The Monster: Not Mad, Just Disappointed

Monsters are a tough proposition to pull off in scary movies. I think this is mostly because it’s tough to make a convincing-looking monster on the sort of budgets most horror films are working with, and no matter how well you sort of tease the monster by giving the audience brief glimpses, at some point you’re going to have to reveal it, and even if you’ve done your job well (or maybe even especially if you’ve done your job well), the reveal is going to be disappointing compared to what the audience has imagined for themselves. You can’t not show the monster (well, you can, but that’s even harder to do well), but audiences are going to come up with things that would have never occurred to the filmmakers, and so what the filmmakers come up with tends to be a letdown by comparison.

And yeah, that’s pretty much what happens with The Monster, both in terms of the titular monster and in terms of where the story goes. Don’t get me wrong, this is generally a well-crafted movie, but I think the skill exhibited got me expecting more than it was able to deliver.

We start with kind of a trite speech about how we tell kids monsters aren’t real, but they are, but this shifts quickly to a day in the life of a young girl named Lizzy. Lizzy’s maybe 11 years old or so, and we meet her doing chores around a dim, musty house - washing a stack of dishes, emptying ashtrays, clearing all of the empty liquor bottles off the coffee table in the living room, all while her mother Kathy is passed out in bed. Lizzy goes in to wake Kathy up at 10am. She was supposed to be up at 9am to drive Lizzy to stay with her father. And now it’s 10. Lizzy’s already packed. Kathy is petulant, Lizzy firm and persistent, their roles thoroughly reversed. It’s immediately clear that Lizzy is used to being let down by her mother, that this has played out many times before. We next see Lizzy sitting on the couch in the living room, her mother coming in and halfheartedly apologizing for falling back asleep. The clock reads 3pm.

The car ride is, of course, strained. It isn’t made explicit, but you get the sense that Lizzy is going to stay with her father and that the relocation will be permanent. She’s sullen, wounded, and not at all receptive to her mother’s sporadic attempts to connect or show affection. She’s over it, grown up too quickly as a result of constant disappointment. And then, distracted, Kathy hits something in the road hard enough to send the car into a tailspin. When the car finally stops and they catch their breath, they see a badly injured wolf lying in the middle of the road. But when Kathy looks at the wolf, she sees injuries that wouldn’t have been made by a car. And their car took a lot more damage than it should have for something the size of a large dog.

It’s as if both the wolf and the car had tangled with something much, much bigger.

And so Lizzy and Kathy are stranded on a rural road, in the middle of the night, as rain pelts down. Nothing but woods on either side, and deserted road behind and ahead. And there is definitely something out there. The rest of the film makes use of flashbacks to bounces back and forth between the present and the past, showing us snatches from Kathy and Lizzy’s life together before this point, although I’m not sure how important or revelatory the flashbacks end up being. We see why Lizzy is so unhappy with her mother (Kathy veers between needy and absent and her boyfriend is an abusive prick), but it sort of feels disconnected from the story as a whole. We get just as good a sense of their dynamic from the opening scene of the film as we do from the flashbacks, and except for a specific exchange between the two that opens the movie, re-contextualized at the end, it’s hard to see exactly why all of the history between them is important for the story. Lizzy is very much the parent here, she’s had to grow up fast in order to take care of her mother, whose alcoholism makes her basically the child, but once the car crashes that dynamic recedes except for some very specific quirks of behavior that don’t really seem to affect anything. Mostly it’s handled well, although some of Lizzy’s dialogue is maybe a little too precocious, at times - there’s a difference between a child forced to take on the role of an adult and a child who sounds like an adult, and occasionally it tips too far into the latter. Although the mother/daughter dynamic is generally well-done and surprisingly unflinching, it generally seems more like a glimpse into a different movie than an integral part of the one we’re watching.

And the one we’re watching is, likewise, generally very well-made. This is a small-scale siege movie, similar in its most basic structure to something like Stephen King’s Cujo - they’re relatively safe in their car, but something’s out there in the dark that’s waiting for them, and though help is on the way, it isn’t here yet. And so for most of its run time,  the filmmakers do a good job of keeping things tense through gradual escalation, starting with small things and very quick glimpses of the titular monster, largely black, glistening, and indistinct, with things getting much worse as the film goes on. It’s hard not to see some of what’s coming - when the tow truck driver shows up, you know he’s going to get it, and when the ambulance shows up, you know that they're going to get it too, but it’s largely staged well and effectively, so even if you can anticipate a particular beat, it’s still startling when it comes. The violence done to the monster’s victims isn’t gratuitous or trivialized - it really does feel like these are real people meeting a very bad end. But again, the skill with which it’s presented was offset for me by it not going anywhere especially surprising, and the final confrontation is as stock as it gets. And yes, the longer the monster is onscreen, the less it holds up. Early in, when it’s just something big, black, and glistening, it works. But you have to show the monster, and in the final act, its artificiality is clear.

I don’t know, maybe watching some really berserk shit like Ari Aster’s films has set my bar kind of high, because both Hereditary and Midsommar presented painfully compelling stories of failing human relationships and made them essential to the horror that followed, bringing a strong tragic element to the table to both films’ credit. I don’t know that the filmmakers here hit quite that level, but both the horror elements and human relationship elements here were absolutely well-done (maybe a little clichéd here and there but certainly not enough to be off-putting), but they never really connected, nor did either piece go anywhere new or unexpected. Like with any monster film, what I was given was never going to be better than what I imagined. It wasn’t actively bad by any means, but it could have been more. It’s the classic parent line to their child: “I’m not mad, just disappointed.”

IMDB entry
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The Heretics: Un-Unorthodox

(Just as a heads-up, there are going to be spoilers in this piece. I mean, a lot of them aren’t REALLY spoilers, because this isn’t an especially subtle or imaginative movie, but if it’s one you were planning to watch, be forewarned.)

I think there are a couple of different ways we can think about horror films. One is the idea of horror as anything that evokes a particular mood or feeling in the audience, and the other is the idea of horror as films that hew to specific topics and employ specific plots and clichés. I’m a much bigger fan of the former than the latter, insofar as it brings a wider variety of films into the tent, and insofar as the latter tends to run to the formulaic, to product that faithfully meets preconceived expectations, but doesn’t really move people beyond some cheap thrill. The latter is far more profitable than the former, for sure, because I think a healthy chunk of people like to indulge a basic startle response without facing anything that genuinely haunts them or makes them feel uncomfortable. These are the kind of people who think “decadence” is a dessert that features five kinds of chocolate.

Why am I even going on about this? Well, it’s because The Heretics isn’t an especially good or interesting film, but it is one that is so transparent and obvious in its moving parts that I had the whole thing more or less figured out  within the first ten minutes. This is not a film in any danger of overestimating the viewer’s intelligence.

We open on a ritual in the middle of the woods. A young girl is chained to an altar, surrounded by robed and masked figures. She struggles, they chant. They raise their knives, she struggles. They chant, and chant, and cut…their own throats.

The young girl is Gloria, and she grows up to be reunited with her mother. Gloria goes to a support group for abuse survivors, and it was at this group that she met her partner, Joan. And so Gloria and Joan go to group, after which they volunteer at a shelter run by the church where their support group is held, and afterward, they lie in bed together, talking about what they’ve been through, and Joan said she’d go through all of it again, because it lead her to Gloria. Which, if you stop to think about it, is kind of creepy and manipulative. Never mind that, though. Gloria says her goodnights, and starts heading for home…when she is abducted by a man in an RV, who starts driving her far out of town.

It seems the cult isn’t done with Gloria just yet.

And it’s really here - twelve minutes in - that the problems start. The man in the RV is Thomas, and he’s taken Gloria out to a cabin in the country to “save” her. I know what they were trying to go for here. What we’re supposed to think is that Gloria got away from the cult, and Thomas has been sent by the cult to get her back, and him “saving” her is supposed to be parsed as creepy cult-speak for sacrifice, and now it’s a race against time for Joan and Gloria’s mother to find her before the cult can sacrifice her. And then, at some point in the film, the curtain will be yanked back on the shocking twist that no, in fact Thomas is trying to save Gloria, that the cult is using her as a host body for their demon god, and by hiding her from the cult, he’s going to make sure that they can’t complete the ritual, and in fact, Joan is actually a member of the cult! I suspect the filmmakers thought this was going to be more of a surprise than it actually is, and I had the majority of this shit figured out before the first act was even over, simply by virtue of paying attention to the movie.

Right off the bat, Joan is way, way too intense - during the support group scene (one where the counselor pressures Gloria to share her story, which is…a pretty big no-no, I think?), Joan advocates that another woman in the group torture her abusive husband, which is just…yikes. Joan almost stabs a guy at the shelter when he surprises her, and it doesn’t read like an exaggerated startle response, it reads like someone looking for an excuse. As it does when she’s taking fliers door-to-door after Gloria goes missing and decides to handle a refusal to look at the flier by holding a knife to the person’s throat. And then, when a police officer asks her about it (because that is a thing that will happen when you hold a knife to somebody’s throat and they get a good long look at you), she stabs the cop to death in front of Gloria’s mother. And then she stabs Gloria’s mother to death

Mind you, this is all well before the reveal that she’s a cultist. So when that reveal comes, all of the stabbing, plus her inordinate interest in the fate of a necklace she gave Gloria to “protect” her, plus her insistence that her and Gloria meeting was destiny, well, that reveal has absolutely no impact at all because it was clear from minutes into the movie that there was something very, very off with Joan.

Likewise, Thomas is revealed to be nonthreatening pretty much immediately. He’s gentle, shy, soft-spoken, and sympathetic. He also serves as an exposition engine, explaining to Gloria in great detail exactly who he is, why he left the cult (he was never really one of them, and watching them kidnap Gloria was the final straw, apparently), what the cult’s purpose was that night, and what’s happening to Gloria is that she’s undergoing physical changes because she’s a host for the demon Abaddon, which is why she’s experiencing fevers and chills and hallucinations and weird skin stuff and puking. He tells her this almost immediately - well, no, not immediately, he tells her what the purpose of the ritual was, but tries to claim that it was all superstitious nonsense right up to the point that he finally comes clean, and it all feels like the filmmakers stalling for time, rather than any natural denial or reluctance on Thomas’ part.

And this is the really exasperating thing - the pieces are there. Scary - looking dude kidnaps young woman who has kind of freaky nightmares, worried mother and girlfriend try to find her, maybe punctuating acts and story beats with Gloria’s weird nightmares until it’s revealed at the end that the cult sacrificed themselves. Joan’s real identity is revealed in a moment of betrayal, too late for Thomas to do anything as the reason for Gloria’s rapid decline becomes clear...it could have been good. Maybe not, like, Hereditary-level good, but good nonetheless. But instead, the filmmakers give away every secret they have at the first opportunity in the most obvious way possible. I finished actors’ lines for them more than once over the course of this film, that is how formulaic all of this is. Every seam shows.

And it’s all abetted by an execution that, although better than amateurish, never rises to the level of anything better than dull competence. The dialogue trades entirely in clichés, the acting is either wooden or histrionic, and none of it believable as human behavior. In terms of structure, there’s no real pacing or dynamism, just the necessary story beats, presented in sequence without any sense that one set of events arises organically from another. Even the music is too obvious, all echoing booms and shrieking strings regardless of the scene.

And because the events of the film are too immediately obvious to really be considered revelations, there’s no mystery or power to it. It isn’t scary. Things just sort of happen, punctuated by stock jump-scare and nightmare sequences arranged like they were taken from a kit (including one entirely gratuitous scene where Gloria attempts to seduce Thomas), one stupid choice after another, everything dragged out past the point of believability. All of this in service of a climax where Abaddon is indeed summoned (and apparently the Angel of Destruction is a skinny white dude in some unconvincing horn prosthetics), and even that is a problem, because stories like this work best when you never see the demon, when there’s no opportunity for rescue or hope, when the conspiracy has done its work and it’s too late, like in Hereditary, or Rosemary’s Baby, or Kill List.

No, here it all comes down to the wire, to one final confrontation between Thomas and Joan (who are, of course, brother and sister) in which evil is defeated…except it isn’t, as we get in a totally nonsensical rug-pull of an ending because BLERGH EVIL. The ending is as obvious, weightless, and meaningless as the rest of it, a testament to an utter lack of surprise, mystery, or deviation from basest cliché.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
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The Alchemist Cookbook: I’m Going Crazy Out There At The Lake

There’s all kinds of ways to treat dark magic in film - you can go lurid and sensationalistic with it, you can treat it with somber dignity as a path of scholarship, you can reduce it to a few candles and a pentagram, and all of these show up in films I’ve written about. But one thing they all have in common is some kind of religious context, a focus on ritual and communion. Which is fine as far as it goes. Sometimes it works well and conveys grandeur, and sometimes it’s mere cliché.

The Alchemist Cookbook treats it differently, like a ramshackle, homebrew process. It’s less ritual circle and more meth lab, and the results are interesting, framing a story of personal disintegration.

There’s a young man out in a trailer at the edge of a swamp. He’s blasting music really loud and messing with chemical substances of some kind on the oven in the trailer’s kitchen area. It’s littered, cluttered with candles, powders, cans, just a whole mess of things loosely cobbled together and all way too close to open flames. His name is Sean, and though it isn’t immediately clear what he’s up to, in between fitful preparations and decoctions he keeps consulting a book with some kind of mysterious sigil on the front. As it transpires, Sean’s trying to practice alchemy - real lead-into-gold alchemy.

It doesn’t seem like he’s having much success, and Sean, twitchy, manic, (he keeps popping some kind of prescription medication, and it seems to be very important that he keep getting this medication), out in the woods, is becoming increasingly frustrated at his lack of success. And since alchemy is at the intersection of chemistry and magic, what starts off as attempts at homebrew chemistry take a darker turn, and the stovetop experiments turn into rituals out in the woods.

Invocations of old, powerful names.

As loath as I usually am to discuss films in terms of other films, this is an odd one. It’s an indie film shot on a small budget, which helps determine its aesthetic and focus to a certain degree, and it’s about alchemy and dark magic, with a focus on a single person going through a ritual and the ways that starts to change their environment. So, in a lot of ways, this really strikes me as sort of being like A Dark Song by way of Resolution and Jug Face. And again, it’s very much its own thing, and “this meets that” is always going to be simplistic, but these were the touchstones that occurred to me.

Like A Dark Song, it’s about someone using dark magic to single-mindedly pursue an outcome in isolation, and how the results of this work start to change things around the practitioner. Like Resolution and Jug Face, it was shot on a small budget in limited locations, so what we get is less explicitly supernatural than odd and unsettling, by and large, but it definitely sets a tone. Sean’s friend Cortez visits him, brings him food, medication, and supplies for his experiments, and though the film is less focused on their relationship than Resolution is in its protagonists, there are echoes of that same thorny interplay between the one making very bad decisions and the one trying to pull his friend back from the brink. Like Jug Face, it presents a vision of rural life with very little dignity or grandeur - everything is squalid and cheap and shabby, rickety. Everything is falling apart,

Well, everything and everyone. The film is as much about Sean’s steady psychological disintegration as anything else. He’s already in a bad way when we meet him, and the isolation and meddling with powerful forces just speed the process along, so at pretty much no point does his situation feel safe or like he is in control. His recklessness and instability does a lot of the heavy lifting until late in the movie when it becomes very clear there’s something out there, staged as a firelight meeting between Sean and a Cortez who seems…different. The trailer has the ambiance of an illegal still, powerful chemistry being done with store-bought chemicals, flimsy equipment, and the barest minimum of safety precautions. Sean’s mental state and grip on the world are precarious, and he’s invoking demons and making dangerous promises. It could all blow up at any minute.

The film feels both highly claustrophobic, with lots of tight shots and close-ups  in cramped interiors, and at the same time like it’s careening out of control, hurtling toward self-destruction. And this is just the part of it that is about Sean and his own safety. However, it’s just as much about the dark forces with which he’s consorting - he’s out in the middle of nowhere, and all kinds of strange shrieks and howls and bellows come out of the woods at night (and then during the day), suggesting monstrous things just out of sight. And there is Sean, crying out into the dark, taunting those things, daring them to come get him. And they do.

IMDB entry
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Good Thing For Your Ears Alert

So a little while back, I wrestled with the dilemma of H.P. Lovecraft, and how his particular brand of cosmic horror has largely been overshadowed either by cutesy pop-culture reduction or the legacy of his truly awful beliefs. I really like cosmic horror, and appreciate seeing expressions of it that get out from under his shadow whenever I can. Well, over the holiday weekend, I was introduced to a horror anthology podcast called Old Gods of Appalachia, and I am here to tell you that it is well worth your time and the use of your ears. The episodes so far are short (I think the longest one tops out at 24 minutes), but they work in accumulation to build up a vision of life in the Appalachian hills, mountains, valleys, and hollers that connects the world we know to something much darker. Root workers make bargains with ancient things, coal miners dig too deep and free things intended to be forever imprisoned. It's cosmic horror emerging organically from a specific place with a specific history and specific traditions, not just a slapdash pasting of tentacles and cults onto hillbilly stereotypes. The people telling these stories live in those woods, come from those woods, and the result is highly compelling. My one complaint would be that the next episode isn't up yet because dammit, I want more. GO GET THAT SHIT.

Possum: The Things We Carry

I really like allegorical scary movies. They work a lot like nightmares, in that they’re rooted in real fears or anxieties we have, but we’re denied all of the defenses that we use to keep fear at bay during waking hours. They press some primal fear button in the back of our brain that more glib, formulaic films miss to focus on cheap startle effects.

Possum is not an especially subtle allegory, but it is very effective, a stark, haunting, story about long-repressed trauma and guilt.

The film begins with a voiceover reciting what sounds like a nursery rhyme about a sinister character called Possum. There is a man, who we will eventually learn is named Philip, taking a train to the small English town of Fallmarsh. He sits ill at ease on the train, a leather bag in his hands, listening to some schoolboys behind him discuss some mysterious bit of business centering around the town’s abandoned army barracks. They view Philip with some distaste and suspicion. You don’t really blame them, Philip’s pasty, with nervous, red-rimmed eyes and a twitchy demeanor. He’s, well, creepy.

Philip disembarks at Fallmarsh, and walks to a dilapidated home sort of in the middle of nowhere. There’s a man there - Maurice - who seems to be expecting him, but not especially happy to see him. Philip is a puppeteer, and there’s been some unpleasantness at the school where he was employed, a “scandal” around a show he put on. Philip thinks it’ll blow over. Maurice doesn’t seem so sure. There’s something in the leather bag that Philip keeps trying to get rid of, but he can’t. Maurice is some kind of father figure to Philip. Philip has come home.

On television, it is reported that one of the schoolboys from the train has gone missing.

It’s hard to really sum up the premise of this film, because it doesn’t really have a plot to speak of, just the cyclical repetition and interpolation of locations and images, all hinting at something terrible, like the intersection of nightmare and uncovered memory: What’s in the bag? What’s behind the door in Philip’s house that he keeps hesitating to open? Why does he call it his house, and who is Maurice, if not his father? What happened to Philip when he was younger? Why does Philip keep a storybook hidden under the floorboards of his bedroom? All we can take away is that sometime in the past, something terrible happened to Philip, and it’s never really left him. The film is a process of gradual revelation and connecting of dots that blends nightmare with reality to communicate Philip’s mental state - it isn’t ever really clear how much of what we’re seeing is real and how much of it is metaphor, but it doesn’t really matter since this is a film more felt than understood as a conventional narrative.

The overwhelming majority of the movie is Philip, who seems broken and alienated and increasingly ill at ease in the world around him, and Maurice, who seems faintly vile and unwholesome and whose interactions with Philip suggest the long history of an abusive parent accustomed to being in complete control. Philip is carrying something around with him - literally, in the leather bag that takes on an almost supernatural quality - that he is trying to be rid of, but can’t quite seem to shake. It isn’t an especially subtle metaphor, but that’s not really the point - we’re supposed to see it for what it is, because the point of the film is Philip coming to grips with something he’s been carrying around with him for his entire life. His childhood guilt and trauma are externalized as the terrible thing that is in this bag. A lot goes unsaid, or is talked around, but between Philip’s twitchy affect, Maurice’s creepiness, the accumulation of little nagging ambiguities (why won’t he go into that one room?) and stories about missing students past and present, all point to the feeling that something very bad is on the verge of being revealed, and although we can make our guesses about what everything means, the film doesn’t give enough away to confirm any one explanation until the very end, so the constant shifting uncertainty also works to keep us feeling uneasy. Every frame is suffused with dread - the weather is constantly overcast, interiors are steeped in squalor and shadows, everywhere is rife with urban decay, backed with a soundtrack of electronics, ambient hums, and discordant strings. Nothing here is new or clean, and the sun hangs red and low in the sky when we see it at all.

Its oblique and elliptical nature mostly works for it because it never lets up on the feeling of unnerving dread, and so even when nothing’s actually happening, there’s still the lingering unease of something just waiting to happen, and though the filmmakers mostly do a good job of pacing the story, there are places where it flags a little, where the revisiting of places and ideas feel like the film is spinning its wheels, but it doesn’t last for long. There’s a mystery here, and the worst thing you can do when you have a mystery that you’re doling out one cryptic clue at a time is not pay it off, but the film does in a way that is not totally out of left-field, but is shocking nonetheless in its intensity and suddenness. The setting, the cinematography, the sound, and the acting and character choice permeate everything with a sense of wrongness, a sense that there’s something very bad hidden just around the corner, and in the final act, as Philip comes to grips with what he’s been carrying around with him the whole time, all the masks come off and the horrible truth is revealed in a sharp denouement that is almost cathartic in its horror, as if something poisonous is being purged from Philip, if not from the world.

IMDB entry
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The Blackcoat’s Daughter: Left Behind

Okay, so this week I’m ending up as far away from last week as I can get. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but as I’m sitting here thinking about this week’s film, I realize that it is in a lot of ways the stylistic opposite of last week’s entry. By and large, Apollo 18 looked like actual found footage, but relied a little too much on horror-film clichés in the third act to gin up any tension or feelings of threat, which undercut the whole thing. You could say it lacked…atmosphere.

(I know, I know. I know.)

By contrast, The Blackcoat’s Daughter has atmosphere in spades. It’s stylish, patient, and suffused with slowly mounting dread culminating in a haunting conclusion.

This film is the story of Katherine, Rose, and Joan. Katherine and Rose - both teenagers - are students at a small boarding school for girls in rural New York, and Joan, in her early 20s, has just been released from the hospital for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. When the film opens, Katherine has just had a strange dream in which her father (an unseen figure in a black coat) shows her his badly wrecked car with her mother inside, and Rose is telling a friend of hers that she’s missed her period, and now she has to think about the possibility that she’s pregnant, all set against the school’s annual parents’ weekend, which begins the school’s winter break. Joan, freshly discharged from the hospital, fumbles with her ID bracelet in a bus station bathroom, tries to call a number that turns out to be disconnected, and then, inadequately clothed against the winter snow, sits forlornly at a bus stop.

Katherine and Rose are both called to the headmaster’s office. He has to go out of town on some personal business and unfortunately won’t be there for the weekend. Katherine is upset that he won’t be there for her performance at the parents’ assembly, and he notes that neither Rose’s nor Katherine’s parents have come for the weekend. Rose assures the headmaster that her parents were just confused and would be headed up in a day’s time. Katherine seems less sure why her parents aren’t there.

Outside of the bus station, a man pulls up and offers Joan a ride.

First and foremost, this film sets a very specific mood. Everything is very quiet and still and slightly outside of time - the only real nods to modernity are the models of cars we can see and a few references to cellphones, but otherwise this could be the 1950s or 1980s or 2000s, it’s very hard to tell. This is reinforced by dialogue that is mannered, if not quite stilted, as we might expect to hear people talk in a period drama. It’s a girls’ boarding school, so there is in those scenes a definite feeling of manners and propriety, like a less lurid take on Picnic At Hanging Rock, and that contributes to the timeless feeling.

That said, it’s interesting in how as the film moves on and we learn more and more about what’s going, that opacity increasingly falls away - facades crumble, feelings are revealed, and what starts off as something slightly ethereal becomes more and more grounded, making the horror of what is happening that much more impactful. There are long stretches without any music at all, and what music is in the film is largely ambient swells and industrial hums. So, if anything, it’s sort of Picnic At Hanging Rock by way of David Lynch, which is no bad thing in my book. There are a lot of long, still shots of dimly lit hallways and snowy exteriors, communicating a world away from the hustle and bustle of big cities as seen in the smallest of hours. And in that world, there is something evil, if only one knows where to look.

It isn’t immediately apparent what these people have to do with each other - Katherine and Rose don’t know each other very well, and it isn’t clear what Joan’s role in all of this is. What this film does very well is take this very specific world and specific atmosphere it has created and tell a story through gradually unfolding events, showing us the points at which everyone’s perspectives converge and diverge, moving between different points of view. Katherine and Rose, despite the headmaster’s instructions that they cannot stay at school over the break unsupervised, appear to have been stranded by their parents. Stranded here, in the middle of the country in the dead of winter, in this place out of time. We get fragments of Joan’s past - doctors and nurses looming over her, medication administered, a gunshot, but not much else. She isn’t very forthcoming. Everything is just elliptical enough to maintain the air of mystery and uncertainty established by the setting, the camerawork, and the sound.

But, as the film goes on, we get more information. We see what Katherine, Rose, and Joan see, and the reasons for their situation become increasingly more and more clear. As we’re getting more details, the details we get become more and more unsettling - at first it’s little things, creeping in around the edges, and then in the third act everything and everyone starts to converge, and the tension, so carefully built up over the course of the film, spikes as the audience has enough to put two and two together, to understand exactly who everyone is and what they’ve done. And there is the horror that has been promised by the details revealed to us but also, finally, a sense of overwhelming loneliness, isolation, and grief that you wouldn’t necessarily see coming. Something terrible happened, is still happening, and cannot be undone.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon

Apollo 18: Moon’s Haunted

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear by now, I’m really picky when it comes to found-footage films. I cut them a lot less slack than I do some other types of films, but I promise you, this comes from a place of love. I am an absolute sucker for any kind of story told via recovered documents or ephemera. Epistolary novels, oral histories both real and fictional, documentaries, mockumentaries - this kind of story is completely and absolutely my shit. I like stories told this way so much because when done well, it helps me forget that I’m reading a story. I dunno, I’m pretty sure in another life I could have been a historian, because the idea of teasing out a narrative from a bunch of archival documents sounds like something I’d enjoy tremendously.

(cue a legion of historians shaking their heads sadly because I’ve completely misunderstood what they do)

Anyway, I think it goes back to that feeling of secret discovery, of being presented with some kind of record for posterity, never intended for a wider audience. I love that feeling. But goddamn, do a lot of found-footage films fuck it up. It’s not an excuse to cheap out on the production or the acting or the writing. If anything, they’re harder to make because you have to make everything look naturalistic and still tell a good story. The instant something feels contrived or artificial , it yanks you right out of the story. You can’t fall back on the usual bag of cinematic tricks to evoke horror, because those are things than happen in movies, and you aren’t supposed to be watching a movie, you’re supposed to be watching raw, unmediated footage.

Apollo 18 does some things very right, other things less so, and the result is sort of a mixed bag.

We open with a title card that says, in essence, that what we are about to see is classified footage from the Apollo 18 moon mission. What makes this noteworthy is that officially, Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon that NASA ever launched.

This footage shouldn’t exist.

We’re introduced to astronauts Nate, Ben, and John in short interviews as they prepare for the mission. This is what they’ve been training for, and though they express concern over the mission’s secrecy - their families are told they’ll be doing a training exercise overseas, and they have a liaison from the Department of Defense - they’re excited to actually be going to the moon. The footage is intercut with some home movies of the three of them at a barbecue, wives and kids in tow. And this really highlights one of the film’s strengths - the attention to detail here is impressive. It really does look like footage from the early 1970s (apparently accomplished in part by the use of lenses from the period), the actors are dressed and groomed appropriately for the time, and speak with the plain competence of men who work in high-risk aeronautics. Most found-footage films go for the camcorder look (which almost always looks like pro-grade camera footage with a cheesy camera overlay on it), but here, we have film stock, maybe some very early video - it’s made clear that the DOD think it’s important to record every facet of the mission, using what was at the time state-of-the-art technology. It’s plausible, it makes sense for the type of story it is, not a case of “oh, we’re going to rig our entire RV with video cameras for reasons.”

Likewise, the launch of the mission looks and sounds like actual spaceflight. I’m not an expert, they may very well have screwed some things up, but the way people talk, the sound of the communications equipment, it all more or less jibes with footage I have seen of space missions from the time. So a lot of work goes into making all of this feel plausible, like we are actually watching classified footage of a mission to the moon that did not officially happen. It’s not just impressive, it’s necessary to create a believable story.

This attention to detail, however, tends to be in service of a film that never really coheres. It looks and sounds fantastic for the most part, but it never really establishes a mood or tension as well as it could. Of course something bad is going to happen (it is a horror movie, after all), but how you get to that point matters. This isn’t an over-the-top assault on the senses, this is supposed to be something that really happened, and stories like that, in my opinion, tend to benefit from being developed gradually, in small, subtle ways, so that when the big surprises hit, there’s real impact, real shock there. The film starts with the idea that there’s something wrong a little too early and depicts it a little too bluntly, and the dialogue is a little too on-the-nose at points (John, who is piloting the orbiter, states early on that “it’s my job to bring you home safely,” and at another point Ben says “it feels like something’s watching us.” Like, we know). From a pacing standpoint, it would have benefited from a slower build-up, from everything being fine until the moment it wasn’t. Instead, almost as soon as they’ve touched down on the moon we know things are amiss and it sucks a lot of the tension out of the film. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

That doesn’t mean it’s entirely tension-free - Nate, Ben, and John discover that the official version of events in the U.S. space program doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality. and it starts to become clear that the mission has been kept top secret for a very good reason. When things start to escalate, it does start to pick up a head of steam, albeit late in the game, and to its detriment, it largely does so when it starts to abandon period authenticity for something closer stock horror-film cliches (even given the omnipresence of cameras, the indication that someone’s losing it by showing us high-speed footage of his head whipping back and forth doesn’t read like actual footage, it reads like a horror movie), and so we go from a believable film that isn’t setting mood to one that sets a mood at the cost of believability. Luckily, it’s not too egregious and it’s mostly late in the film, but it rankled. There’s also the matter of how the footage was recovered - I’m not someone who thinks film criticism is about finding all the plot holes, but it’s a big thing to go unexplained and soured me a little on the experience.

Don’t get me wrong, though, this film definitely has its moments. There’s a great setpiece search through a dark crater, lit only sporadically by a flash, that ends with a shocking discovery, a sudden reveal of something that shouldn’t be on the moon, alongside the claustrophobia and isolation of their environments and the sterility and barrenness of the moonscape. In that sort of environment, the discovery of anything out of the ordinary is that much more startling. If the filmmakers had leaned into that a little more, unwound things a little more gradually, and let small revelations do most of the work, it could have been really good.

There’s a way to tell a story within the narrow constraints of found-footage and make it effective. Setting it in space makes survival itself a tougher prospect (see also Europa Report), and makes anything unusual potentially scary. Unfortunately, this film tips its hand a little too early, goes a little too obvious in places and stretches plausibility toward the end (including a mild case of “we have to keep filming” syndrome), which makes all of the obvious care and preparation that went into making it look like it was actually recovered footage stand out in stark contrast. It did a lot right up front, which ends up throwing all of the stuff it does wrong into sharp relief.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

Climax: Worse Trips

Bad trips are a great source of horror. There’s a sense that everything is out of your control, that there’s no safe harbor, no certainty you can turn to, and because it’s all a product of your own distorted perceptions, there’s no way to run from it. Wherever you go, there you are, and even closing your eyes just brings more awful visions. It’s as close as you can get to the nightmare from which you cannot wake up.

Bad trips played a big part in last week’s Mandy, but mostly as a way to get some really striking visuals up on the screen. It wasn’t even so much about an actual bad trip as it was the way bad trips have been typically portrayed onscreen and using that visual vocabulary to evoke a mood.

Climax is sort of at the other end of the spectrum. It’s less about the imagery of the bad trip, and more about the experience and consequences of a bad trip. It’s a queasy, emotionally exhausting portrait of psychological disintegration.

We open on a figure running and stumbling through snow, sobbing, shot from high overhead. They collapse, the ground streaked red around them. Roll final credits. It’s disorienting, to say the least. Before we can really get our bearings, we cut to a close-up on an old television, broadcasting audition videotapes, and here the story starts to come into focus. A choreographer named Selva is auditioning dancers for a touring production. We’re introduced to 20 dancers, mostly young, varying in how worldly they are. Some are achingly naïve, naked in their desire to succeed, others are more jaded, some come from tough backgrounds.

Cut to rehearsal, the company performing a routine in an empty school that they’re using as a practice space and dormitory. Their dancing is vibrant, raw, libidinous. They’re almost ready to go out on tour and this is their last practice. The routine finished, they gather around a bowl of sangria prepared by Emmanuelle - the company’s manager, a former dancer whose unplanned pregnancy cut her career short - dancing less formally to music provided by their DJ, breaking off into groups to gossip and drink and unwind.

Everyone brings their own thing into the troupe, as evident from their audition tapes and the conversations we observe. Some of them are more emotionally healthy than others, some are downright pigs, and you can see the attachments and divisions and jealousies and resentments that have already formed among them. Who’s sleeping with whom, who’s already slept with whom, who’s slept with everyone, who wants to sleep with whom, tensions and rivalries and yearning. And then, one by one, they start to feel sick and dizzy. They start getting overheated.

Someone’s spiked the sangria with LSD.

So we have all of these people with their hopes and fears and resentments and tangled intimacies, stuck in an empty schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter, they’re starting to hallucinate, and they’re totally unprepared for it. Once the drugs kick in, it starts getting very ugly, very quickly. Blame flies and mob ugliness erupts as they realize they’ve been dosed, and then abandoned as they become consumed by their own internal hells. Desires are laid bare - whether to fuck or fight or kill, and the mask of civilization that keeps their worst impulses in check is ripped off. Every grudge, every secret jealousy, every need, it’s all out in the open as the dancers lose their ability to maintain any sort of emotional equilibrium. The way people love each other, hate each other, hate themselves, it’s all naked and exposed to the world, with no mediation, and all sense of good judgment falters. These aren’t the bad trips of Mandy or exploitation film in general - there’s no swirling light or chromatic aberration or imagined monsters and hellish landscapes. Just screaming and tears and piss and vomit and blood, casual emotional cruelty.

The film’s style mirrors the internal state of its characters. We don’t know what they’re seeing or feeling specifically, but everything about the film communicates the disorientation and profound alienation of the bad trip. The opening dance number is shot as a single take, and then the afterparty conversations are quick, short takes cutting fast from one set of people to another, almost like the camera is blinking. Then. once things start to fall apart, the second half of the film is a single unbroken take, the camera fixing onto one person and following them around from place to place, room to room, and as things go from bad to worse, that long, unbroken take becomes a journey through something like a haunted house, where something terrible is likely going on behind any given door.

The camera abandons one person to follow another, and people wander through scenes of others’ grief or rage or lacerating self-abuse, with the natural lighting of the opening giving way to deep shadows and sickly reds and greens, shots tilting at unnatural angles or flipping over upside down entirely to heighten the feeling of disorientation, a feeling which extends to the way the film is structured. The events themselves are chronologically ordered, from the end of rehearsal to the aftermath the next day, but the film begins with its end credits, the opening credits appear halfway through, and the title appears at the end. It all converges to heighten the feeling that things are out of control, out of order, that something has gone seriously amiss, ending in the room where it all started, now lit entirely in reds, shot upside down, bodies writhing and contorting in violence and lust and both intermingled, like something out of Bosch, abstracted and visceral at the same time.

In its raw, jagged displays of emotion, lack of stable center, tremendous harm happening in passing or on the periphery, it’s all like the bright, brittle desperation of that party that’s gone on just a little too long, where the fun’s all starting to look desperate and feverish, but turned up to a deafening pitch. You want to go home, you want to be someplace warm and safe and familiar, but home is a long way away, and by the end, everyone has abandoned themselves and all sense for whatever consumes them from the inside out.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Mandy: Bad Trip

Memory is a funny thing - we tend to remember the gist of things, the way they felt, rather than how they actually happened. We get details wrong, but we get them wrong in ways consistent with the overall feeling of the experience. We’re better at remembering the emotional truth of an experience than its literal truth.

This occurred to me while I was watching Mandy, because the whole film feels like the emotional truth, rather than literal truth, of a specific time and place, of a specific zeitgeist. It evokes a specific aesthetic and set of cultural references while at the same time turning them all up to the point of expressionism.

Red is a lumberjack, and he and his girlfriend Mandy live in a cozy cabin by a lake at the foot of the Shadow Mountains. He chops down trees, she runs the cash register at a small gas station, and in the evenings she draws or reads, they watch television together, talk about their dreams. Theirs is a life of quiet contentment under an impossibly starry sky.

That is, until the day that Mandy crosses paths with Jeremiah Sand, aspiring musician and leader of a small cult called the Children of the New Dawn. Something about Mandy captivates him, calls to him.

He must have her, and Jeremiah Sand is used to getting the things he decides he needs.

 It’s a story as old as time. You’ve got a quiet, hardworking man, the woman he loves, a kidnapping, and that quiet hardworking man set off on a rampage of revenge in the name of the woman he loves. It’s right there in the title: Mandy. This is a film that works in the way it presents discrete images and vignettes that communicate a feeling, moreso than in telling a story. It does have a story, albeit not an especially complicated one, but what makes this film compelling is how richly and vividly the story is put up on the screen, and how far it pushes its imagery. It’s shot with a vivid, gorgeous palette that takes elements of drug/psychedelia, cult, and biker exploitation films and turns them up and up until they achieve hallucinatory majesty, punctuated by intertitles that first tell us the setting (the Shadow Mountains, in 1983, in a flowery period-appropriate script), then the antagonists (the Children of the New Dawn, set in a typeface reserved for Satanic-panic witchcraft stories), and finally, over an hour in, Red’s mission (Mandy, described with the thorny symmetry of a metal band’s logo). How it’s written matters as much as what it says.

Likewise, how it looks tells us how the characters feel. The beginning - our introduction to Red and Mandy and their idyllic existence - has a strong emphasis on the cosmic, lots of color washes and open, brightly starry skies, and as the film goes on, these open vistas are replaced by the chromatic aberration and apocalyptic visions of hallucinogens, then a descent into darkness and firelight and grime, and then back to vivid color again as Red completes his journey through hell, itself chronicled by animated nightmare sequences that resemble nothing more than the cover of one of Mandy’s pulp fantasy novels, or a heavy metal album cover. Mandy’s kidnapping is set in total darkness, punctuated only by flashes of blue electricity, action captured in fragments like a very slow strobe, and even relatively innocuous scenes of everyday life are shot through with period-appropriate film grain and colors, the warm browns and mustard yellows of the 1970s and early 1980s. Still, you’d never mistake it for a period film because everything’s so heightened, all of the cultural allusions so caricatured, that it becomes something else entirely.

The acting contributes to the overall expressionism as well. The characters don’t really have inner lives and largely speak in banalities, but it works, because they’re essentially emotional colors alongside the literal colors of the film. Red speaks mostly in monotone or in pained, guttural screams of rage and grief, and Jeremiah Sand is quietly melodramatic until the second he doesn’t get his way, the facade revealing ugly, angry cracks. A conversation between Red and the Chemist, a purveyor of powerful drugs, seems to consist of Red broadcasting his thoughts telepathically, and throughout, Mandy feels remote, unknowable, unattainable, as if she’s a ghost, as if she’s already receding in Red’s memory no matter how hard he tries to hold onto her. The soundtrack does its own share of the heavy lifting to convey what words do not, shifting from gentle ambience to ominous, pulsing synthesizers and tectonic swells of distorted guitar as Red journeys further into darkness.

It isn’t perfectly executed, however. Most notably, it flags a little at the beginning of the third act. While it’s still beautifully shot and lit, the action, when Red finally arrives at a confrontation, is not paced well. There is a fight against a demonic biker gang that should feel climactic given their monstrous introduction but doesn’t, instead ending as it’s just starting to develop a head of steam, and Red’s revenge against the cultists - something we’d expect to be lingered over - is dispatched summarily. What the first two-thirds of film leads up to is over in a matter of minutes, the end result being oddly anticlimactic. The filmmaker’s lack of facility with action is, however, made up for by a final encounter with Jeremiah that works beautifully, an apocalyptic showdown in the pulsing red light of his church. The end result is a film you feel, rather than one you think about, a simultaneous love letter to and tone poem for an age and aesthetic long passed, and perhaps only dreamed about. But what a dream it is.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Wounds: Nothing Happens, Until Everything Happens

Part of telling any kind of story is pacing, and that’s as true of scary movies as anything else. You can feed information out slowly, or in sudden, shocking reveals, or you can bombard your audience right from the beginning. All of these are perfectly effective ways of creating horror, but they all rely on certain rhythms sustained over the course of the film. Screw up your pacing, and you kill the vibe you’re trying to create and risk pulling your audience out of the experience.

Pacing isn’t the only problem with Wounds, but it’s certainly one of the bigger ones.

We open with a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, about telling someone things they don’t want to know about themselves, and in retrospect I’m not sure how it’s supposed to inform the rest of the film. It sounds foreboding, but that’s about it. The film proper opens at Rosie’s, a bar in New Orleans, but not one of the big, tourist-friendly bars on the main drag. Rosie’s is a neighborhood dive, not especially pretty, and the clientele tend toward the rough. Will, the bartender, is entertaining a couple with some parlor tricks in between refilling drinks for the few folks sitting at the bar. This is actually one of the stronger bits of the film, as the bar and the relationships between the people in it are communicated economically. Will’s likely an underachiever, too smart for this job, but not ambitious enough to do anything else. The couple - Alicia and Jeffery - haven’t been together long. Alicia brought Jeffery along, and Will clearly has a thing for Alicia. Some folks are shooting pool, and a group of obviously underage college kids come in, fish out of water, though one of them has a legit enough ID. Just another night at Rosie’s.

And then Eric comes in. Eric’s a tough customer, works on an offshore oil rig and gets fucked up when he’s not at work. He’s on a hair trigger, you get the sense he’s hoping for an excuse to beat the shit out of somebody. But he’s a regular, so Will’s got an eye on him, and so when another tough guy bumps into Eric and shit immediately goes south (the college kids recording the whole thing with their phones), Will’s pretty much already called the cops, but not before the other guy takes a broken bottle and cuts up Eric’s face pretty badly. The college kids scatter.

In the aftermath, as Will cleans up, he finds a phone that one of the college kids must have left behind. Unlocking it reveals the usual text exchanges…well, that bit about “that ritual in that book must have worked” was a little odd…and the usual selfies and party pics give way to images of increasing violence, of broken teeth in pools of blood. Of what could be corpses.

A video of something horrifying and impossible.

Normally, what would follow from this discovery could be, say, the gradual intrusion of whatever nightmare thing Will saw on the phone into his everyday life - hallucinations, unexplained calls, a sense of being watched, stalked by something beyond normal understanding. Instead, mostly what we get next is the story of Will and his girlfriend Carrie. She’s a graduate student at Tulane, and there are problems with their relationship. Carrie’s suspicious of Will, wonders why he has some girl’s phone, and Will’s suspicious of the very friendly relationship Carrie seems to have with one of her professors. And, from what we can observe, both are right to be suspicious of each other. Take out the bit with the weird shit on the phone, this could be an indie drama about the downward spiral of an underachieving bartender.

And that’s where pacing comes in. We get this horrifying reveal, this cursed image on an abandoned phone, but then for a good chunk of the movie, it doesn’t really matter. You’d expect that Will discovers this horrible thing, that events would steadily ramp up, that figuring out what’s behind this nightmarish thing would become a focus. But the film kind of meanders instead. A few weird things happen here and there, but there’s no real connection between them or internal logic or vocabulary for what’s happening. Good stories about curses or hauntings will have a specific image or set of images that denote the presence of something evil and some way to know that certain actions will cause the evil to be summoned. Here, it sort of feels like the filmmakers reached into a grab bag of things from other movies - Ringu-style cursed images, hallucinations, nightmare sequences and body horror most notably - without really making it clear how or why these things are the result of Will finding this phone. It all feels really disconnected and sort of assembled from parts in this respect. There are some effective shots or set-pieces here and there, but very little to tie them together - there’s no sense of things being put together or discovered or revealed, and this sort of aimlessness describes about two-thirds of the film. Then all of a sudden everything goes bad all at once and then it ends.

The reliance on technology to tell the story doesn’t help much either - it’s not impossible to make technological devices effective conduits for something evil (see Ringu and Kairo, for example), but it’s not easy, either, and this film relies way too much on checking text messages and looking at small images on a phone to drive the horror, and it isn’t scary - the messages from who or whatever is behind all of this don’t come across as anything more than just texts, and it robs the film of a lot of power. Had they just left it at an image or a video that when viewed does bad things, that would be fine, but then there’s this whole weird subplot where the college kids who left the phone behind are following the bartender around and they take the phone back for...reasons, and then give it back to him for...other reasons, and maybe they’re possessed? It doesn’t make much sense and the overreliance on the phone as the source of horror makes a lot of it fall flat, and that’s on top of the idea that a group of college kids just happened to find a book on ritual magic and tried something pretty horrifying and then went out for beers afterward. It’s better to just not explain it at all.

To its credit, when it comes to the relationships between the protagonists and setting up their world, it does a pretty good job of showing instead of telling. If their circumstances feel increasingly contrived, at least they themselves feel like real people. They aren’t overplayed. If anything, they’re underplayed - there is very little emotional dynamism in this film. For the majority of the film, most everyone feels inert, and it’s only at the very end that voices get raised and emotions run a wider gamut than A to B, as events suddenly come to a head - not because things have naturally reached some horrible, inevitable conclusion, but because it feels like the filmmakers realized they needed to wrap things up with some more horror stuff. The overall experience is one that starts with a strong, natural sense of place and the people in it, and then squanders that by dropping in a bunch of haphazardly selected supernatural elements, as if that would be enough to make it a horror film.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

Backcountry: Man Versus Man, Man Versus Nature, Man Versus Self

One of the most common criticisms leveled at horror movies is that people in horror movies behave like idiots, doing things no sensible person would do. This strikes me as kind of glib criticism, though, because (as I’ve observed here before), people in horror movies don’t know they’re in horror movies, and let’s face it, actual people in the real world behave like idiots all the time as well. Sure, there are instances where the only explanation for a character’s behavior is the need to move a plot along, but it’s definitely possible to build a gripping story around entirely plausible behavior. Poor judgment in the real world has had shocking consequences.

Backcountry is a very tense, economically told story about man’s folly, one based on actual events.

We open on a slow tilt down the length of a stand of trees. The only sound we can hear is the buzzing of flies. A lot of flies, by the sound of it. As the camera continues down, the buzzing gets louder, and the top of a cloud of flies reveals itself. We cut away before we see what they’re circling.

We cut away to Alex and Jenn, packing up for a camping trip. The car ride out into the woods reveals them to be a pretty normal couple by all appearances - their conversation is easy, familiar, not overly expository, and their interactions seem playful, though there does seem to be some tension or strain underneath. It’s clear pretty quickly that the trip was Alex’s idea, and there’s some friction mixed in with the affection. But soon enough they get to the canoe rental spot at the entrance to the park - it’s a big, sprawling nature preserve that Alex has been coming to since he was a little kid. The guy who runs the canoe rental business tells him one of Alex’s favorite trails has been closed for the season, and he’s sort of evasive about why. He offers Alex a map, but Alex doesn’t need it. He knows the park really well.

It’s a quiet, uneventful trip to their campsite - it’s the end of the season, so they pass more people going out than coming in. They’re setting up for dinner and gathering wood when a handsome stranger comes by the campsite. His name’s Brad, and he’s caught more fish than he can eat by himself. Jenn invites him to stay for dinner, which bothers Alex a little. Brad seems friendly enough, though he’s a little cryptic about what he does for a living, and takes plenty of shots at Alex in the way that men do when there’s a pretty lady in the room. There’s some jockeying for dominance, and then Brad gets up and pisses just outside of the campfire.

Almost like he’s marking his territory.

This film takes its time to set up the events of its second half, to tell us who these people are and what they’re doing here. Jenn is a lawyer who’s never been camping before and has trouble putting her phone away. Alex does some landscaping work, but he’s working on something bigger. You get the sense that maybe he’s a little disappointed with himself, a little insecure. He wants to show Jenn this park, this place that’s been so important to him since he was very young, including all of the really cool places off-trail that the tourists don’t know about. Well, Brad knows about them.

Alex isn’t showy or loud, but he definitely has something to prove, and maybe Jenn’s a little impatient with it. All of this is important for what comes after, because out in the woods, little mistakes can have big consequences. Small injuries can become big problems if left untreated, the weather can turn on you, and memory plays tricks on us. A lot of what happens to Alex and Jenn comes down to his pride, his need to be good at something, to show off for Jenn, to demonstrate his worth to her. And without giving anything away, the second half of the film is a measured, dispassionate look at the ways in which they pay an awful cost for Alex’s pride. A lot can happen out in the woods, and there isn’t necessarily anyone around to help you.

The tension of the first half increases as things get worse and worse for the two of them, without ever really descending into melodrama. Everyone in this film is a believable person, with flaws and strengths and moments of weakness and moments of compassion, and their conversations sound like how people actually talk. The camerawork is expressive throughout but not overly showy, and makes good use of focus and a combination of close-ups and wide shots to communicate both interior states and the precariousness of their position out in the wild. Moments of high tension are punctuated with blurred, shaking shots and an absence of sound, which ends up being highly evocative - this film is good at making you feel what its characters are going through. At times it feels like it signposts things maybe a little too clearly (alternatively, I may just be entirely too vigilant about stuff like this), though there are a few nice feints and red herrings along the way, and the last act drags a little as the action subsides and becomes more about escape and survival, which dissipates some of the tension. I’m not sure it’s avoidable, though - this is a story told at a realistic scale, and hysterics and melodrama would seem awfully out of place.

Ultimately, that’s the film’s strength. This story is relatable, and that makes what happens all that much worse. Sometimes your insecurities and misplaced confidence and need to prove something - to pit yourself against something - lead to terrible consequences, and there’s something about the plainness of that that stayed with me after the film was over. Horror isn’t always moodily lit - sometimes it’s just out there in the world, under an open sky, screams and moans and pleas going unheeded in the middle of nowhere.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon

Reading Horror Instead Of Watching It

Due to a combination of technical mishaps at just, like, the worst possible time this week, I was unable to write up a movie for consideration in time for today. So, instead, I think I’m just going to freestyle a little about three horror novels I’ve either read or am in the process of reading right now, and have dug or am digging. Two of these books are either in production as films or have had their rights optioned, and I kind of wonder how well the third would work, so I’ll call it close enough for jazz.

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach

Penpal is constructed as a series of episodic recollections from different points in the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, and focuses a lot on the unreliability of memory and a childhood perspective that doesn’t quite appreciate the enormity of what’s happening at the moment. Basically, we do a lot of things as kids that it’s only years later we realize were really dangerous, or maybe we consider a specific person’s behavior and realize what seemed innocuous as children really wasn’t, and this book takes that idea and explores it to startling effect. The narrator got hurt when was a kid, he had a best friend with whom he lost touch, a teen romance nipped in the bud, and a school project to find penpals by sending out balloons with notes attached ended up having far-reaching consequences for him and people around him. It creates a tension between the innocence of the narrator’s childhood recollections and our adult understanding of the implications of the events he’s recounting, and as the book moves on, things get worse and worse as the narrator, now an adult, come to a reckoning with his mother about what happened all those years ago.

It hinges a lot on small details and reveals, and does so with sharp effectiveness - it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read that elicited gasps from me. It’s had its film rights optioned, and I think that if someone like Mike Flanagan - someone who knows how to get the most out of small details and understands people as people, not just plot objects - got hold of it, it would make one hell of a horror film.

A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

It’s easy for possession narratives to collapse into cliché, into the same riff on The Exorcist that we keep seeing in one form or another. But A Head Full Of Ghosts pulls off a really nice balancing act. It’s the story of one blue-collar family in Massachusetts, whose lives are upended when their oldest daughter begins acting very, very strangely. It’s told from the perspective of her younger sister, and bounces back and forth in time, told in a quasi-epistolary fashion via modern-day interview transcripts and blog entries, the past represented by diary entries and other sources of information as the family’s economic and emotional situations collapse, leading them to accept help from a local priest who, in turn, thinks that their story would make an excellent reality television show. Which sounds like it’s being set up as some kind of blunt satire of show business and what people will do for fame (which would be boring, in my opinion), but it’s not - it’s an account of the destruction of this family’s lives in the wake of a force that might (or might not) be supernatural.

The plotting uses periodic twists to maintain a sense of unease, alongside some sparingly used but highly effective imagery to illustrate the older daughter’s deterioration. The family themselves sometimes threaten to fall into caricature, but the cruelty that an older sister can visit on an utterly worshipful and trusting younger sister is acutely and devastatingly observed.

The film version is in pre-production, directed by Oz Perkins, whose I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House struck me as a stylishly mixed bag, but he certainly knows his way around a camera, so if the writing isn’t as bloodless and convoluted as that film, it’ll be another one to watch.

The Croning by Laird Barron

I’m smack-dab in the middle of this one, and though I wasn’t quite sure where it was going at first, it’s turning into a nicely atmospheric slow burn that reminds me of a lot of what I like about H.P. Lovecraft’s writing without all of the baggage he brings with him. It opens with what might be reductively described as a gritty, Game-of-Thrones-style retelling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, but as the adventures of the royal spymaster tasked with discovering the mysterious dwarf’s real name wind on, it makes the mischievous fairytale character a harbinger of ancient evil, before leaping forward to a nightmarishly druggy interlude in modern-day Mexico which introduces us to Don and Michelle, the central characters for the rest of the book so far. From there, it begins bouncing backward and forward in time (I am starting to see a pattern here) through events in their life, narrative asides from their children and friends, and all along, the specter of that long-ago trip to Mexico haunts the edges of Don’s fitful memory. Something evil happened to Don back then, something with roots in the opening fairytale, and slightly wrong, unsettling details about Don and Michelle’s life together flit in and out of the narrative.

Although nothing’s really developed outright by where I am in the book, the sum product of all of these different stories - stories from different places and different times, many colored with the patina of an unsavory family history -  create this feeling that there’s something very bad coming, something very old, and very powerful, a feeling of fates long ago sealed. It’s an audacious book, and it’d make a hell of a film, or maybe a limited-run series, if handled with taste and restraint.

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A Head Full Of Ghosts
The Croning

Midsommar: What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Lots and lots of scary movies take place at night. And that makes sense - the dark is threatening and uncertain, and from a survival standpoint, what you don’t know CAN kill you. As much as we’ve evolved over time, nighttime is still when we can’t see it coming, and darkness is where the monsters lurk, where the hands are waiting to grab us from out of the shadows.

Which makes it all the more impressive that Midsommar manages to wring the dread and uneasiness that it does from the unblinking eye of day. It’s one thing to cloak your nightmares in shadow, it’s a whole other thing to lay them out in plain view. But that’s exactly why this film works - it’s a slow, deliberate exercise in the dread that comes with exposure.

Dani’s having a rough time of it lately - her relationship with her sister is fractious, part of a long and complicated family history, and she’s afraid that she’s driving her boyfriend Christian away with what she perceives to be constant neediness. She’s worried about her sister, who struggles with bipolar disorder, and looks to Christian for support (as one does with their partner), but to her it feels like too much, and so she’s constantly apologizing and accommodating.

And for his part, Christian is…barely there. Over the course of a phone call and a switch in perspective, we learn everything we need to know about him. He’s callow and aimless, a boy in a man’s body, unwilling to or incapable of making not just commitments, but decisions, of taking any direction in life at all. Dani constantly puts her needs aside to keep him around, but it’s immediately apparent that he’s only there until he leaves. His friends are urging him to break it off already, it’s been a year of him dithering and miserable and she’s obviously pathologically needy, you know, what with the wanting reassurance and emotional support and all. But Christian’s afraid of breaking up with her and then regretting it. He can’t stand the idea of making a decision that might make him feel bad.

Dani may very well be clingier than is healthy, and she may very well be asking more from Christian than is reasonable, but Christian is so obviously not the man for the job. Her clinginess stems from insecurity and uncertainty in the strength of the relationship, and if Christian weren’t so shallow, unhelpful and noncommittal, she wouldn’t be so uncertain. it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, where she’s so afraid she’s driving him away that it drives him away, but nothing about him inspires trust or reassurance. The distance between them is palpable - she pulls and tugs at his arm, he keeps saying he needs to go. There’s almost always space between them, in how they talk to each other, in how far away they stand from each other.

This, then, is our beginning - a couple in the throes of disintegration. And he’s just sprung on her, out of nowhere, that he’s taking a trip to Sweden with three of his friends - one he hadn’t bothered to mention before. Which makes an already awkward situation even more awkward. And then something horrible happens to Dani. Something world-shattering. And so Christian invites her on the trip, out of pity, out of not wanting to make any tough choices. He assures his friends that she’s not actually going to take him up on it. And of course she does.

And so they’re off to Sweden - Christian, Dani, Josh, Mark, and Pelle. They’re headed to Halsingland, the tiny community where Pelle grew up. Christian and Josh are in grad school for anthropology, and Josh is going to do some fieldwork. Christian’s hoping he’ll find something to kick-start ideas for his thesis, because he hasn’t found a topic yet. Mark is, well, a pig. Mostly he wants to fuck some “Swedish milkmaids.” They’ll be arriving in time for the midsummer festival, and this year’s is a special nine-day festival that only happens once every 90 years.

As soon as they arrive, they meet up with Pelle’s brother Ingemar, who brought his friends Simon and Connie from London. Everyone’s really happy to see Pelle and Ingemar, home from their traditional trip abroad. Halsingland is a bucolic rural commune deep in rural Sweden, so far in that the sun only sets a little, for maybe two hours a day. It is a place of wide-open spaces, simple livelihoods, bright colors, and constant sunshine. Everyone’s really happy to meet Pelle and Ingemar’s friends.

They’re so happy for new people to share in their traditions.

So here they are, in a foreign country, in a foreign culture, while Dani’s processing intense traumatic grief on top of a toxic, disintegrating relationship, and everyone’s consuming a lot of hallucinogens as part of the festival, strange customs and rituals under a constant, unblinking sun. The commune at Halsingland is both more than what it seems and also exactly what it seems, and the net effect is less out-and-out scary than it is deeply disconcerting. The constant bright light and bright color starts to feel a little oppressive after awhile, and everyone plays their part in the many games and rituals with wide, sincere smiles and joy. This is a community where these traditions have been upheld for countless centuries, and they don’t see anything wrong with them, it’s the visitors who react negatively. There’s a vein of humor running through the film as well, relying on the American fish out of water- in some ways, this is very much a “wacky teens travel abroad” comedy, just thoroughly recontextualized into horror.

Which, make no mistake, it is. The people of Halsingland have some very specific customs and rituals, and while Dani is working through intense grief (while everyone is tripping balls) and dealing with her failing relationship, that tends to take center stage. The role hallucinogens play is central to this film, blurring the line between real and unreal, bringing up deep-seated fears and emotions, all painted in bright, vivid color throughout. Aesthetically, this film is as far away from the standard horror palette of dark, grimy, decaying and rusty as you can get, and it’s absolutely bracing. Space and composition are immaculate and striking, little details inform everything we see, and it all serves as a backdrop to pageantry, abandonment and betrayal in equal measure, scored equally by charming folk songs and keening, dissonant strings, ancient melodies played on equally ancient instruments. The dysfunction between Dani and Christian - separately and as a couple - is acutely observed and deeply uncomfortable throughout, as provoking of unease as any traditional scares. Her self-negation and his selfish indifference are, at times, really hard to watch. This is a film that puts emotional violence front and center. Dani’s alone and afraid, and Christian’s base selfishness and unwillingness to stand for anything destroys everything around him.

And while it puts those things front and center, the real horror shit lurks in the margins. This film works at this level through sudden juxtapositions and cuts, jarring images presented suddenly, without any fanfare and very odd things put right out in plain sight. Folk art plays a big role in this film, and when you stop to consider what the art’s depicting, it’s sort of a “wait a minute” moment, but then it’s gone before it really has a chance to sink in. Things happen in the background - a look here, a conversation there, a distraction, a dismissal - but it’s so protracted that there isn’t a lot of tension built up. Everything’s weird, because it’s a small commune in a foreign country and everyone’s tripping, and it’s only gradually that the weirdness reveals its stakes. Really it isn’t until the very end that it all comes together, Dani’s journey through grief, the cost of community and tradition, and Christian’s fecklessness leading to something truly awful. But it’s less of a punch in the gut than something that lingers, like the remnants of a serious drug trip or a very bad dream.

IMDB entry
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Pure: Pffft Goes The Dynamite

I think it’s important that the arts be able to engage with difficult, uncomfortable ideas, and horror’s no different. Fictional fears can be proxies for real-world ones, sure, and in that mode horror provides a measure of distance, of emotional safety. We can work our shit out without it getting too close, too real. But when real-world fears take the lead and fictional fears are no longer a proxy, but instead a way to heighten those real-world fears, that’s when it gets interesting. When it gets under our skin and we don’t have the comfort of distance. The horror is right here beside us and there’s no use pretending otherwise.

But this is a tricky, tricky balance. It’s easy to mishandle sensitive subject matter, to take the sort of actual horrors people contend with every day and trivialize them as cheap provocation, or worse. (See, for example, roughly 95% of all horror films that feature rape in some form or another.) Dealing with controversial or sensitive subject matter in creative works is like juggling dynamite: It can be done, but you better be goddamn good at juggling.

The people who made Pure are not good at juggling, and end up squandering a potentially powerful story on trite expressions of its central ideas and a raftload of cheap jump scares.

We open on a young woman riding along in a car, eyes closed. She’s dreaming, the kind of reverie you experience on long road trips. Her dream is  unsettling - in it, she walks through a field in a white dress reminiscent of a wedding dress, her face obscured by a veil, and she meets a contorted, twisted mirror image in a black dress, crawling along the ground. It’s actually pretty sinister, and the cross-cutting between her riding peacefully in the car and the dream creates some real tension…

…and then the veils come off, and the one in black smiles in an obviously CG-exaggerated grin. Its artificiality robs the moment of all its power. We aren’t watching a nightmare, we’re watching a special effect.

(As an aside, this is pretty much the movie in a nutshell - there’s the potential for something grim and unsettling here, but it’s undone by cheap, obvious choices throughout.)

The car ride ends with the young woman getting out of the car and getting noisily sick. She is Shay, and she’s come with her half-sister Jo and their father, Kyle to an annual father-daughter “purity retreat” out in the woods. Kyle subscribes to a particular view of Christianity that positions fathers as the keepers of their daughters’ “purity”(read, sexual virginity) ahead of marriage, and for some time, Kyle and Jo have attended these retreats to reaffirm this specific father-daughter relationship at the “purity ball” and subsequent signing of a contract between father and daughter that concludes the retreat. Shay is Kyle’s daughter by another woman, and the recent death of Shay’s mother has brought her back into Kyle’s life. Shay is happy to finally have a father in her life, and Kyle gets another chance to get it right, so Shay’s trying her best to go along. Jo’s very much the bad girl - you can tell because she smokes and wears makeup and flannel shirts and jeans instead of pretty feminine dresses like all the other daughters.

The retreat is run by Pastor Seth, who is very much the consumer-grade Christian pastor, all business casual and bland performative informality, a slick megachurch version of faith. Lots of smiles and glad-handing, all with a gun on his hip. Nobody comments on the gun. Pastor Seth opens the retreat with a sermon about Lilith, the first woman created by God, exiled to Hell for consorting with the heavenly host. Pastor Seth really doesn’t like it when women don’t respect the wishes of men. No he does not.

The daughters are assigned to cabins, and Jo’s exasperated that Lacey - Seth’s daughter - is sharing their cabin as well. Lacey’s a goody-two-shoes sure to snitch on any fun that bad-girl Jo might want to have. Rounding out the cabin is Kellyann, who is sweet, sincere in her relationship with God, diligent about counting her calories and going for a run every morning, just like her daddy wants her to. Kellyann takes a non-specified medicine for anxiety. It’s tough being daddy’s little girl. Sure enough, night falls and the girls of Cabin 4 get into a little trouble, passing a vape pen back and forth while Lacey looks on disapprovingly.

And then Jo suggests they sneak off into the woods for a little adventure. See, Jo found a book about Lilith in their cabin a few years back and she’s been reading it. She thinks Lilith is misunderstood, and she ropes the girls into trying a little ritual she found in the book. It’s all for laughs, it never works. Only Shay notices something is missing from the ritual, and once it’s made complete, extinguished candles flare back into life.

And Shay sees the figure from her dream.

What follows is sort of two movies happening at the same time. On the one hand, you have the quietly but persistently sinister atmosphere of the purity ball, and on the other you have Shay hallucinating this menacing figure, like they really did summon some kind of spirit during the ritual, and ultimately, these two films are at odds. See, purity balls are already really, really creepy, in the way that fathers positioning themselves as the gatekeeper of their daughter’s sexuality (and ultimately, their agency) through rituals that approximate marriage can be. And, like, that’s not an invention of the film. Those things really exist. But the filmmakers don’t trust this to carry the horror of the film, and so instead try to make it an evil-spirit story as well. People like Pastor Seth and people who follow him are, in their way, monstrous. You don’t need another monster - especially one that isn’t that scary.

And that’s the other problem with this film - neither of the two movies it’s trying to be are well-served by the filmmakers. This is a deeply obvious film - everything is spelled out for us in the most simplistic terms possible. The characters are all painted with the broadest possible brush - the fathers and the pastor are all creepy, controlling hypocrites with double standards big enough to park an aircraft carrier in, the daughters (at least, the four on which the film focuses) are less people than specific types - Shay is shy and awkward, Jo is the rebellious bad girl, Lacey is the goody-goody who buys into the whole thing, and Kellyann is a believer breaking under the strain of unrealistic demands. Films like Antichrist and The VVitch have dealt far more vividly and effectively in the idea of pagan, primal female energy as a response to patriarchal control, and it’s clear (exposited by Jo early on) that Lilith is intended to be an icon of empowerment here, which makes it weird that for most of the film her role is that of jump-scare engine, like the girls conjured Bloody Mary during a sleepover. Nobody really talks to each other, they just say things for the benefit of the viewer, and there’s no nuance at all. Everything and everyone is largely what they appear to be (at least, until the very end, where there are some last-minute surprises and betrayals that actually more or less work well).

On top of that, everything’s a little too convenient - Pastor Seth  goes on and on about Lilith so that we know who the mysterious figure is going to be, and Jo just happened to find a book about her in their cabin one year (which makes no fucking sense - is someone as obsessed with control over women as Seth really going to let a book like that hang around?), and she’s been trying this ritual over and over, but Shay just happens to know how to fill in the missing pieces of the ritual for...reasons? Nobody once in all these years has ratted on Jo for her bad behavior? It’s hard to make a film about authoritarian control when that oppressiveness comes and goes as needed for plot reasons.

And on top of that, this isn’t a film with a lot of teeth to it. The ritual is pretty half-assed (but A Dark Song has probably ruined me for portrayals of ritual in any other film). Shay starts hallucinating all kinds of things - she sees Lilith everywhere and starts seeing all of the fathers and the pastor as vaguely demonic figures (which again, no shit, movie), then there’s some vaguely sinister intimations about what happens to recalcitrant daughters and Pastor Seth’s one-on-one “prayer sessions,” but it just kind of goes on like this until everything comes to a head. There’s not a lot of tension or surprise (apart from sudden Lilith appearances scored to loud music stings, which are just the cinematic equivalent of going BOO!) or real visceral emotional stakes at all. The idea of a bunch of dads alone with their underage daughters in the woods, utterly convinced of the righteousness of whatever they do? That could be genuinely horrifying, but this film doesn’t trust that or have the courage to really lean into the oppressive fear that would encourage, to really go there. Instead it makes the dads two-dimensional villains, and the daughters two-dimensional heroes whose summoned spirit helps them get revenge. The production values, casting, acting, and mood top out at “CW teen drama,” so the net result pretty much ends up as a slightly gorier episode of Riverdale, and a lot tamer than that show in some ways.

There are isolated moments that are really effective here and there - the sinister gathering of fathers and pastor behind closed doors, Lacey’s complete breakdown over having kissed a boy, flashes of real rage and vivid imagery at the climax, but it’s not enough. The way men conspire to exert control over women and justify that control as their right is a very real horror that affects millions, and so to turn it into the pretext for a tame, crummy avenging-spirit story is worse than disappointing - it’s frustrating. They had something set to explode, and they fumbled it.

IMDB entry
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