In The Earth: The Forest Primeval

Something I’d like to see more of are, for lack of a better term, psychedelic horror films. Sure, the word conjures up very specific ideas, mostly to do with the Sixties and hippie culture, and though there’s nothing wrong with that, I think there have been some fairly good movies of late that expand beyond that specific time and space. Consider Beyond The Black Rainbow, Mandy, and even Annihilation, Possessor, and Ahi Va El Diablo to a certain extent. Lords Of Salem flirted with it and could have leaned into it harder, but it was kind of a confused mess as it was. Hell, as much as I dislike remakes, I wouldn’t mind seeing someone good take a run at a new version of Altered States. Films that push beyond delusion and instead bend and warp reality into something completely other scratch a very specific itch for me.

In The Earth is, for the most part, a worthwhile addition to that little corner of film. It’s trippy and brutal in equal measure, telling a story of the roles of art and science in communing with nature. Which may not sound especially frightening, but it works. It does lose the plot toward the end, but until that point it’s extremely atmospheric and unsettling.

The film opens cryptically, on shots of a forest as seen through a hole in a standing stone, like an eye, or a void. A man smashes some rock with an axe, and plants a shard of it in the ground. We cut to Martin Lowery, who has just arrived at a research site in a remote wooded area in England. The area is unusually fertile - things grow really, really well there, and he’s come to assist the lead researcher - Dr. Olivia Wendle - with her investigation into the local flora. There may be something of use to be learned, things that might help improve the hardiness of crops. Martin walks up to the lodge where the research team is based, and stops at a checkpoint. People in hazmat suits come out and spray him down. He bears it patiently, like it’s routine. Inside, there’s paperwork, a piss test, a blood draw, confirmation that he’s been in quarantine for four months. Everyone’s wearing masks.

As it turns out, this is all just part of daily life - there’s a global pandemic going on in this world too. It doesn’t figure heavily into the story, but a lot of the establishing details hit very differently than in your usual films that take place during some kind of plague - it’s all very routine and commonplace, but seeing it in a movie as a fact of life instead of the central conceit is itself sort of unsettling. Once all of Martin’s documentation is in order, he’s introduced to Alma, a park ranger assigned to guide him out to the lead researcher’s camp, a two-day walk from the lodge. No roads, no quad trails, they’ll be doing this on foot, taking supplies out to Dr. Wendle. 

Before they leave, Martin notices a painting on a wall in the lodge. The lodge’s owner explains that it’s a depiction of Parnag Fegg, a local legend. It’s a woodland spirit, part folk tale, part boogeyman used to scare children into obedience. It looks a lot like the stone from the beginning.

Apparently, nobody’s heard from Dr. Wendle in months.

Martin and Alma head into the deep woods and it becomes very clear very quickly that Martin isn’t much of an outdoorsman, and that he lied when he told the doctor back at the lodge that he’d been keeping up his exercise in quarantine. Martin’s an interesting character - he is not in any way, shape, or form a heroic man. There’s something meek and hesitant about him, almost bordering on petulant. He seems like someone profoundly out of his depth. Alma, by contrast, is in her element. She’s tough and practical and focused. She’s trying to do her job, because these are not tamed lands. This is the wild, and people get lost here all the time. An entire research team went missing not that long ago, as a matter of fact. She has to keep Martin safe and moving. 

Beyond this, it’s tough to talk about the story, because so much of what makes this movie good is the way it twists, and does so with little to no warning. But you’ve got the outlines - it’s an unusually fertile forest reputedly home to some kind of pagan spirit, and there have been a lot of mysterious disappearances lately. What I think makes the film work is the way it weaves together what you’re expecting from a story with this framework with things you probably weren’t expecting. It’s very terse in its composition - there are lots of quick shots and sudden cuts, some almost feel premature, moving away slightly before the action is completed (this extends to a lot of strobing imagery in the second half, so this one’s off the table for anyone prone to seizures). Likewise, the characters don’t talk a lot, and when they do there’s a brusqueness to it. The action and dialogue feel naturalistic, but the clipped style to the pace and editing makes it all feel slightly fragmented. This extends to the dynamic of the action as well - things turn ugly quickly, out of nowhere. There isn’t a ton of violence but what’s there is sudden and awful, depicted without fanfare and sharply observed. It happens in real time and in striking still images, drawn out for maximum discomfort and lightning-fast alike. All of this combines to create an atmosphere of persistent discomfort. 

This, then is in contrast with things like the cinematography and sound design. There are lots of shots of nature in slow motion and almost microscopic close up, making everything look surreal and alien in a fashion similar to Color Out Of Space. It’s all soundtracked with woozy, monolithic synthesizers that evokes everything from classic science fiction scores to traditional psychedelica to tectonic, rumbling tone generation. You get the sense that these choppy, hesitant human lives are stories playing out against a vast, slow natural world that tolerates their presence for its own reasons. It’s a film that revolves around the reality that nature is a living organism and pits pagan folk tales against science. It asks the question: How do we commune with nature, and should we even try? As the characters explore these questions, the world around them turns stranger and stranger, before collapsing entirely into kaleidoscopic visions of a world they can barely comprehend.

It’s largely a strong effort, but it does have some problems. The second half, the last act especially, feels like it’s trying to cram in a bunch of ideas about nature and consciousness and our role in the ecosystem that it doesn’t really develop. It actually does a pretty good job of everything making sense in context for most of its runtime, which is no mean feat, given how weird and kind of cerebral its premise is. But it loses its way in the climax, I think, sacrificing development of all of those ideas for a firehose of imagery pointed directly at our eyeballs in the end. 

It’s one of the pitfalls psychedelic horror can fall into - it tends to sacrifice story for imagery, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing necessarily, but if you’re going to do that, you really need to commit and just pour it on throughout and let the audience take the ride. This film presents a pretty compelling story, but instead of following the story to increasingly stranger places, it sort of sets the story up and then ends on a lot of imagery, and so you feel kind of cheated. Which is too bad, because up to that point you have something uncomfortable and sinister and very smartly executed.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Hunter Hunter: Predators

Pretty much any monster movie (and I’ll include serial killer films in there because ultimately that’s what most of them are) leans into the idea that the monster is a predator and its victims are its prey. So, in other words, it’s just replicating relationships that exist in nature, but since we, as a species, are supposed to have transcended those base transactions, and so that’s where the horror comes in. That despite all of our evolution and technology, under the right circumstances, we can be reduced to a target, to food. That we aren’t so special after all.

Hunter Hunter, then, is an absolutely harrowing film about the relationship between predator and prey, and it goes some unexpected places.

Joseph and his family - his wife Anne, and daughter Renee - live off the land, in a remote parcel, far even beyond rural, out where tourists don’t usually go and even the seasonal crowd hasn’t built homes (though that’s certainly changing). Joseph and Renee are out setting trap lines, collecting pelts and meat. The pelts they can sell in town, the meat’s what they’ll eat to survive. This is how Joseph lives, how his father lived, how his father’s father lived, and so on and so on as long as this has been their land. He’s focused on the work and showing Renee what needs to be done when he notices one of his traps has had its catch gnawed away, all that’s left in the trap is a leg. It looks like the work of a wolf. This is going to have to be taken care of quickly - winter’s coming, and that’s when they move to their other cabin further south, and they’re going to need supplies to take with them. Pelts aren’t bringing in the money they used to, and food is starting to run low. The last thing they need is another predator taking the prey they need to survive..

Especially one that isn’t afraid to venture into another predator’s territory.

So Joseph resolves to set up traps and stake out the area, waiting for the wolf to reveal itself. He and his family represent a dying breed - they live off the grid, off the land, hunt and trap to keep themselves fed. He’s aware he’s part of a world that’s vanishing as modernity encroaches, and he’s very much the taciturn alpha male, with the protectiveness that comes along with it, that desire to stand between his loved ones and the dangers of the wild. He doesn’t want Anna and Renee to know how bad this situation is, how much danger they’re in, but Anna and Renee are no pushovers, they’re accustomed to this life as well, and capable of taking care of themselves. That said, you get the sense that there’s some restless, some dissatisfaction there. Anna wonders if Renee wouldn’t be better off going to school like any other kid her age, and it’s getting harder and harder to make a living off the land, and maybe a house in town wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Joseph doesn’t want to hear it. He’s got his pride, but that idea that the modern world is pushing in, imposing itself on nature, is an idea that runs throughout the film. 

It’s a very tense film - it’s mostly about Joseph’s attempts to survey the forest, to try and find signs of the wolf, and Anne and Renee’s attempts to keep the household going while he’s away and radio silent. In either case, you’ve got people in a forest that is very still, very quiet, and where that quiet is likely hiding something that sees them as food. The slightest sound could portend disaster, so things (especially in the first half) operate on a constant low boil, the awful waiting before the even more awful action. The music is minimal, mostly ambient hums and understated strings (with one especially striking exception at the very end), and the cinematography alternates sprawling shots of the woods and ominous, cloudy skies with more claustrophobic moments, all in a mostly drab, desaturated palette. This isn’t the nature people go to on vacation, this is the nature people live and work in, unsentimental at best, cruel at worst. 

At first it doesn’t seem like a horror film - some horror films announce themselves from the opening credits, others take varying amounts of time to reveal themselves, and this one takes its own sweet time to get there, but make no mistake, this is a monster movie, but you don’t really see the monster all that much, and that’s to the good - a lot of this film is in little things, in inference, things briefly glimpsed, so the few really graphic moments hit that much harder as a result. The characters are all believable as regular people - Joseph might be a little bit of a caricature, but not much, and there are a number of beats that underscore the fundamental humanity of the people on screen, for better or worse. There’s some denial here - Anna and Joseph want to protect Renee, and so maybe they aren’t as honest with her as they should be, but in the end it isn’t really their undoing. These are competent, capable people who think they understand the world they live in and the rules of that world. 

When it turns out they don’t, it upends everything in a climax that I can only describe as shocking, as trite as that word is, for as sudden and intense as it is. The end is jarring, even, and probably really polarizing. I go back and forth on it - the majority of the film has been constant simmering tension, so when the turn comes, it’s startling without feeling totally inconsistent to the rest of the movie. I think it’s shocking, but also that it plays fair - and it sets off something that builds the film to a primal howl before ending on a smash to black and total silence, leaving me with an empty feeling in my stomach for what I just witnessed. Remember: It’s about predators, and prey, and whether or not that relationship can adapt to the modern world moving in around all of them.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

The Void: Older Than Time

Appeals to nostalgia are tricky things. At their worst, they’re smug, shallow surveys of clichés, attempts to reproduce a style or time period without capturing any of their soul. But at their best, they not only capture a specific aesthetic, but the mood and sensibility that accompany it. A truly affectionate look back gets the feeling right, along with the look. It feels less like somebody’s take on a bygone style of filmmaking and more like some recently unearthed relic from that period, a filmic artifact out of time.

The Void, fortunately, falls into the latter camp. It’s a very solid homage to 80s-era cosmic horror that contains a few missteps, but nothing serious. It’s suitably eerie, not just in its story and imagery, but also in a production design that makes it feel like an artifact of another time, rather than a modern attempt to ape a style. Much like the last movie I wrote about, Piercing, it feels like it could be a loving hi-def restoration of a cult classic.

We open on chaos, on what appears to be a murder in progress. Two men gun down a woman and set her body on fire. Another man escapes, wounded but not dead. The men resolve to pursue him. They don’t think he’s going to get far. Meanwhile, police officer Daniel Carter is finishing up his shift, getting ready to head back in for the night, when he spots that very same badly wounded man crawling along the road. Naturally he bundles him into his patrol vehicle and hightails it to the nearest hospital. It’s odd - the nearest one shouldn’t even be receiving patients, it’s a small community hospital that’s recently undergone a bad fire. But they’re listed as active and receiving and the next nearest hospital is over an hour away. This guy doesn’t look like he could make it another hour. So it’s an easy decision.

When he gets there, the hospital is all but deserted - it’s already small, but it’s staffed by a skeleton crew, one doctor, a couple of nurses and a nurse trainee. There’s a young woman - hugely pregnant - and her father, and that’s it. They hustle the badly wounded man into a room and get him stabilized. It’s apparent there’s some history between Daniel and one of the nurses. The doctor knows them both very well. It’s just another busy third shift at a hospital in a community small enough that everyone knows each other. Until the two men from the beginning show up at the hospital.

Until the figures in robes start to show up outside. Until the other nurse begins to…change.

Everyone is trapped inside the hospital by the mysterious figures outside (who are carrying what appear to be ceremonial but wholly functional knives) and threatened from within by something not really human, and so the basic backbone of the film is one in which the threats within and without become more insistent, there are revelations, some surprising, some not, and a sense that something cosmically horrible is coming to fruition. It’s difficult to tell if it’s a deliberate stylistic choice or a function of budget (or both), but the film really nails the grittiness of the kind of horror getting made in the 1980s away from slasher films, the darker, weirder, less-obvious stuff like From Beyond and Prince Of Darkness, the latter of which it’s especially beholden to in its siege-film setup and sense of persistent uneasiness and dread. It relies on lots of single-location shooting and practical effects (which are far more effective than I thought they were going to be), the lighting and film stock are period-appropriate (which again is as much about limited resources and technology as anything else) and the soundtrack is largely the kind of pulsing synthesizer that characterizes John Carpenter’s earlier films. All of this really does evoke the memories of a prior age to its benefit. There’s a nostalgia factor, sure, but it also feels like some kind of relic, a forgotten classic of the genre given new life, the kind of film half-remembered from 3am viewings on cable, where you can’t be sure if you actually saw the film or just dreamed it, isolated images from it stuck in memory. It’s a story about things from beyond space in time told in a style itself out of time.

But - and this is important - it isn’t slavish or winkingly self-referential in its homage. It plays things completely straight, like a film made in the 80s rather that a film about the 80s and so, period trappings regardless, it largely works as an eerie siege film that descends further and further into cosmic horror as it goes on. Not everyone is who they seem, time and space start to fray around the edges, and things with impossible biologies begin to crawl into our world. 

As befits a film made on a very small budget, it does a lot of work with little things - stark imagery, sudden outbursts of violence, a reliance on suggestion over explicit depiction - that also serve to make it effective. It’s sort of a cliché that our imaginations come up with far more disturbing things than anything you can show us, but it’s a cliché because it’s true, and it does a lot of heavy lifting here. The filmmakers seem to know how much we can see before the artifice of practical effects becomes apparent, so all we get are glimpses of…things…and our imagination does the rest. There are a couple of instances where something’s on camera maybe a little too long, but not long enough or often enough to really undo the conceit entirely, and there are periodic hallucinatory interstitials that, although maybe a little more sophisticated than you’d expect from this sort of film, help to really cement the vibe when it starts to flag. 

It’s got a lot of tricks up its sleeve, from sudden startling moments that break the quiet (not the same thing as a jump scare, of which there are almost none here) to mounting dread to plot twists and reversals, all of which serve to keep you on your toes, and it doesn’t really descend too much into cliché (at least not until the antagonist really starts monologuing, but more on that in a bit). By and large, the characters are believable - nobody’s wholly heroic or villainous or hyper-competent either way, just a bunch of people who are fighting back panic at being totally out of their depth, thrown into a situation nobody could possibly ever be prepared for. Hospital surrounded by robed cultists? Tentacled things sprouting out of bodies? Of course they’re freaking out, and they don’t get along all that well, for that matter. It never reaches the point that their failure to work together is their undoing, but their prickliness and discomfort feel real.

It does have some problems, though even these feel period- appropriate. The dialogue is pretty stagey throughout and painfully expository in places, mostly around filling us in on character background, very “you know he hasn’t been the same since his father died” type of stuff, and the quality of the acting varies somewhat across the ensemble, so some people feel more like characters in a movie, and others feel more like people. It can be a little distracting in the moment, but again, nothing that ruins the film. And, like a lot of horror films, it sort of loses its way in the final act, cutting between three groups of characters, one of whom may be starting to lose their connection to conventional space and time, so what had been a solidly constructed story starts to get really messy - the individual segments are good, but they’re sort of jumbled up in a way that makes the whole thing feel less uneasy than it could. And then in the denouement, the antagonist - who has had sort of a running monologue through the back half of the film, made sinister and effective by being presented in brief glimpses - sort of gets a bully pulpit toward the end and what was made creepy and unsettling by inference and suggestions turns into exactly the sort of villainous monologue you’d expect. Things also very much take a turn for the 80s toward the end in the set design and makeup, and it felt a little alienating and less visceral (ironic for some of what happens), like I was distanced from the film, thinking about the quality of the prosthetics and how aesthetically faithful it all was instead of being caught up in the film itself. But again, it’s a relatively small complaint and the film ends on a note that earns back a lot of goodwill. 

It's a tough balancing act to pull off, to make something feel like an artifact of another time AND a satisfying horror film - after all, the sort of stuff we find terrifying as kids often doesn’t age all that well. But this really left me saying “man, if I’d seen this as a teenager I’d probably be shitting my pants.” It’s a film about a nightmare from beyond time that is itself a nightmare from beyond time.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon