick that this isn’t strictly raw footage. So calling it a found-footage film (which is how it’s marketed) sort of does it a disservice. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem too bound to the conceit, and the ways it breaks plausibility are fairly easy to overlook in favor of what it does well. It looks like jittery cinema verite, shot by the kind of frat-bro assholes you’d expect to do a prank show on YouTube, giving it a nastiness and immediacy that fits the narrative perfectly. It really does feel like you’re watching something that’s going to end up being evidence in a manslaughter trial or something similar, and still manages to fit in some nice camerawork, using focus to dramatic effect in a couple of places and benefitting from an abrupt, clipped editing style that jumps between perspectives with a suddenness that communicates tension and unease even at relatively mundane moments.

On top of that, the type of story it is, told the way it is gives it some thematic heft. It is nominally a film about a prank that goes wrong, and it does a good job of keeping the audience on its toes. It’s almost a nesting doll of a story, and setting things up that way means that it’s very much a story about the line between truth and fiction. Where do the pranks stop and real events begin? What even is real in this context? It’s true for both the audience and for characters in the story as well – we’re watching a story that looks just like something you might find on some random YouTube channel, and we’re watching it on YouTube, so there’s a lot of reflexivity to it. Meanwhile, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is for the characters in the film to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a setup for yet another prank until it’s too late. It ends up going some very dark places, and it works in that regard because the performances are strong and naturalistic - which they really need to be for a found-footage movie -  and in at least one case, sincerely unnerving. So you get what looks at least initially like something you might actually find on YouTube (and you’re…watching it on YouTube), you get a sense of how it’s going to unwind…until it doesn’t unwind that way and you realize that something really, really bad is going on.

Some time back, I wrote about a film called I’m Just Fucking With You, which largely squandered the opportunity to be a horror film that digs into the inherent viciousness and cruelty of pranks. This film doesn’t squander it, instead it faces it head-on and then blows right past it in something that reminds me of nothing so much as Creep and the segment “Amateur Night” from V/H/S – it’s persistently uncomfortable in the best way and is a great example of how budget doesn’t dictate quality.

Between the Adams family, analog horror like Local 58, Kane Parsons’ work on The Backrooms, and people like Kyle Edward Ball and the Phillipou brothers getting feature-length films distributed off the back of their own work on YouTube, this is a really good moment for indie horror, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

IMDB entry
Available on YouTube 

Chernobyl: Palatable Fictions

Nothing spices up the prospects of a horror movie like the phrase “based on a true story.” Of course, it’s total bullshit as often as not, but it does give the film a frisson of danger, like maybe this isn’t as safe as our usual serial-killer, ghost, or monster movies. And as often as not, what you get is…a fairly pedestrian serial-killer, ghost, or monster movie. What a lot of these films fail to understand is that the reality is so often so much worse than anything a screenwriter or director could come up with. The horrors that are possible in the real world far outstrip our imaginations.

Chernobyl - a five-part miniseries about the titular disaster - is based on a true story, and it’s very faithful to that story. No ghosts, no monsters, no serial killers. And although very few people would call it horror, make no mistake. It is.

It’s early, early in the morning on April 26th, 1982, The night shift at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in Ukraine, has just come on duty, surprised that they’re going to be running a safety test. The test was scheduled for the day shift, but delays pushed it back well into the evening and then into the night. The night shift hasn’t been trained or prepped on the test procedures, and they have maybe ten minutes to figure it out because the supervising engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov, is bound and determined to see it completed and shouts down any reservations. So the completely unprepared night crew - including a reactor control engineer who’d been on the job for all of three months - begins reducing the reactor’s power output for the test. And something goes wrong. The reactor power starts plummeting. Steps are taken to raise the power output, and then the power starts spiking, going higher than it was ever meant to. An engineer presses the emergency shutdown button. And then something explodes. And then something else explodes.

The structure that holds Reactor 4 has been replaced by a column of fire.

If you aren’t familiar with what is still one of the worst nuclear accidents in human history, there are any number of accounts that you can read, but what very few of them can do - and what this miniseries does extremely well - is provide a sense of immediacy. This is not a careful, considered retrospective, told from a safe distance. This is a depiction of the disaster as it unfolded, and it is kaleidoscopic in its dread. In some ways, it almost serves as a survey of horror while still being a factual account of something that actually happened. Dramatic license is taken here and there, but every episode finds a new way to horrify us. It begins with the panic and terror that immediately follow the explosions as workers at the plant gradually discover just how absolutely wrong everything has gone and how absolutely fucked they are. The reactor core is completely exposed and burning, spewing instantly lethal amounts of radiation into the air. It is literally the worst-case scenario and it’s happening. Everything has gone wrong, and unless something happens immediately, millions of people will die, and it’s all on the backs of a handful of engineers who, merely by being on-site, have signed their death warrants. As in your typical slasher movie, people split up to look for survivors and some of them never return.

And then there is body horror, as we’re witness to exactly what radiation sickness looks like at the absolutely massive doses these people have taken. It’s never fast, and it’s always agonizing. And the amount of death is staggering, matched only by the death to come if steps aren’t taken to bring a raging nuclear inferno under control. Every bit of dust carried by the breeze carries death. And as the series moves into the remediation following the accident, we see just how many more people are going to sacrifice themselves just to keep it from getting worse. There’s a sick, clammy dread that comes with knowing that everyone we’re watching is doomed. Whether it’s a week, a few months, or a few years, what they do here today is going to kill all of them. With this comes the realization that the Soviet Union was massively underprepared for an event like this. Firefighters rushed into lethal amounts of radiation thinking they were just dousing an electrical fire. Equipment that could measure radiation levels was either broken, locked away where nobody could access it, or just shorting out because its measuring capacity couldn’t go that high. People acting on bad information and passing that bad information up the chain to do further damage. Officials motivated less by saving lives than saving face, blandly insisting that nothing is wrong. It’s like the cliché of disbelieving law enforcement and parents writ large, your anxiety rising as you realize that there’s something really dangerous out there and nobody’s going to take it seriously.

And then as the investigation and resulting trial begin, we are shown exactly how an obsession with preserving the infallibility of the state, shoddy workmanship, dangerously careless engineers, substandard training and an inability to face the reality that the worst has happened lead to catastrophe. It was no one thing that lead to the reactor’s explosion, it was so many little things, one thing on top of another, one mistake on top of another, one bad judgment on top of another, all leading to this. And then when you think your capacity for horror is exhausted, we see how the state deals with those who would see the truth come to light, crushing them into forgotten people, erasing them and leaving them to die by their own hand in disgrace. The destruction, this miniseries says, is total.

It's bleak, it’s harrowing, and it’s superbly made. Performances are top-notch throughout, careful and down to earth, full of small moments and character arcs as people are changed forever by what they’ve seen. The cinematography juxtaposes gray, drab, overcast cityscapes with sun and trees, finding beauty even in destruction as a bright blue light flares into the sky from the wreckage and radioactive particulates float through the air and land gently, like fairy dust. The soundtrack is ominous electronic hums and pulses and clangs derived from the ambience of a neighboring power plant, and the chattering of dosimeters work as well as any sudden shrieking violin would. Each episode tells a contained story featuring a different aspect of the disaster before ending where it began, with the same question - what is the cost of lies? - before concluding with an epilogue that robs you of any of the distance afforded by fiction. These were real people, and this is a real place.

Horror movies are palatable fictions, moments of terror and dread that we experience vicariously knowing that they are fiction. We vent our fears safely through them. What happened at Chernobyl was at least in part due to a culture of palatable fictions, and the resulting horror is undeniable. Easily one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Chakushin Ari: Ghosts In The Machine

One of the things that I’ve really come to appreciate after writing this thing for so long is just how much any given horror film is informed by the values of the culture it comes from. What scares someone can tell you quite a bit about what’s important to them, and if you watch enough movies produced in a particular place, the more you start to see the same underlying themes and imagery show up consistently. England, for example, does a good line in horror that taps into pre-Christian traditions; the United States likes its overtly bloody parables about the dangers of premarital sex.

I’ve watched my share of Japanese horror writing this thing, and some things about modern Japanese horror really clicked into place for me after watching Chakushin Ari (One Missed Call) this week. Which is good, because the film itself only works fitfully, and has some serious pacing issues, especially toward the end.

One night, college students Yumi and Yoko go out to dinner after class, and like any other young people in the early 2000s, they’ve got cellphones. Not smartphones, just those tiny-ass little cellphones with the most basic messaging and camera functions. Yoko gets a notification that she missed a call - oddly enough, it was a missed call from her own number, and there’s a voicemail. When she listens, she hears her own voice saying “it’s starting to rain,” and then there is a horrible scream. So that’s creepy.

Even creepier is that the voicemail is timestamped two days in the future.

The conceit, then, isn’t that hard to figure out. People get mysterious voicemail recordings of the moments before their own death at some point in the future and when that day comes, those people…well, die. Yoko dies, and Yumi becomes determined to try and figure out what the hell is going on. So this film fits right into a cinematic tradition that also includes the cursed videotape of Ringu and the Internet ghosts of Kairo. I think it’d be easy to chalk these all up as reactions to technology, the ways in which modern devices are bad for us, but I’m not sure that’s it, at least not in this case. It occurred to me watching this that Japan’s indigenous religion is Shinto, which as I understand it is an animist religion. So it holds the belief that objects have spirits -houses, trees, ponds, you get the idea. So why not videotapes, cellphones, or computers? I don’t think it’s a “technology bad” thing as much as it is the idea that technology, like everything else, could be expected to have spirits of its own, and when someone dies badly, maybe that gets carried on into technology just like it could into a house or forest or doll or lake. In a culture where ghosts are just a part of life, they can be anywhere.

It also follows in the footsteps of films like Ringu and Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara by folding a legacy of parental abuse into the narrative. Like Ringu, the whole thing is handled less like a horror story than it is a mystery where the protagonists are trying to trace the chain of causality for a bunch of supernatural deaths back to its beginning, and like those films, it seems to all start with an abusive mother, and like in Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara, it seems like the struggles of a single parent and the pressures of trying to be a good mother in a culture that doesn’t really make allowances for single parents lead to violence and trauma. In a culture where ghosts are everywhere and family is important, these are the sort of things that will be scary. It’s even of a piece with these other films in terms of its cinematography - this is the drab, overcast Japan of Kairo and  Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara, full of dreary tower blocks, themselves full of cramped apartments. There’s even a dig at tabloid news, as one of the unlucky recipients of a voicemail is featured on a sensationalistic news program where a medium will attempt to combat or exorcise the evil spirit (it doesn’t go well), and that struck me because these are usually fairly intimate films, in that they are, like a lot of horror films, about something hidden and terrible that a small group of people are trying to escape or fight in secret. To have it acknowledged that the whole country is tuning into this phenomenon feels a little strange. Not bad or detrimental to the plot, just…strange. As if people dying mysteriously after receiving phone calls from beyond the grave is just the latest thing.

So there’s a decent bit to unpack here, but ultimately that’s sort of it, because the execution of the story itself lacks something. It’s got all of the parts of its contemporaries, but doesn’t have the striking imagery of Ringu, or the claustrophobic feeling of doom that suffuses Kairo, to name two. It’s a very quiet film, with little to no music, and in the first half or so, this tends to make things feel a little inert. There are creepy moments here and there, but nothing really startling, and a relative absence of tension makes it hard for these moments to really have an impact. There’s a lot of investigation, which means a lot of people going from place to place and asking people questions, and in those moments isn’t really distinguishable from any other drama that you started watching halfway through. You know things are happening, but it’s tough to really get drawn in. There isn’t a lot of action, which is fine, but there’s also not a lot of mood or atmosphere, and that’s a problem. Slightly clumsy translations in the subtitles don’t help, but on top of that the performances feel a little one-note. This might be because I’m relying on the subtitles, it’s often hard for me to gauge performances when they aren’t speaking English and that’s on me, but everything felt a little flat.

Many of these problems do abate somewhat in the second half of the film, as Yumi starts to piece together what’s happening and what kind of horrible legacy has lead to all of these deaths, but the action feels a little bungled as well. It’s sort of exposition-heavy - not in the sense that someone just stands there and tells you everything, to its credit there’s some really good use of flashback to catch us up - but more in the sense that it’s in the second half that everything starts happening. The problem here is that it’s trying to present a narrative that solves the underlying mystery, that makes clear what exactly happened, but it throws in enough stuff that, while good for some scares, also confuses things a little. And, most egregiously, it has one of the most obvious fake-out endings I’ve seen in awhile (or maybe it’s just because I noticed there were still 20 minutes left when everything ostensibly resolved) and instead of hitting you with the twist fast and sharp and then ending, it drags out the reveal and the twist for entirely too long, to the point that ultimately I was just waiting for it to end.

It's sort of odd - I’ve watched films that weren’t especially thematically rich, but worked well. And I’ve watched films that were thematically rich and worked well. But I don’t think I have, until now, seen a film that was pretty thematically rich but just didn’t work. It’s like it had substance in spite of itself.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Ouija - Origin Of Evil: That Is One Tasty Burger

So just last week I was talking about how much I don’t like films made off the back of other films. Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, et cetera. Don’t even get me started on franchises. I think it’s the way it turns film into product. I’m not going to get all precious and “my cinema” about films, but…it’s the difference between a home-cooked meal or fine-dining experience and a burger and fries from your fast-food place of choice. But here’s the thing: Sometimes those fine-dining places get a wild hair up their ass and do their own take on the burger and fries. It’ll be a burger and fries, but the meat is top sirloin, the bun freshly baked, the fries hand-cut and fried in duck fat. The form is fast food, but the execution isn’t.

That’s the analogy that came to mind while I was watching Ouija: Origin Of Evil. It’s a prequel to an apparently not-especially-good film about a haunted/possessed Ouija board. Hardly a novel idea, but it’s executed with such taste and care that the finished product is way better than you’d expect.

It's Los Angeles in 1968, and Alice Zander is conducting a séance for a middle-aged man and his visibly skeptical daughter. They’re trying to contact the man’s late wife, and Alice reaches into the beyond to make contact. The table rattles, doors open and shut, candles blow out and relight. A shadowy figure appears behind some curtains before rushing toward the daughter, screaming. The séance ends, the father and daughter leave, with Alice refusing to accept payment.

Once they’re gone, Alice goes back inside and calls to her own daughters to come out, while she breaks down the various devices she used during the séance. The younger daughter, Doris, had made cabinets rattle. Her older daughter, Lina, was the apparition behind the curtain. Lina wasn’t supposed to rush the man’s daughter, but Lina thought she was a bitch. Alice points out that that little stunt cost them their pay. And it’s pay they desperately need. Alice is a widow, and the wolves are constantly at the door. Doris prays at night to her father, she thinks he’s just gone away on business, but Lina and Alice know the truth. He isn’t coming back. Alice is tired and worried, Lina is angry in the righteous, passionate way that teenagers are. She’s straining at the leash, desperate for independence. And it’s this independence that leads her to sneak out at night, to go to a friend’s house while her friend’s mother is away at her bridge club. They listen to music, sip booze. There’s a cute boy there that Lina fancies. Then her friend pulls out this new game her mother got. It’s a Ouija board.

Lina sees how freaked out her friends get at the possibility of communicating with the dead, and mentions it to her mother as a possible new prop. Needless to say, Alice grabs one and goes to work doctoring it, magnetizing the planchette so she can manipulate it hands-free from under the table. Doris wants to know if she could use it to talk to her father, and even though Alice and Lina discourage her, once they’ve left she gives it a try. Something responds.

But it’s not her father.

In the interest of full transparency, the director made one of my favorite horror movies ever as his feature debut, so I’m a little biased. That said, everything I like about his style is on display here and it elevates the result. Like his previous films Absentia and Oculus, this film leverages the power of restraint, of not going loud or making things obvious. The scary moments tend to happen in the background, without an unnecessary amount of fanfare, and I think this makes these moments even more effective. They reward the attentive viewer, catching you unawares and being that much more startling as a result. There are some near-mandatory jump scares, and yes, they’re still jump scares, but inventive staging and - again - a lack of buildup or forecasting make them about as good as those get. It’s a film full of little moments that make you go “GAAHHHHH!” The performances are suitably restrained all-around, with no scenery-chewing to be had. Alice and Lina and Doris seem like a real family, with complicated feelings about life after their father/husband has died, Lina is a resentful teen, Doris just wants her father back, Alice is trying to keep their heads above water, and they’re all wrestling with grief in different ways. It’s not enough to provide much thematic subtext, but it also keeps everyone from feeling one-note. There’s a priest who manages to be smart and thoughtful, and even the expected romantic spark with Alice isn’t overplayed. The relative lack of histrionics throughout is refreshing.

It’s also visually self-assured. The whole thing is shot as if it had been made in the early 70s, and the attention to detail (including reel-change marks) is cool, but the picture quality is still a little too clean to look like an actual film from the 70s, so as it is just seems like a really good period piece instead of a historical artifact. But it also means there’s an analog warmth to the visuals that keeps the whole thing grounded. The narrative is fairly well-paced (with one exception in the second act), and in contrast to last week’s The First Omen, the connection to the film it precedes comes only at the very end, so it works as a self-contained film, with a satisfyingly creepy ending.

On the less-effective side of the register, it does feel at a couple of points like the director’s good judgment is in a tug-of-war with a studio that wants things to be bigger, louder, and more obvious. There are couple of unnecessary musical stings, and an exposition dump at the end of the second act, that leads into a plot development that’s over the top enough to elicit an eye-roll; but largely they let him cook on what is basically a work-for-hire deal, and he took something that could have been as pedestrian as the original film apparently is (ooh, evil Ouija board! Nobody’s ever done that before) and made it genuinely spooky.

There’s an art to making a good classically scary movie, and I feel like that art gets forgotten. You don’t need to shove a bunch of screaming distorted faces at the audience, you don’t need dopey teens doing the dumbest things (at one point, Lina says “splitting up would be the dumbest thing we could do” and I got a good chuckle out of that), you don’t need blaring musical stings to tell us that what we’re seeing is scary. You just need to trust your audience’s intelligence and the result is going to be a lot better. A burger and fries is still just a burger and fries, but made correctly, with really good ingredients, it’s going to be exceptional.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

The First Omen: The Burden Of History

So much of what I don’t like about sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, reimaginings, etc., is how they so often pale in comparison to the film from which they spring. They tend to be exercises in reduction, pulling one thing from the original film and beating it into the ground over however many attempts are made to wring more cash out of the original idea. And everything else that made the original gets missed, ignored, or worse, deliberately jettisoned for a “fresh new take” on the property. Do you really need a fresh new take on a story after only one film?

Which is what makes The First Omen such an oddity to me. It’s actually pretty good; moreover, it would have been even better as a stand-alone film. If anything, the narrative debt it owes to the original film works against it, dragging it down instead of letting it be its own thing.

It’s Rome in 1971, a city teeming with civil unrest, and a novitiate named Margaret has come here to become a nun. She’ll be working at an orphanage that takes in women who are unmarried and pregnant, providing a home and education for their children once they’re born. The assignment hits home for her - she was orphaned and made a ward of the church herself, though her memories of those times aren’t all pleasant. She was a troubled girl and got her fair share of discipline from the sisters who ran the orphanage. And now she’s come all the way from the U.S. to seal her vows in the heart of Catholicism. While getting a tour of the facilities, Margaret spies some drawings done by some of the children. It’s the usual whimsical crayon scrawls, except for one that depicts a number of sad, hollow-eyed young girls looking up at a bigger girl floating above them, disheveled and slightly deranged though no less sad. It’s the kind of drawing that would likely inspire a wellness check in modern times. She’s told it was done by Carlita, a troubled girl with a history of violence, who spends most of her time segregated from the other girls.

Bad things tend to happen around Carlita, and nobody wants to talk about it.

In some ways, this film is at a fair disadvantage. Even if we factor out its connection to a film about the Antichrist, it is still yet another film where a nun or priest or someone about to become a nun or priest finding themselves at a monastery or convent that seems to be hiding a dark, dark secret. So it’s difficult to sustain any sense of mystery from a couple of different directions. If there’s a convent, there’s a dark secret. If there are nuns, at least some of them are complicit in hiding this dark secret. And because it is a prequel to The Omen, we have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end. Even if we don’t know how it’s going to get there, we know where it’s going. And in horror movies, you really don’t want to see the end coming from a mile away. Maybe it’s because this sort of story has a pretty narrow range of possibilities associated with it, but it was really hard to shake the feeling that this film was checking all the boxes on a list of things that need to be in a convent/monastery with a dark secret movie.

And that sucks, not just because formulaic, predictable stories are the ruin of good horror, but also because this film is really well-made in a lot of ways. The performances are generally on the right side of understated and there’s an acuity and restraint to it that films like this rarely have, if ever. For once, the dark secret doesn’t just stop at “well we’re nuns but we’re actually evil nuns,” there’s at least a rationale there, for as much as it matters. I think more could have been done with it in relation to the film’s time and place, but I appreciate it not just being a bunch of Satanists in habits and wimples. And it’s actually pretty scary! There is no shortage of startling moments, but they aren’t jump scares, and as often as not they’re presented in ways that are inventive. There’s especially something sort of unblinking about how this film treats the female body, and there’s one moment around childbirth that’s as unsettling as anything David Cronenberg did in The Fly or Dead Ringers. I feel confident that these filmmakers could have made a really good movie about the church as a patriarchal force, resistant if not actively hostile to change, intent on controlling women’s bodies and done so in a way that could have been stark and horrifying, if they weren’t saddled with the need to tell a story that dovetails with a film made in 1976 (and remade in 2006, for that matter).

And that’s really the sticking point: The need to tell a story that leads into an existing story really hobbles and constrains this film, to the point that the end drags out for far, far too long in order to absolutely cement this story in relationship to The Omen. The world-building and exposition may be necessary (or at least somebody thought it was necessary) because this is a prequel, but it compromises the quality of the film as a singular film. It shoehorns it into a well-established formula and gives it a foregone conclusion for an ending, and damned if the film isn’t still pretty good in spite of all that. I really want to see more from these filmmakers, ideally not straitjacketed by a studio’s need to create more product in the Omen franchise space.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu