Antrum: The Necronomicon In Paperback

When I was a teenager, I was really into cosmic horror (well, I still I am, but I was then too), and I remember browsing in a bookstore near my house one afternoon and coming across a copy of the Necronomicon. For those unfamiliar, the Necronomicon is a fictional book that features in some of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. It’s a cursed book filled with ancient, forbidden knowledge, and it drives anyone who looks upon it insane.

And since I was looking at a copy of it in mass-market paperback, sitting on the shelf at a B. Dalton’s, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the real thing. Antrum is kind of like that paperback copy of the Necronomicon.

I love stories about cursed media - films, books, records, plays, etc. that bring madness nr ruin on anyone who experiences them. Works of art that serve as literal gateways to hell, that offer up visions that destroy the sanity of anyone who sees them. Usually, very few copies exist, or they’ve passed into the realm of myth, and the protagonist is someone tasked with going down whatever rabbit hole will lead to the art in question. Sometimes these stories are done well and sometimes they’re done badly, but I will give them a shot pretty much every time. 

But there’s another thing these stories tend to have in common - the audience rarely if ever gets any firsthand experience with the art in question. We almost always see its effects secondhand, with the horrifying experience itself left up to our imagination. And I think Antrum (subtitled The Deadliest Film Ever Made), if nothing else, gives me a good idea why that’s the case. It’s an ambitious failure of a film that gives itself a very difficult task to accomplish and doesn’t pull it off, mostly because it doesn’t have confidence in its audience or its ability to tell the story

We begin with a sort-of documentary introduction to the titular film, which was supposedly made in the 1970s and exhibited in public exactly twice before vanishing from the face of the earth. The problems start early, with about 10 minutes of background on the film’s effects - some of them seem to be supernatural (a theater in Budapest showing the film burned down in a mysterious fire), but others are people befalling accidents which could easily be unfortunate coincidence, and yet others appear to be the direct result of things that have nothing to do with the film. Right off the bat, this muddies the brief because it seems to be as much happenstance as evil. If you’re going to tell a story about a cursed film, make that shit evil. Make it the kind of thing that drives people to gouge their eyes, to change their name and move far away. Make everyone involved in its production either dead or very difficult to locate. Especially if you’re going to subtitle your film “The Deadliest Film Ever Made,” you can’t sell it with things like people slipping in the bathtub, because nobody’s going to believe that a film that has caused death and madness is going to be available on streaming services. You aren’t going to find the Necronomicon in paperback. Instead of trying to sell the idea that this is a real film, let it be fictional and then sell the idea that it’s something truly unholy. 

So we’re already off to a shaky start. It’s handled convincingly enough from a mockumentary standpoint, it sounds and plays like an actual talking-head documentary, but it doesn’t make a strong enough case for the actual power of the film before introducing the film itself. We get just enough to know that there is a film called Antrum, it only showed at a couple of film festivals, and pretty much everyone who saw it met with one kind of bad end or another, and it’s not enough to establish the film’s myth. It could really use some more setup in terms of who made it, where did it come from, what happened to everyone who starred in it, and so on. Or, hell, even just establish that it was made by someone nobody had ever heard of, and that nobody could track down the cast and crew. That would help establish the mystique that the story really needs. Instead, we get some perfunctory setup before we’re introduced to the film itself with a 30-second countdown under a disclaimer, which feels too hokey, like an old William Castle gimmick. 

So the first problem is really one of plausibility - we’re being sold a bill of goods that doesn’t for a second feel likely, and there’s not enough mystique to get the audience invested. The second problem is that we’re being shown the film in question, and there’s no way it’s going to live up to whatever mystique it does have. Usually the way these stories work is that the protagonist is someone tasked with tracking down a copy of the work in question for someone wealthy and powerful and usually depraved. The story then is usually more about the journey than the destination, the dark, horrible things the protagonist discovers along the way, rather than the work itself. And I think there’s a reason for that - it’s really, really hard to directly depict a piece of art that opens doors to hell and destroys minds and do justice to the idea. It’s much easier to convince an audience that the artifact in question really is as bad as it seems through showing the effect it has on others than it is through showing us the artifact itself. Put simply, it’s a lot easier to show people watching a movie and losing their minds than it is to show us the movie itself and make it seem convincingly like something that would make people lose their minds. Imagination tends to beat out direct depiction - the worst thing you can come up with in your own is generally going to be freakier than what someone else comes up with, and so whatever follows is bound to be underwhelming.

And sure enough, it’s pretty underwhelming. It’s the story of siblings Oralee and Nathan, who have apparently just had to euthanize their dog, Maxine. Afterwards, Nathan is plagued by nightmares and the feeling that Maxine is somewhere in hell because she was a bad dog. So older sister Oralee takes Nathan into the woods, supposedly where Satan fell from heaven, to perform a ritual and dig a hole to hell so they can rescue Maxine’s soul and redeem her. And so they begin to dig, and as they do, strange things begin to happen around them. By itself, it’s not a bad idea - the film as presented does feel like a cheaply produced piece of outsider art, like a somewhat cleaner, slightly more professional Manos: Hands Of Fate. It’s just amateurish enough to make everything about it seem slightly weird and uneasy. And it’s plausible enough, technically speaking - it looks like something that was made on the cheap in the 1970s, albeit in surprisingly good condition, though I’d rather have its vintage underplayed than overplayed. But there are a couple of problems with the film itself, apart from the gap between imagination and reality I already outlined. 

First, if it’s going to be as plodding and unfocused as it is from a narrative standpoint, then the strangeness really needs to pop - either the whole thing needs to feel off-kilter or it needs to feel really mundane right up to the moments that it doesn’t. As it is, it takes a little too long to get really weird, and there are too many stretches where nothing really happens even after it does get weird. Second, there are sort of two layers of narrative strangeness here, and they sort of detract from each other. The things actually happening in the film, when they do occur, are more often than not sufficiently creepy by themselves. But then on top of that, you have obviously spliced and inserted material - occult symbols, words on the screen, what seem to be scenes from a different, equally low-budget movie - and it’s all at odds with the source film, both by being way too obvious, and by being obviously added digitally - it’s too clean and sharp compared to the source material. Puzzlingly, the documentary layer of the film explains - well, first it explains that it’s there to begin with, ruining any element of surprise that it could have had on its side, and then it explains that it seemed to have been added later, which if anything dilutes the mystique of the original film. And then once the film itself is over, we get even more explanation over the end credits, basically “see, there were hidden symbols in this film, and here’s what they mean,” which is kind of insulting to the audience’s intelligence, at the end of the day. It’s not enough to let us sort of experience the film as text, the filmmakers had to signpost and footnote everything in case we missed the point, just yelling “GET IT?” over and over again.

This was always going to be an uphill battle, but there was potential here. The film within the film starts off with a dreamy strangeness to it and has a few moments that are genuinely creepy, and I think if the filmmakers had trusted in that footage without the distracting spliced-in stuff, and had tweaked the actual story some, it could have been something pretty unsettling. Not the sort of thing to drive anyone mad, not by a long shot, but at least disconcerting. Let inference do more of the work up-front, make the film’s history and provenance more elliptical, let the audience read into it more, then show us what appears to be a circa-70s low-budget story that just feels…off, and then take it stranger and stranger places. Don’t obviously splice in ham-handed subliminal stuff, and definitely don’t explain the subliminal stuff after the fact. That could have been something, but this tries too hard on every front to convince us that the paperback book really is the Necronomicon, when nobody was ever going to believe that.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon 

His House: No Matter Where You Go, There You Are

So there’s horror, and then there’s horror. There’s all of the stock techniques and clichés that, when employed skillfully, still make for something scary, and those films are plenty popular and can even be really good, I’m not looking down my nose at them. But then there’s the horror that gets real, that grabs at the things that terrify us, that scar us in ways that move beyond basic escapism. Because that’s what a lot of horror is, a safe way to vent anxiety and fear, a place we can go where we can feel those feelings without having to experience the bite of whatever makes us feel those things in our waking life. We can walk away from the horror film and put those feelings away. 

But then there’s the stuff that’s genuinely unsettling, and no, I don’t mean “extreme” horror or whatever. That kind of shit is usually boring and gross because there’s nothing to it, just escalating gore and pointless misanthropy. I’m talking about films that hook into the things that scare us outside of the movies. The things we can’t walk away from when the credits roll because they’re the sort of things waiting for us when the movie ends. In literature, The Shining is an excellent example because the book really is as much about Jack Torrance’s mounting fear at being unable to support his family at failing his wife and child and his inability to control his own rage as it is the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel. In film, The Babadook is an excellent example because even though there’s a ghost, that’s not Amelia’s problem. The problem is the grief and guilt she lives with and a son that can’t be left unsupervised, who is a danger to himself and others, and who she is beginning to realize might never be independent enough to let her live her own life. Those are the fears adulthood and circumstance bring to our door, and they’re waiting for us when our brief sojourns from them end.

All of this is really just to say that His House is definitely one of the latter films, a smart, vivid, understated story about the ghosts we bring with us, wherever we go.

We open in war-torn Sudan. A crowd of people are hurrying to a pickup truck, piling into the back to get out of the country, to escape their home. Civil war has already taken everything they have, and all they have left is to get out with their lives. Among them are Bol and Rial Majur, and their daughter Nyagak. The truck leads to a boat, and a dangerous nighttime escape over the water, no running lights, people as crammed on the deck as they were in the truck. There is a loud thud, and people fall overboard, including Nyagak. Bol and Rial lose their daughter at sea.

And now they’re in the bleak institutional nowhere of refugee detention in England. We come back to them on the day their case for asylum is to be heard. And miraculously, they are granted the status of “asylum-seeker,” which is better than “refugee” but not citizenship. So, from hell to limbo. They are assigned a caseworker, a stipend, a whole host of rules where any violations mean getting sent back to detention and likely having their appeal dismissed, which is a guaranteed return to the country they fled, but most importantly, a house. They will have a house.

Of course, it’s not much. It’s public housing, drab and sad, trash-strewn yards, barking dogs, scornful neighbors and roaming gangs of delinquents. The wallpaper is peeling, the lights don’t work, the doors don’t sit right on their hinges. But it’s all theirs. Which is unusual, because typically people in their situation are packed three and four families to one of these places. But it’s all theirs. And that’s all that matters to Bol. They have a home in their new country. A new place to call home, far away from strife and death, far away from what they left behind. He’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

At least, not until night comes, with strange scratching and scurrying sounds behind the walls. A face peering out at them from the dark.

A face that looks like Nyagak.

There are, simplistically, three different narrative layers at work here - first, there’s Bol and Rial’s grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt. They have been through a lot. There’s whatever horrors they saw back home, the ones that drove them to flee, there’s the death of their daughter, and that they survived the journey when so many others did not, when so many others didn’t even make it out in the first place. They live with that constantly. Then there’s the constant low-level tension and menace that attends being a refugee in a country that does not want or welcome you and makes no bones about letting you know that. Finally, there’s whatever is happening inside the house. Bol and Rial are very sympathetic from the get-go, just two people displaced by war and trying to make the best of where they’ve landed, and we feel the weight on their shoulders, the way relief mingles with guilt for feeling relieved, the sense of displacement, being adrift in a strange and hostile land, and now even home, the one place that should feel safe, a place to which they are effectively confined for the most part, isn’t safe either. As things get worse for them (which, of course they do), we feel for them.

And this is true even at their worst, because they aren’t saints. They’re messy, imperfect people trying to make the best of a very bad situation, and they don’t always handle it with grace. There’s a tension between Bol’s almost desperate desire to assimilate to the culture of their new home and Rial’s resistance to it, which seems to be grounded in a weary awareness that they aren’t welcome here and a desire to hold onto the things she loves and values about the home she had to leave. They’ve been through a lot together, more than anyone should have to bear in a lifetime, but how they deal with that differs dramatically. Bol seems to be driven primarily by denial, by wanting to put the whole nightmare behind him and throw himself into the ways of his new home, to run from what he’s been through. 

Denial is generally not the healthiest way to cope with things, and so Bol’s descent over the course of the film is most pronounced, but Rial’s seeing ghosts too. She’s just more willing to face them head-on because they’re a part of where they come from, they are part of their own cultural landscape, and so she faces them with resolve. It’s the world outside she struggles with the most. To this film’s credit, it doesn’t paint its characters in broad strokes - just as the Majurs aren’t saintly, the people surrounding them in their bleak little corner of England aren’t villains - just garden-variety bigots at worst, yelling “go back to Africa” or following them around in the department store, vigilant for shoplifting, or at best largely sympathetic but coming from a place that can’t comprehend the enormity of what’s brought them here. Every trip out of their depressing little house is weighed down with menace, with what could happen. And inside isn’t any better - if it’s not the ghosts that come at night, it’s the constant weight of bureaucracy - periodic meetings, no outside employment to supplement a meager income, no social gatherings, no candles, no games, just sit tight while we review your case and maybe…just maybe, if you don’t slip up once…you’ll be upgraded from asylum-seekers to potential citizens. Maybe. If you’re lucky and never make a mistake.

So there’s the horror of where they’ve been, the horror of where they are, and the horror of what seems to have come with them, all pressing down at once. As a result, the film has very little downtime, there’s a constant thread of unease running through it that is only sharpened as the ghosts they face make their presence more and more known over the course of the film. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another from minute to minute, and it works because the film rarely if ever overplays things. Strange noises, faces peering from holes in the walls, the sudden nightmarish juxtaposition of images from their past with their life in the present, handled often through startling, unexpected reveals that are never really telegraphed. Even the one moment I was expecting the obvious jump scare never really came. There’s maybe some slightly dodgy practical creature effects toward the end, but it’s a strong enough sequence that it’s easy enough to overlook, and it comes in the wake of a revelation that I’d argue is the most horrifying thing here, though it’s the sort of thing most folks would say wasn’t “really” horror. I envy them their lives that they can think this way, because it suggests they’ve never dealt with the sort of thing Bol and Rial have, or any number of other real-world horrors. There are things that stay with you for your entire life, that follow you, that you can’t walk away from, and what you do with them makes the difference between living your life, finding a home, or forever being chased by them, wherever you go.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix