Smile: A Really Good Movie Trapped Inside A Very Average One

I’ve felt a lot of different things over the course of watching movies and writing about them. Fear, anxiety, dread, sadness, revulsion, even boredom, anger and disgust at the especially terrible movies, disappointment at the ones with promise that don’t quite get there. But I’ll be damned if I can remember the last time I walked away from a film feeling a mixture of frustration and confusion on top of everything else. Upon finishing a film I can usually gather my thoughts pretty easily and land on some kind of conclusion. What I liked, what I didn’t, what I thought worked, what didn’t, stuff like that.

But I cannot remember a time when a movie has left me as mixed-up and uncertain about what I just saw as Smile has. I guess if I were to be reductive I’d call it a mixed bag. For every piece of it that works, there’s something that doesn’t, and it fails with the same intensity with which it succeeds. So it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it but I can’t really dismiss it either, and if my dithering is annoying two paragraphs in, well, it ain’t gonna stop here.

The film opens cold on a face - a woman’s face, still, unblinking and insensate. The room is dim and very messy, laundry spilling out of hampers and a scattering of pills spilled out of bottles. A lot of bottles. The door opens, and there’s a little girl. And she sees this woman slumped over in bed, surrounded by so many empty pill bottles. And this is how this little girl discovers that her mother is dead.

The little girl is Rose Cotter, and she grows up to become a psychiatrist. She works at a hospital in emergency medicine. She wants to help people whose demons threaten to get the better of them, for whom life is a day-to-day proposition. She’s seen what happens when the demons win. And so, in the course of an otherwise routine day, she’s asked to do intake on a young woman named Laura. She’s a grad student, no previous history of mental illness, but she’s seeing things. Rose starts with the standard questions and Laura insists that she isn’t crazy. But Laura’s seeing something everywhere she goes. It looks like people she knows, but it’s not them. It wears their faces like a mask, and nobody else can see them. And they are smiling at Laura. Smiling so widely. Rose tries to reassure Laura that our mind can make us believe something that isn’t real absolutely is, and Laura becomes extremely upset because Rose isn’t listening, Rose doesn’t believe her. Rose can’t see the thing that is standing right behind her. But Laura can, and she starts screaming and backing away. Rose looks away long enough to call for assistance.

And when she looks back, Laura is standing there, very still. Smiling.

I think the best way I can describe this film is as one that succeeds and fails with equal intensity. It’s got a good foundation. The use of a smile as an indicator that Bad Things are about to happen is a great singular image. A smile is nice until it’s a little too wide, and held a little too long, at which point it’s unnerving. So that’s a great start. It’s narratively minimal, in that all you have to do is have someone smiling somewhere in the scene to convey dread. It’s nightmarish stuff in the best way, in that it’s a little cryptic, a little inexplicable, and can be absolutely anywhere in the scene. So this is the kind of film that doesn’t need to have too many moving parts. And narratively, it doesn’t - Rose witnesses something bloody and terrible, and finds herself plagued by nightmares, episodes of sleepwalking, and she starts seeing things. Her life starts to fall apart and she becomes increasingly obsessed with trying to figure out what’s happening.

And toward this end, one of the film’s biggest strengths is that it does a very good job of setting a tone early. Shattering glass is a recurring motif, and it’s a good analogy for the overall feeling of the movie as well. It’s something hard and brittle that fragments and splinters in the blink of an eye, leaving lots of sharp edges. It’s tense and nervy, using lots of close-ups and shots centered on a figure, drawing your eye to the middle of the frame in a way that feels confrontational. Holding close on people’s faces a little longer than you think can do a lot to elicit unease, and I have to say, the shot composition does a lot of good work in this regard. It does resort to the occasional jump scare, but just as often it gets the same effect from dramatic contrasts in cuts from one shot to another instead. The transitions can be whiplash-inducing, but that’s a feature, not a bug. There are nightmare sequences that come unexpectedly and seamlessly with waking life, and vary enough that you can never be sure of what’s coming. The soundtrack is mostly scratchy static, low-frequency swells, and queasy, wavering tones - it’s not subtle, and it’s not afraid of using stings to punctuate startling moments, but it doesn’t feel overdone, again, it feels confrontational somehow. It’s a film that is very much in your face, almost relentless in its insistence.

The performances are somewhat uneven, but Rose is a strong central character. She’s someone who’s pretty clearly driving herself too hard to try and outrun whatever haunts her, and that’s just where the movie starts. Once things go bad, she’s got no buffer for it, so she gets twitchier and more erratic as the film goes on. She handles her situation badly, which is realistic given what she’s witnessed. She’s a mess, which is exactly what you would be in her situation. Her decline is one of the most believable things in the film, one of the few times that the old “everyone thinks she’s crazy but the ghosts are real” cliché actually has some punch to it, because she’s so raw and because the character’s actually pretty developed - the way she immediately retreats and apologizes following any angry outburst is a nice touch given what happened to her as a child. It can be uncomfortable to watch in the best way.

I think a lot of its failures have a lot to do with not living up to its strongest moments, but more on that in a bit, because the messiest and most complicated thing about this movie is, for me, a big part of its central conceit. Its treatment of mental health…well, I’m really not sure how to parse it. There’s a strong reliance on other characters dismissing or trivializing mental illness - phrases like “nut case,” “head job,” and so on are thrown around so much and so glibly that they almost feel like a stylistic choice, and most of the people surrounding Rose range from baffled to callous on the subject. One way to read it is as being tremendously insensitive in general, a film about a psychiatrist and the supernatural presenting as mental illness made by someone with little appreciation for the gravity of the material. And there’s certainly plenty of precedent in horror - classic and contemporary - for exactly that, so that’s entirely possible.

But on the other hand, it’s only the laypeople in the film who talk that way, never the professionals, who are portrayed pretty reasonably. This paints the other characters as less sympathetic and frames them as being in the wrong here. As a result, the divide between what Rose is experiencing and how pretty much everyone else in her life handles it serves to alienate her further as the film goes on. So in that sense it could also be read as an attempt to illustrate how often issues around mental health aren’t taken seriously and how alone people suffering can feel. But it’s really tough to tell which is the case, so I sort of want to say it didn’t work. There’s also this idea of an evil spirit that feeds on trauma, and again that feels like an attempt at metaphor, at how trauma and pain get communicated generationally and passed on, that it is something that haunts you and people who haven’t experienced it will never be able to understand, and though I think that making it a literal monster isn’t a mistake thematically, I don’t think it really serves the movie well as a story because the literal monster is sort of underwhelming for the most part. It’s good to remember that what we don’t see can be even scarier than what we can. As soon as you put the monster up on screen, you threaten to fall short of what the audience has conjured up in their heads.

And that’s just one of a number of cinematic missteps here. As I said above, the use of smiles and smiling figures is potentially a powerful image but it ends up being really underutilized. There are attempts to build it in throughout, but they’re fitful enough that it never really builds up the kind of inescapable dread that it could. Characterization is a kind of all over the place - Rose is very believable, then others in her immediate orbit are a little less fleshed-out, and she has a sister and brother-in-law who, along with a detective, are almost literal cartoons. There’s a dinner with them and her fiancée that feels like it comes out of an entirely different movie, maybe a farce about suburban vanity. The dialogue is this odd mix of conversational and stagey, verging on speeches and monologues. Maybe the artificiality helps the overall tone insofar as the whole thing feels slightly unreal, like Rose is sort of seeing the world through the eyes of a trauma survivor and everything seems a little shallow and fake, but again I can’t tell if it’s a deliberate choice or not. I think if the performances had been consistently grounded or consistently artificial, either would have worked well, but bouncing from one to the other feels confusing.

And on top of that, it’s too long - this was not a story that needed to take almost two hours, and the third act suffers most in terms of feeling padded. It arrives at the end I assumed it would (rather than one I thought they were hinting at that could have been much creepier), and that by itself is okay, because handles well it could have been really powerful. But it took an unnecessary detour on the way there for a Final Girl moment, featuring a big speech that laid everything out too plainly, that told instead of showing, and coming at the same moment the monster becomes visible to us made it really, really on the nose. Nothing that happens in that sequence needed to be spelled out, and the monster was scarier when it was just someone smiling at you. But it keeps hammering away at the point. This extends to the filmmaking itself, which uses a few cinematic tricks a little too often. Like I said, there’s a lot of breaking glass, in this movie and as thematically and tonally apt as it is, it’s also frequent enough that it starts to verge on comical. There are also a lot of drone shots, which is fine, it’s becoming kind of a cliché, but whatever, but they include more than one where a long shot of someone driving or of a city skyline inverts itself. I don’t mind this as an effect, but don’t use it more than once, for pity’s sake. That it echoes films like The Ring and It Follows bothers me less than it did some critics, but along with overreliance on those other elements, it all does threaten to occasionally spill over into feeling assembled from parts. It never quite gets that bad, but it’s sort of on the radar, which isn’t great. And the pacing issues mean that the end itself doesn’t have the impact that it should. It feels anticlimactic, both because an attentive viewer saw where everything was going but then it took too long to get there, so it just lands with a thud.

Like The Night House - another film about loss and trauma embodied as monstrosity - it’s a film that suffers most when it underestimates its audience and feels the need to spell out stuff that doesn’t need to be spelled out. When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it fucks up it doesn’t fuck up by half measures. It’s a really good movie trapped inside of an aggressively average movie, and I can’t say for certain if the glimpses of something much better justify sitting through the really pedestrian stuff, but they’re certainly there..

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Night House: Dark Places

Ghost stories can be hard, haunted house stories can be hard, simply because there are so damn many of them. It’s tough to really do anything new with them because somebody, somewhere, has more likely than not assayed that territory already. It’s one of the oldest forms of horror there is, as soon as we had dwellings and communities we had the potential for stories about the long-passed people who once inhabited them. Hell, maybe even before that, I’m no anthropologist. The point is that it’s hard to do new stuff with ghosts, and so a lot of people don’t even try. Instead they just set up the location, insert some interchangeable characters, arrange some jump scares, and as often as not, make bank.

Which is probably a big part of why I’m still thinking about The Night House a few days after watching it. It’s a thoughtful and effective (albeit uneven) story about grief and the things we keep secret, and it manages to give one of the oldest stories in town some real heft and substance along the way.

It begins with a series of placid exterior and interior shots of a lovely modern lakeside home. There’s a boat bobbing gently in the water next to a dock, wind chimes clink in the breeze, Inside, the house is still, empty. It’s captured in the middle of everyday life, glasses sitting on a nightstand, pictures of a couple, pictures of friends and family. A home office, filled with drafting equipment. No sudden blaring shock disturbs it. Nothing sinister, nothing ominous. It’s just quiet. And then two women walk up to the front door, glimpsed from inside the house. There are murmured sympathies and reassurances, expressions of polite gratitude. One woman walks into the house while the other leaves.

The woman who walks into the house is Beth Parchin, and she’s just come back from a funeral. Her husband Owen has passed away suddenly, and Beth is left to try and pick up the pieces. He was an architect, he designed their home, and by all accounts he loved Beth very much. And Beth loved him. So we’re introduced to her at the moment when all of the well-meaning, sympathetic people have fallen away and it is just her in their house, without him.

And then she hears the footsteps upstairs, sees the muddy footprints that come right up to the front door.

In Owen’s absence, Beth finds herself beset by vivid nightmares that she finds hard to separate from waking life, and she’s started sleepwalking. She’s hearing someone in the house when she’s alone, and the circumstances around his death are leading her to wonder who her husband really was. She starts piecing the Owen she didn’t know together from his books, his diaries, the files on his computer and on his phone. And the longer she looks, the stranger it gets. This is the kind of film that might be called “stylish,” because a lot of it takes place in lovely modern interiors that don’t seem especially foreboding. Even nighttime exteriors in spooky forest settings are spooky forest settings at the edge of a pretty lake in upstate New York. And I appreciate the departure from cliché. It’s always nice to see a haunted house story where the house doesn’t look like the kind of place that’d be haunted, because there’s something so much more unnerving about ghosts in a place that looks like where we might live.

But it’s not just a modern take on a stock ghost story, at its heart there’s a strong commitment to exploring the emotional aftermath of someone’s death, and the idea that maybe we didn’t know that person as well as we thought. That there were other sides to them. It’s told with a strong use of silence and empty spaces, putting the idea of absence at the center of the film, and uses distortions of place and shape to communicate not just emotional states but also the supernatural in terms of absence and emptiness. Parallels and mirror images are a big part of the story too, which makes sense because in the wake of an unexplained death, the familiar can become strange, and that strangeness only deepens the more Beth explores what her husband’s life was like in the spaces she never knew about. So in some ways, that idea that we don’t ever truly know one another, no matter how intimate our relationship, is turned into something bigger and darker but does so in a way that isn’t necessarily obvious. It’s a ghost story, and it’s not not a ghost story, but that’s not where it ends, and it’s the story of someone who was keeping a dark secret, and it’s not not that story, but the secret both is and isn’t what you think it is. And it’s a story where the antagonist is something both literal and metaphoric, a fable about unresolved trauma and grief like The Babadook (though it’s really nothing like it otherwise and The Babadook is still easily the superior film overall). We experience Beth’s grief as grief and as something worse, more monstrous, as profound grief can often be. A grief that is taking form and pushing its way into our world.

The filmmaker’s approach is a very restrained one, and I think it works well, especially when so many mass-market horror films distributed by big studios go big and noisy and as obvious as possible. The palette is full of muted colors - this is mostly a tastefully earth-toned film - even in exteriors that are somewhat overcast without being brooding. It’s a surprisingly warm film visually, given the subject matter, and again, I think this works because it contrasts with the supernatural elements. This is someone’s home, and there’s something very wrong here. The score (where there is any, like I said, this is a film that uses silence a lot) is mostly ambience with the occasional sting and a well-deployed use of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “The Calvary Cross” as a leitmotif that brings grief and horror together. The dialogue is a little stagey in places, but strong performances across the board go a long way toward smoothing that over. Beth is especially well-realized as someone whose sorrow is matched only by her rage, and both shine through incandescently .She is not handling any of this well, she is lashing out and falling apart. On balance, she’s not even sympathetic in places but she’s absolutely raw and present throughout. And in the face of someone who feels totally alone, the importance of relationships and connection is made clear with the people around her, providing something of a lifeline for Beth as things get much worse. There’s anger, there’s pain, there’s sadness, there’s loss, and all of it to a degree that feels barely containable without being histrionic or exaggerated.

But it is uneven, and in the middle of a lot of good, thoughtful, substantial work there are moments that are entirely too conventional. The first act leans a little too much into what film critic Mark Kermode would call “quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG!” filmmaking, not quite to the point of gratuitous jump scares, but things happen suddenly with sharp musical stings a little too often in spots where letting something unfold quietly in the background would have elicited more dread. And in the third act, the climax lays everything out a little too plainly, especially considering how much of it an attentive viewer has already put together at that point. It’s always annoying when a filmmaker doesn’t trust their audience to put two and two together. But none of this really fucks anything important up and it ends on a nice, uneasy note that manages to be both cathartic and sinister, avoiding a pat ending without feeling like sequel bait. We all have dark places we don’t like to go, this film says, but they are always there, and sometimes we have to.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

Tourist Trap: Uncanny

The “uncanny valley” refers to the idea that after a certain point, an approximation of human features begins to elicit uneasiness and revulsion - things below this point don’t have this effect because they’re recognizably non-human, and things above this point are effectively indistinguishable from human, but there’s a point where something looks human enough that you want to process it as human, but it’s non-human enough that you recognize that you shouldn’t, and this is perceptually queasy. The word “uncanny” itself can be defined as “mysterious, arousing superstitious dread, uncomfortably strange.”

And Tourist Trap, at its best, works both of these angles. It’s an oddity from the days before the rules of slasher films were really codified, and though it’s not especially nuanced, fits a few different ideas together awkwardly and only works in fits and starts, it’s an interesting take on the genre and not really like anything else I’ve seen.

We start off with a guy rolling a tire down a dirt road (like you do), arriving at a gas station. He goes inside, but there’s no attendant, and it’s clearly been deserted for some time. He goes poking around the back, looking for someone to assist him, but only finds a small room with a bed and what appears to be someone sleeping. When he tries to wake them, it becomes clear that it’s a mannequin that’s been posed in the bed. And, well, that’s not weird at all. And then the mannequin starts to move, things get lethally weird, and the young man dies before we can even learn his name.

His name, as it turns out, is (or was) Woody, and he was trying to get air for a spare tire because he and his friends Jerry, Molly, Eileen and Becky got a flat tire while they were driving through a remote stretch of what appears to be southern California. The rest of the gang wonders what’s taking Woody so long, and slap the temporary tire on their care in an effort to get to a phone. They see a sign for “Slausen’s Lost Oasis” and follow it, expecting the usual underwhelming natural feature and tacky gift shop, but instead find this legitimately nice green spot in the desert, complete with waterfall and swimming hole. Soon enough they meet Mr. Slausen himself, who explains that the “oasis” is closed, has been closed ever since the new highway came through and business dried up. But he’s amicable enough, albeit a little odd, and invites them back up to his house for a beverage while he helps Jerry work on the car. As it turns out, Mr. Slausen lives in what used to be the main attraction of the oasis - a wax museum - while his brother Davey lives in the nearby house. He tells them not to bother Davey.

He also has a lot of mannequins.

The basic story is nothing especially complicated. You’ve got your requisite teens who aren’t aware that they’ve stumbled into big trouble, and they get picked off one by one. This isn’t really spoiling anything, it’s clear right away what kind of movie it is. But that’s in the broad strokes, and what I think makes this movie interesting is in the details it uses to paint those strokes. This film came out after early proto-slasher films like Halloween and Black Christmas, but before things started getting really formulaic. And so this film pulls from things like Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Psycho in equal measure without necessarily ripping any of them off outright - or, for that matter, being as good. The end result is something that in some ways is very much your stereotypical slasher movie (teens in trouble) and in some ways something very different, and that difference makes for an intermittently unsettling viewing experience. A big part of this is down to the use of mannequins and waxworks - figures that are human in their features but clearly not alive, and so when they do come alive (as they do in the opening scene, which also uses sound and silence in a surprisingly effective manner), it’s disconcerting. There’s a mechanical, gape-jawed clumsiness to some of them, and others seem like regular mannequins…until their eyes start to move. The intersection of life and lifelessness on display is exactly the uncanny valley, before the term entered regular usage.

And this extends from the story into the way the film itself is constructed. The whole thing feels…fractured, somehow. It sort of jumps one from scene to another without a lot of narrative transition. But sometimes that works for it - you’ve got a group of people who stumble onto this weird little out-of-the-way setting, isolated from everything else, filled with mannequins and the choppiness of the film evokes a half-glimpsed, half-remembered feeling, like the sort of movie we might conjure up in our dreams, or remember waking up in the middle of after dozing off, as our still-asleep brain struggles to make sense of what it’s seeing on screen and not quite putting the pieces together correctly. The score, especially during the opening credits, bounces between your standard ominous minor-key strings and something jauntier, more playful. It’s kind of the musical equivalent of a haunted toy, or a funny clown hiding a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, and given that we’re dealing with sinister inanimate figures, that seems entirely appropriate. And there is a decent amount of atmosphere - the locations are believably shabby and decaying like you’d expect a long-neglected tourist attraction to be, and though the performances are largely unremarkable, there are a number of moments that range from low-key uneasy to downright creepy.

But that’s when it works. There are more than a few places where it doesn’t. The off-kilter feeling extends to the pacing, as if the filmmakers realized too late that picking off all of these characters was the entire deal and so they have to spread them out so the movie isn’t just 45 minutes long. There are stretches of the antagonist monologuing that have an effectively off-putting strangeness to them but seem largely devoid of tension, and the third act drags out way too long with a minimum of actual action. And though the protagonists aren’t actively obnoxious, they are people who cannot leave well enough alone. Someone tells them not to do something, it becomes the first thing they do. And in this way it’s very much like the template for slasher films to follow -  a bunch of young people on vacation getting picked off one by one because they consistently make the worst decisions they can, going beyond suspension of disbelief into naked contrivance, with a killer who seems to be able to be everywhere at once.

It does end pretty strongly though, getting back to the half-awake nightmare vibe and finishing on an extremely creepy freeze-frame (a technique I wouldn’t mind seeing come back) that feels like the hook to a good ghost story. But for as much that’s here that you don’t see every day, there’s also a lot that we will come to see way too much in all of the films that came afterward, That place between the unfamiliar and too familiar is, itself, an uncanny valley.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Pengabdi Setan: Say Your Prayers

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - the films I watch for this thing work in spite of themselves. On paper, they should suck. Hell, on film, they should suck. But there will be something about some of these films that just gets them over. Usually it’s a full-on commitment to whatever they’ve got going on, no matter how ridiculous. Films that just go for it often make it easier for me to get past their bigger flaws.

And Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) is a perfect example of this kind of movie. It’s dated, crude, and unsubtle to the point of being hokey but damned if it doesn’t have its moments. It tells the story it’s going to tell with an earnestness that made it easy for me to overlook some very obvious shortcomings.

We open on a funeral. Munarto has just lost his wife Mawarti to some unspecified illness, leaving behind him, their son Tomi, their daughter Rita, and their faithful servant Karto. She’s being laid to rest in the family plot, and many have come out to mourn her, including one mysterious woman who stands off to the side, watching the family. They return home to grieve and begin the process of getting on with their lives. Only Tomi is visited in the middle of the night by a specter, a ghoulish distortion of his mother, who scratches at the window and terrifies him. He says nothing about this to the rest of his family, but when he tells a friend about it, his friend advises him to seek out a fortune teller, who can give him advice about spirits. And so he does, and the fortune teller tells him that his family is in great danger. She tells him the best way to protect himself and his family is through the use of black magic.

So Tomi picks up some books and starts chanting and meditating on the dark arts. This upsets Karto greatly, because he’s a devout man who thinks Tomi should spend his time praying and sending blessings to his later mother. Meanwhile, Munarto recognizes that Karto, as faithful as he is, is also ailing. So they’re going to need some help around the house. He’s a prosperous businessman, so he has the resources to hire a housekeeper. And days later their new housekeeper, Darminah, shows up at the front door, ready to move in and start work.

She’s the woman from the funeral.

So we’ve got a restless spirit, a kid practicing black magic, and a mysterious figure who seems to be up to no good. That’s plenty, and one thing I’ll say about this film is that it isn’t convoluted or overly fussy. Bad shit happens and keeps happening. That’s the brief (well, for the most part, but more on that later). It’s not especially cerebral or sophisticated, and in fact, everything about this film is unsubtle or even downright crude. The acting is melodramatic, the dialogue is stiff throughout (even allowing for the vagaries of translation), and the special effects are primitive even for the time in which it was made. But for all of that, its crudeness also gives it a real kick in places - not as consistently as I’d like, but there are definitely some really striking moments and set pieces here. The color palette is largely shades of garish, and the soundtrack is full of ambient swells and feedback and cavernous booms that seem more like industrial noise than a soundtrack, and the crudeness of the effects and makeup work give it an unsettling outsider feel. At its best, it taps into the same kind of gonzo strangeness that made Messiah Of Evil so good, though never to the deliriously nightmarish heights of that film. And for every moment that doesn’t really work (there’s a nightmare sequence that’s downright comical), there are more that do. There are some jarring tonal shifts that just add to the overall weirdness as well - moments that feel like they were spliced in from a movie about the lives of swingin’ teens in 1980s Indonesia, before the whole thing returns to a feeling of nightmare.

That’s at its best, though. Sometimes the flaws are harder to overlook. In terms of pacing it feels like it drags in the middle, and it’s marred by a few instances of characters completely forgetting or disregarding something inexplicable that occurred right in front of them - not so much like they’re in denial as like a reset button got hit or something. There’s a, well, let’s say casual relationship to continuity here. There are creepy moments sporadically throughout the beginning but the tension gets lost for a bit, and though the climax does a lot to make up for that, again there are some moments in the heat of things that come across as maybe a little sillier than the filmmakers intended. And the whole thing ends with a moral that blows right by subtext into the territory of flat-out text, one laid on so thick and with such a heavy hand that it sort of comes all the way back around to being almost endearing and nostalgic, like a callback to an even earlier age of filmmaking, where all kinds of sensationalism could be excused if you ended on a note that was edifying to the masses.

And that’s the interesting thing about this film for me - it only succeeds sporadically, stumbles a fair amount, and falls flat on its face at times. But I was on board for the ride because there’s something about its operatic earnestness and utter lack of nuance that I think sort of works for it. If it reminds me of anything, it’s of a fable - an instructional story intended to teach a moral lesson, and fables aren’t really about nuance. Say your prayers, this film says, or the monsters will get you. And there’s something kind of appealing about something that unpolished.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

The Changeling: Family Matters

Ghost stories are, for the most part, stories about the past. Someone lived here and though they are long gone, something of them remains. Or, something very bad happened here long ago and the restless spirits of those caught up in it are unable to move on. Every now and then you’ll get one that puts a bit of a different spin on it, but ghost stories usually come down to solving the mystery of what happened long ago that keeps the presence or presences haunting a particular place from moving on.

And in that sense, The Changeling is, for most of its duration, a classic ghost story. It’s very much about the past, not just in its story, but also how it tells its story, and in the signifiers of the time period in which it was made. When it’s in classic ghost story mode, it works quite well, but when the focus shifts elsewhere, it stumbles in the home stretch.

John Russell is a pianist and composer on vacation with his wife and daughter in snowy upstate New York. Their car has broken down and they’re pushing it off to the side of the road so John can find a phone and call for a tow. But spirits seem high and everyone seems to be making the best of it. John spots a phone booth, and his wife and daughter occupy themselves with a snowball fight on the shoulder of the highway. But what this means is that they don’t see another car swerve to avoid a semi truck and plow right through them. All John can do is watch from the phone booth, horrified.

Some months later, John’s relocated to Seattle to take a position on the music faculty at a local university. He’s still adjusting, still breaks down into tears sometimes. Everyone is sympathetic. He’s looking for a house to rent until he puts something more permanent together, and an acquaintance puts him in touch with the local historical society, who have a property they can lease to him. Someone from the society shows him around what is referred to as the Carmichael estate. It’s huge, palatial and sprawling, with a wonderful music room. It hasn’t been occupied in about twelve years, and the previous occupants left some things behind. Books, mostly. Truth be told, it’s probably too much for one person, and so John finds himself rattling around in this gigantic house. Just him and his grief.

Him, his grief, and mysterious noises in the middle of the night. Doors that open and close by themselves.

Everything about this film is rooted in the past. To start, it was released in 1980, so it’s set in a world very different from the one we live in now. Everyone smokes, you call information to get someone’s phone number, and John records his compositions on a big reel-to-reel tape recorder. So there’s a bit of quaintness to it in that sense. But then, on top of that, it’s very much a ghost story in the gothic tradition, and being a ghost story, it’s about something that happened long ago at the time of the film, so you’re watching a film about the past intruding on a present that’s now very much the past in the style (mostly) of an even older storytelling tradition.

And for at least the first two-thirds of the film, does a pretty good job of being a ghost story in the gothic tradition. A lot of little things do the work here - doors opening and closing by themselves, mysterious banging noises, closed-up rooms thick with cobwebs, all set in this enormous old house, dark wood, a vertiginous central staircase, stained glass, a seemingly endless warren of rooms and hallways. Performances are a little mannered as befits when it was made, but not so as to be distracting. It’s more just a rhythm and pace to the dialogue that you really don’t hear much anymore, and it’s tempting to say that the house is the real star of the film. That might be going a bit far, but this is one of those films where the long, dark silence of a big old house is interrupted by small, strange things, like jabs at your calm.

And so the house does a lot to sell it. It sits in the middle of a bunch of bare, leafless trees, skeletal in the middle of Washington state’s lush evergreens, it’s all big empty rooms and long stretches of corridor that the film uses very much to its advantage with continuous pans and long Steadicam shots, the camera gliding through the mansion like the ghost itself. The soundtrack is all classical music, quivering strings and dissonant piano - it’s not subtle at all but it’s also rarely overbearing. The tendency toward long shots of the mansion’s interior is offset by a clipped, almost brusque editing style where one scene will crash right into another. It’s jarring, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not - it creates at sense of uneasiness and temporal dislocation at times, but other times it feels sloppy, like a scene crudely edited out.

And this does, to a degree, extend into the narrative - relationships between characters develop quickly, events move really fast (sometimes defying plausibility)  and some characters are whisked out of the story immediately after being introduced. It’s a little on the longer side, but doesn’t really feel like it until the third act when the focus shifts. And it’s this shift that I think represents the biggest problem the film has. John devotes himself to uncovering whatever happened in this house so long ago to leave a restless spirit inhabiting it, and it ultimately abandons the moody, tense ghost story of the first two acts to spend too much time focusing on a cover-up and conspiracy driving the mysterious events of the rest of the movie. Ghosts are typically restless spirits that are the result of some past tragedy or injustice a spirit that can’t rest, and that’s fine, but what should be a final revelation, a coming together of all of the pieces and the discovery of actual proof of this horrible secret ends up getting tangled up in something closer to a political thriller, and it kills the momentum and the atmosphere pretty quickly just when it should be tightening up. It almost feels like what should have been the whole movie got compressed into the first two acts. What’s more, the exposition starts getting pretty clumsy in the third act  -there are more than a few instances throughout where people tell instead of (or worse, in addition to) showing, but there’s a lot of it at the end, and things start getting muddled, happening just for the sake of happening without really fitting into a cohesive narrative as well

Had it stayed the course, I think it would have been very good, but as it is it does feel like it sort of sputters to an ending. It feels very much of its time and so it does threaten to feel quaint, but when it works, it works very well in a mode that still has a lot of life left in it, even if it has been left behind for more bombastic efforts. I think it’s a good argument for old-fashioned ghost stories still having some life left in them. Well, at least it is when it's focusing on the ghost story.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi 

What We Like, Redux: The Blackout Experiments/Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

I’m going to do something a little different this week - some of is due to circumstance (the film I’d intended to write about was such a bust that I ended up dozing off in the middle of it, which is a sign to me that maybe I shouldn’t write about it), but also something that’s been percolating away for the last couple of months. Back in September, I watched a film called Extremity, about an unstable young woman going through an extreme haunt (also known as “immersive horror experiences”) and all of the terrible ways it goes wrong. The film itself was a pretty mixed bag, it started strong and then fell flat on its face with a ridiculous third-act twist, but it got me thinking about real-life immersive horror experiences again.

It's intuitive to think of extreme haunts as your traditional haunted-house attraction turned up to 12, but I don’t think that really captures what’s going on. A lot of them are closer to immersive theater or performance art than that, and make demands of the participants that aren’t anything remotely close to what you get at your traditional haunted house or haunted corn maze or haunted hayride or…you get the idea. And so, in following my curiosity, I watched a couple of documentaries - The Blackout Experiments is about Blackout, one of (if not the) first immersive horror experiences, and Haunters: The Art Of The Scare is mostly about the history of fairly traditional haunted house attractions, but also centrally features McKamey Manor, one of the most notorious extreme haunts. And I came away from these two films thinking about how well they also outline some of the different ways in which people approach horror films. I haven't thought about stuff like this in awhile, so it seems like a good time to revisit it.

The Blackout Experiments

This documentary follows the experiences of three people as they go through Blackout for the first time, and then follow them as they continue to go back, over and over again, charting their emotional journey and relationship with the event. It’s run by two people with theater backgrounds - founder Josh Randall is an alumnus of the Tisch School for the Performing Arts - and began with the idea that it was getting harder and harder to really, genuinely scare people in a haunted house setting, so Randall and collaborator Kristjan Thor started thinking about the conventions of the haunted house. One of the things they observed was that it’s standard practice that the actors in these attractions not physically interact with the guests. And so they wondered…what would be possible if the performers were allowed to touch the guests? And what if it were built less around stock-standard ghouls and witches and ax murderers, and more around deep, real fears? 

The result is something best described as confrontational. It’s minimalist, run out of an office space marked only by three dots on the door to indicate what’s there. Guests have to sign a waiver and submit clean bills of health (physical and mental) to qualify for attendance. Until fairly recently, it was an experience designed to be gone through alone, though they’ve started doing group events. You’re asked about your background and your fears as part of the application process, and so to some degree the experience is personalized, intended for you specifically to go through alone. You arrive outside their building at the intended time, the door opens, and hands snatch you and drag you inside. You’re shoved against the wall, and so it begins.

In many ways it’s the antithesis of the typical haunted house, in that there’s little to no décor, and not a lot of props, just very dark rooms filled with the omnipresent performers, who do indeed touch the participants, shout at them, bark orders and restrain them as needed. Participants witness (and take part in) tableaux that are less your standard monster-movie stuff than situations that put them on one side or another of a power dynamic played out in ugly, immediate fashion. In fact, the whole thing has strong element of psychodrama and kink to it. There’s a safe word that immediately and irreversibly ends the experience, and you get the sense that a lot of the ordering around and holding people in place or pushing them up against the wall is as much about their safety and managing the experience as it is about creating an atmosphere and the safety of the performers. It gets very heavy - there are elements of breath play, mock executions, even waterboarding. This is not for someone looking for spooky fun, but nor does it seems to be gratuitous brutality for the sake of shock. Most of the film is seen through the eyes of Russell Eaton, who eventually attends multiple Blackout events, and we sort of follow his journey from his first visit to what is presumably his last one, a bespoke event staged specifically for him, in his own house. 

His isn’t the only story featured - there’s another young man who taps out after a few with the sense that maybe they pushed a button he wasn’t ready to have pushed, and someone whose attendance starts reminding his partner - an addiction counselor - of addictive behavior. But Russell’s is the most fully realized. He introduces himself as someone who had a troubled childhood and who is comfortable with darker experiences. They might not be okay for everyone, he says, but he thinks they’re okay for him. He seems a little self-conscious. But Blackout seems to do something for him, there’s something cathartic or revelatory for him about being confronted with his deepest fears and insecurities and coming out the other side. So he keeps coming back. He’s eventually invited to join a “Blackout Survivors” group - people who’ve had repeated experiences going through it, where they share their feelings and insights, talk about what it’s done for them. It’s something like a support group, but you don’t get the sense that any of them are suffering. They’re enjoying community, enjoying being able to talk to other people about something that only they  could understand. His relationship to the experience goes up and down - there’s an especially intense part to one experience that feels to him like a breach of trust, but he comes back, and it’s interesting to see where it ends up, and for Russell at least, it seems transformative.

The creators seem to be pretty thoughtful about what they’re doing - they try out any new elements on each other first to see what would make them most effective, and as they’re discussing what they’re putting together for Russell as his custom experience, they discuss his specific fears and consider whether or not specific elements might be going too far. They seem to be aiming for something, trying to evoke a very specific experience that pushes limits in a safe way. And I think that’s why I came away from watching this even more curious about experiencing Blackout. The idea of pushing beyond your limits, confronting your deepest and darkest fears and anxieties and vulnerabilities in a way that is fundamentally safe seems compelling to me. Harrowing, but in a way that has the potential for growth.

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

Conversely, this film is mostly about the more commercial end of the haunted house industry - and this film really did illustrate for me how much of an industry it really is, complete with people who are professional “scare actors,” for whom this is full-on seasonal employment. Sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of mass appeal, the varying degrees of homegrown events put on by enthusiasts at a financial loss (and in the case of one featured creator, some strain on his marriage). These are hobbyists with a genuine love and enthusiasm for coming up with ideas, improving on what they’ve already done, looking forward to October every year and putting things together in their garage for the community to enjoy. And then sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of big budgets and licensed IPs for the sake of making a profit, as in the case of Universal Studios’ annual event, an extension to an existing amusement park.

Either way, it’s the rollercoaster type of scare - actors in makeup and costume leaping out at people, relying on startles and pushing traditional buttons with mostly the traditional types of monsters and archetypes. You’ve got your ghosts, your witches, your zombies, your werewolves, your masked axe murderers, and the participants move through these mazes where things pop out or they walk through rooms (safely separated from the performers by railings or partitions) where you see moments you’d expect from any number of horror movies play out. The participants shriek and scream and then giggle and clutch each other. It’s a thrill ride, like any other thrill ride, something that spikes your adrenaline for a little bit, but that you probably won’t take home with you.

And then you’ve got Russ McKamey, who runs McKamey Manor. He established it first in San Diego, and then after running afoul of a number of zoning and licensing issues, now runs it at locations in rural Tennessee and Alabama. McKamey Manor is billed less as an immersive horror experience and more as an endurance test, one where a $20,000 prize ostensibly awaits someone who can go the full ten hours, which nobody has. What glimpses we get remind me a lot of extreme underground horror films, the kind that forsake plot and character development for set pieces of extreme violence and degradation for its own sake. There’s lots of verbal abuse and people being drowned or force-fed things, being caged or locked in boxes, muzzled and blindfolded with duct tape. Honestly it looks like an attempt to reimagine the haunted house as something closer to a snuff film. Participants have to sign a waiver acknowledging the possibility of everything from having their heads and eyebrows shaved to dentistry without anesthesia to possible bodily injury and death. Participants wear humiliating adult-sized onesies for the whole experience, and everything is recorded with highlights going up on McKamey Manor’s website and social platforms. The other, more commercial haunted house operators look down on things like Blackout and McKamey Manor, not seeing the “fun” in it - to their minds, people are paying to be tortured and think it’s sick. And honestly, when it comes to McKamey Manor, I kind of agree. It seems less like people are being scared than it is that they’re being brutalized, that it’s more about how much they can take than how they’re engaging with it. But their perspective also assumes that the purpose of a haunted house is the easy jump-scares, the horror equivalent of empty calories. And I’m not sure I’m on board with that either.

And just as the creators of Blackout have backgrounds in theater, Russ McKamey is, first and foremost, a showman. He makes his living in a variety of ways, including as a wedding singer and DJ. He loves to perform, and McKamey Manor is all theater. He doesn’t do it for the money - admission is one bag of dog food, which he donates to an animal rescue charity - and he operates year-round, with an ever-growing waiting list. The creators of Blackout don’t do too many interviews, and participated minimally in the documentary because they want to preserve a sense of mystery about the experience, but McKamey puts himself front and center throughout the whole thing. He loves the spotlight and he knows how to play to it. But unlike Randall and Thor, McKamey plays fast and loose where Blackout doesn’t - he only started allowing safe words very recently, and moved the operation someplace where they told him in effect “if they signed a waiver, you’re covered.” He’s received a number of complaints, including cases where performers ignored safe words and ended up injuring participants. More troubling to me is that he uses former participants as performers, largely untrained, many of whom are assisting in potentially dangerous things because, as they cheerfully state, they want to put other people through what they went through. Part of being willing to push people to their limits is acknowledging the existence of those limits and knowing what is and isn’t safe, and all of the obvious theater aside, it really does seem like McKamey is playing with fire in a way that Randall and Thor aren’t.

And so, in these two documentaries, I see examples of ways in which people engage with horror film. The big-budget commercial attractions are a lot like big-budget, mass-appeal horror films. They’re engineered to the nth degree and rely on familiar jump-scares for the purpose of entertainment and profit. Plenty of people like that stuff - that’s why the budgets are able to be big. But they don’t really do much for me. It’s not fun to me to be startled and not much else. McKamey Manor, on the other hand, is a lot like underground horror. It’s low-budget brutality without context or larger meaning, a barrage of graphic brutality for people numbed to anything else. That’s not really my deal at all either. I have no problem with graphic violence in horror, but it’s a tool, not the point. Blackout, on the other hand eschews bombast, spectacle, and the obvious, unsettling by going directly to the source of our fears and insecurities and doing just what it needs to in order to pluck that nerve. And that is absolutely my thing, which might explain why I’m generally bored by the first type and disgusted by the second, but fascinated by the third. People come to horror to be entertained, to be subjected to ever-increasing stimulation (and to develop a perverse machismo about what they can endure), and to be moved to something, however uncomfortable, that might change how they see the world.

The Blackout Experiments
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Barbarian: There Goes The Neighborhood

My biggest complaint about Hellhole last week was its complete and utter absence of surprise. It tells exactly the story you think it’s going to tell in exactly the way you think it’s going to tell it (until the very end, but that almost sabotages the film rather than helping it), and I think the only reason I wasn’t able to anticipate actual lines of dialogue was that it was subtitled from the original Polish, and cliches often get lost in translation.

So this week I have Barbarian, which…it doesn’t exactly have the opposite problem, but it doesn’t not have the opposite problem. Basically, it’s an ambitious effort that does a number of things well in a novel fashion, but isn’t quite a slam-dunk because some of its more audacious moments don’t quite land.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview, for a position working as a researcher on a documentary film. She gets in late at night, and she’s confirming details for the AirBnB she’s rented. She texts them that she’s there, they give her the code to the key safe, all good. She parks in front of the house - a cute little one-bedroom place - and opens up the key safe, only to find it empty. Then it starts to rain. Locked out of the house in a strange city in the middle of the night, in the middle of a rain storm, the night before her big interview. So she goes back out to her car to try and get it sorted out, when she sees a light go on in the house. She runs up and starts pounding on the door, and a man opens it up. His name’s Keith, and he booked the same house for the same night on HomeAway. They’ve been double-booked. So that’s awkward.

So it’s just Tess…a young woman in a strange house in a strange city in the middle of the night, finding herself face-to-face with a stranger who just happens to be there already. He seems friendly.

He asks Tess, “do I look like some kind of monster?”

It’s hard to talk about this one in much detail,  because the less you know about it going in, the better. Seriously, don’t even look at the IMDB listing before you watch it if you can help it. It’s a film that takes a couple of sharp narrative turns that contribute as much to a sense of overall uneasiness as the events of the story itself. They aren’t twists, exactly - in some ways this is actually a very straightforward story told in an off-kilter way. But the off-kilter narrative approach works to the extent that it wrong-foots the viewer, denies us the comfort that comes with the familiarity of a certain kind of story. You think you know how this is going to go, but you don’t, not really.

That said, just like it’s really a pretty straightforward story, it’s also got some pretty conventional beats to it, at least at first. It even lays it on a little thick at first with lots of ominous music and startles accompanied by sharp musical stings, but about halfway through the first act it starts to settle into a good sense of restraint. Once the initial obviousness is out of their system, .the filmmakers know when to let a setting or a detail or a reveal do all the work without overplaying it, and Tess is smarter than your typical horror-movie protagonist, acting exactly like a woman in a rented house with a strange man would reasonably act, even to the point of upending one particular horror cliché to a degree that got a laugh from me. And the story itself is told in crisp fashion, with very little wasted time or energy. Little moments convey a lot. It’s one of those stories where the details all slot together into a larger narrative mechanism, where little things end up being important later in a way that doesn’t feel contrived. The shot gets held long enough that you know this is going to mean something later, but it’s not usually clear exactly what, so when the payoff comes it’s satisfying. There are a couple of beats you’ll see coming, but they aren’t large ones, and there are just as many that will surprise.

It’s got a well-considered visual sense too. It’s shot mostly in shades of deep shadow and gloom, with dimly lit interiors to the house, nights that are solid black except for the sparsest of streetlights throwing the smallest pools of light, overcast days and long, dark corridors, with a soundtrack of deep synthesizer swells and prickly high frequencies…except when it isn’t that at all. About all I can really say is that it’s a film of contrasts, many of which work to drive a sense of discomfort and foreboding through sharp tonal shifts in the filmmaking. And most of these work, though not all. They’re jarring, but not too confusing. Where I think they’re the least effective is around the characters. Most of the performances are suitably restrained and grounded, but there’s at least one that is overly broad, to the degree that this character feels dropped in from another movie. It’s easily the film’s biggest liability, and I think that’s because the character sort of brings that other movie into this one, in a way that undercuts the dread and uneasiness managed by the first act. You get the sense that it’s trying to mix horror and comedy the way something like Us did (and did much more effectively), but where Us punctuated horror with stabs of comedy in a way that elicited nervous, otherwise-I’m-going-to-scream laughter, this film sort of shifts gears into comedy and backgrounds the horror instead, and that loses some of the film’s biggest strengths. The character is pretty well-realized and a more grounded take on it could fit really nicely into this film, but as it is it’s pretty distracting. One of the narrative turns could have benefited from being a little more fleshed out too, it communicates something economically (this film’s mostly pretty good about showing instead of telling) but I think going a little bit more into it could have restored some of the unease lost during the second act. And as the film goes on, it’s also a little on-the-nose with its messaging about suburbia and urban decay and the dangers of being part of a minority group in the face of institutional indifference. Not that that’s a bad note to hit, not at all, but it’s a little obvious in that respect and though not enough to ruin the movie, it was a little distracting.

As weird as it sounds, I’d like to see the filmmakers tackle something a little closer to conventional horror, because there’s evidence here that they have the chops to pull that off with style. What we have here is sort of a mixed bag, but in an interesting way. When it works, it works quite well and has some audacity to it, which is nice to see. Not all of the audacity works to its benefit, but I’d rather see a film screw up trying to do something interesting than screw up by bungling the obvious and predictable.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
 

Hellhole: The Clue’s In The Name

(Just as a heads-up, I’m probably going to end up spoiling most of this one, but in a way it doesn’t really matter, because it’s nothing you won’t already see coming. This is in no way a subtle or surprising film.)

A good title can sell me on a movie. I’m a sucker for cryptic, oblique, understated titles (e.g., Hereditary, The Blair Witch Project) but every now and then there will be one that just begs viewing if only to find out what the hell it’s all about (e.g., The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Beyond The Black Rainbow). I think the problem, for me, is the ones that sort of fall in between, where they’re just sort of generically descriptive. Those don’t really spark the imagination, so it’s hard to imagine that the film will either.

This is one of many problems with Hellhole. It’s a film that is as dull, formulaic and obvious as its title would lead you to believe.

The film opens in Poland, in 1957. It is a dark and stormy night, and a car pulls up to a church, and a priest gets out, carrying an infant in his arms as he heads inside. He brings the child up to the altar, and proceeds to ask God for forgiveness as he pulls out a dagger. He’s going to kill the child, who has a strange birthmark on its shoulder. The police burst in and tell him to put the knife down. He tells them that they don’t understand, that this “evil seed” must be destroyed, and they gun him down for his trouble. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen this before, it was the end of The Omen, in 1976.

Flash forward thirty years, and a priest named Father Marek arrives at a monastery located way out in the sticks. They’ve largely been forgotten, or left alone, because they make a point of running a sanatorium for people who suffer from demonic possession, exorcising their demons and caring for them as they recover. As the prior sees it, it’s a necessary service that nobody wants to admit to. Father Marek is given a habit, a rosary (he brought his own), and his suitcase is searched. It’s very important, given their line of work, that earthly temptations are kept far away. His cigarettes and cell phone are confiscated. The evening meal is some kind of foul-looking gruel, dark and pasty, with…chunks…in it. Not that you expect ascetics to eat well, but this is especially unappealing.

After dinner, once he’s returned to his cell, Father Marek opens a hidden compartment in his suitcase. There’s a gun and a flashlight, and some news clippings about a series of mysterious disappearances in the area. The monks may have something to hide.

It’s a very dark movie. Not in the sense of sinister or brooding, just…underlit. It makes sense, since it’s a monastery, but it doesn’t help things. There’s some good, gloomy atmosphere toward the start but the rest of the film largely takes place indoors where everything looks the same. And this sameness is pervasive. I said up at the top that this film has many problems, and that’s not strictly true. It has one really big problem, in that it doesn’t have a single original or unpredictable bone in its body. You’ve seen all of this before, and it’s going to go pretty much exactly how you expect that it will, with an exception toward the end that doesn’t really help its case. As a result, there’s no tension, no surprise, and although it’s only 90 minutes long, it still feels like a slog.

It’s oddly devoid of tension, even in moments where there should be tension. Marek witnesses an exorcism that proceeds almost by rote - a young woman is bound to a bed, there’s prayer, she rears up and starts growling and convulsing, the bed starts shaking, and the prior’s crucifix bursts into flames. At no point does anyone evince anything stronger than mild concern. Most of them seem almost bored, and it certainly doesn’t look any different from any other exorcism you’ve ever seen in a movie before. The dialogue is serviceable (though the translation does make everything sort of an understatement) as are the performances and the soundtrack. Nothing special, but nothing awful. Just sort of there.  It’s just as rote in its action - Marek goes poking around where he shouldn’t be, not everything is what it seems, something spooky happens, rinse, repeat. And if that isn’t clear enough, the first act ends with a conversation (held in a confessional, because of course it is) that spells out what anyone actually watching the film has already figured out. No, Marek isn’t really a priest, he’s an undercover cop investigating the disappearances, which appear to be tied to the exorcisms they perform - exorcisms that the possessed inevitably don’t survive. Yes, of course they figure this out, and yes, the revelations you expect to follow - about Marek, about the monks, about what they’re really up to - they’re exactly what you’re anticipating them to be. There’s more to Marek than meets the eye (like the weird birthmark on his shoulder), it’s not by chance that he was assigned this case, and so on.

Normally I don’t like spoiling films that I’m writing about. Whether I liked it or not, someone should be able to watch it and decide for themselves, but this film is so predictable that anyone with any familiarity with the genre will, like I did, see every single beat coming. Until the very end, wherever you think the story’s going to go, that’s where it goes. There IS sort of a twist in the third act, and in theory it’s one for which I have sort of a perverse appreciation, but it’s handled so anticlimactically, it lands with such a thud that it’s actually more comic than anything else. In that moment, it almost felt like the film was shifting course to become a spoof of the sort of film it had been sincerely up to that point. Which is certainly a choice, though I can’t say it’s a good one.

And then THAT twist is reversed, but the filmmakers don’t bother to offer any narrative logic for it, almost like they realized that otherwise the film won’t have an ending, just a bunch of monks standing around saying “welp,” so nope, that didn’t count. I do have to give the film credit for not copping out on its ending (which contains the only interesting imagery in the entire film), but it’s far too little, far too late. The climax takes place in a cave under the monastery, around a well that is a portal to hell. A literal hellhole. It is a hole...to hell. This is what we have to work with here.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Matriarch: A Mother’s Sacrifice

Motherhood is supposed to be this sacred, supremely benevolent thing. It’s warmth, nurturance, love, fertility, growth, a thing to be celebrated and valorized. Motherhood is supposed to be sacred, but all too often it isn’t. Motherhood can also be greedy and selfish and narcissistic, manipulative and self-serving. And there’s something profane about that, a massive violation of trust and care. It’s no wonder that motherhood distorted and disfigured comes up so much in horror. It’s one of those things that literally and metaphorically hits us where we live. Some things are supposed to be safe. Some places are supposed to be safe, and some people are supposed to be safe.

And when they aren’t, you get a film like Matriarch, a powerful, supremely uneasy tale of motherhood turned poisonous and sour.

Laura is an advertising executive in London, and we meet her as she’s getting ready for work. She’s coring the rotten section out of a peach and slicing up the rest into her cereal. She eats her breakfast and then promptly goes into the bathroom, shoving her fingers down her throat to vomit it all back up. She chases this with a few swigs of vodka and some snorts from a bottle of nasal spray. She gets into the office a little late, apologizes to her boss, she still has a cold. The same cold, her boss observes, that she’s had for a few months now. But Laura’s got it together. There’s a big pitch meeting coming up and Laura’s ready. Or, at least, she will be. It’s a quick study - she’s obviously running from something - the bulimia, the alcoholism, relentlessly driving herself forward. She’s brittle, pulled tight against her skin. There’s a desperation to her, brought into stark detail that night when she invites an old flame over and the cocaine comes out. It’s an all-nighter, with Laura still doing lines alone as the sun comes up. She’s trying to outrun herself, but ends up clutching at her chest and keeling over on her bathroom floor instead. As everything fades, she has a vision of a hand reaching out of an expanse of dark water…

…and she wakes back up. She should be dead, she knows that, but she isn’t. She doesn’t know what’s happened to her, how she didn’t die, or why dark, brackish fluid is seeping out of her. She needs answers, and that means going someplace she never thought she’d revisit, and seeing someone she’d sworn she would never see again. She’s going home to the small village where she was raised, and she’s going to see her mother. The reunion is polite, and her mother is the picture of health, looking to be in her late forties or early fifties.

But her mother is eighty years old.

This is a film that hits the ground running, in terms of its style and narrative. It takes place in a world that is drab throughout, a place drained of color and icily remote. The big city is all cold fluorescents and sleek, modern design, and the village has its own foreboding, a collection of old buildings and sheep paddocks, clusters of houses sunken into a maze of hedgerows taller than a person and a black, black marsh on the outside of town. It’s very much in the fine English tradition of villages with old, old secrets, observed in details that are modest, but sharp. It’s a place that is ugly and warped without being cartoonish about it. And when it’s not the inner emotional violence of Laura’s life away from home or the weirdness of the village itself, above and beyond all of that it’s Celia, Laura’s mother. Her toxic, manipulative mother, all of Laura’s anger and self-loathing explained by Celia’s immediate descent into a litany of denial and minimization and guilt trips and passive aggressive jabs. Her mood turns on a dime from mock-concern to wheedling to self-absorption to an inability (or refusal) to remember the past as Laura remembers it. Their dialogue is full of repressed anger that’s starting to spill through the seams, old resentments, old regrets, the cathartic venom of people finally saying things they’ve always wanted to say, soundtracked by woozy, discordant ambience. And it’s not just Celia, it’s the villagers as well, so bitter at Laura’s return but so interested in keeping her there. There’s never really a quiet moment in the film,  and since it’s very clear very early on that there’s something Not Right about this place, it’s a film threaded through with unease and discomfort.

And all of that is before Laura really starts to dig into what’s happening to her and what seems to be happening in the village. There are secrets, of course, and they run deep, old, and dark, culminating in a revelation that blasphemes the sanctities of religion and motherhood through vivid imagery and body horror. A bargain has been made, and the cost is coming due again. Motherhood is supposed to be about helping a child to grow and flourish, but for narcissists like Celia, it’s entirely about them instead and how they can use motherhood, capture it, feed upon it. It’s a story told in earthily visceral fashion.  

That said, the biggest problem with the film is that although a lot of the dialogue works, there are points where it does become stagey and affected. Conversations sometimes end up on the verge of becoming monologues, and some of the performances are broader than they should be. This threatens to overwhelm the film when things really start to heat up in the final act, but it rights itself in the end for something that’s equal parts horrifying and emotionally exhausting. It might not be quite as intense in its emotional violence as Hereditary or as carefully staged (few films are, though), but for as wrung out as I was by the end of this, it’s the closest touchpoint I can find. This one’s a doozy.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi: The Devil You Don't Know

There are a number of things I feel like are overdone or just bad for scary movies in general. I think there’s sort of a glut of demonic possession movies, for example. And I’ve gone on the record at length, repeatedly, about how people need to stop making found-footage movies for awhile. And as a rule, I really, really dislike sequels and loathe the idea of “franchises.”

And so, by all rights, I should absolutely hate Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi (Dabbe: The Possession). It’s a found-footage movie about demonic possession and it’s the fourth in a series of six movies. But damned if it isn’t pretty good. Between this and the films of Can Evrenol, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been sleeping on Turkish horror all this time. It’s definitely got some flaws, but I think it manages to overcome the majority of them through sheer energy. It’s an intense film that puts a novel (to Western eyes) spin on some well-worn ideas.

That said, the beginning isn’t especially auspicious. We’re treated to a bunch of newspaper headlines about something terrible that happened in the village of Kibledere back in 1986. There’s a voiceover of a phone conversation between two people - one who’s trying to get at the truth of what happened, and another, a doctor who was there and really doesn’t want to share what he knows. It winds up with the doctor telling this other person to speak to a colleague of his who visited the village recently - Dr. Ebru Keraduman. Then there’s a barrage of horrific images that slam right into the title. It’s…not subtle. At all.

But we cut to Ebru as she’s testing out her camera. She’s a psychiatrist who’s taken an interest in claims of possession and the techniques employed by the people who claim to be able to exorcise evil spirits. So she’s come to watch one such exorcism and interview the person doing it, Faruk Akat. In a small room, a group of women and Faruk gather around another older woman, who alternates between wailing, frenetic cursing and threats to reveal everyone’s dirty secrets, and puking up gross-looking things into a kiddie pool in the middle of the circle. This goes on for some time, Faruk places strips of paper with writing on them into the pool, there’s a great roar and the possessed woman horks up something that looks like a teratoma. Faruk pronounces her cured.

Ebru is, needless to say, skeptical. She interviews Faruk, asking him what the specific mechanisms are behind exorcism, asking how this is anything distinct from more modern diagnoses of mental illness, challenging his narrative in the way you’d expect from a science-versus-mysticism sort of story, though maybe not as obnoxiously as she could. Still, he thinks he can prove what he does is real, and she puts the onus on him by stipulating that she choose his next client - someone he doesn’t know, so that collusion is more difficult. So they travel to visit relatives of Ebru’s - her aunt Refika and Refika’s daughter Kübra. They live in a small village not far from the abandoned ruins of Kibledere. Kübra hasn’t been feeling well lately.

At her engagement celebration, Kübra stabbed her fiancé to death. A voice told her to do it.

In some ways, this film embraces a number of cliches - the opening title sequence is something we’ve seen variations on a dozen times before, and you’ve got the skeptical scientist insisting on rational explanations for everything and the exorcist who insists that there’s more to heaven and earth than her philosophy. The possessed talk in creepy, raspy, unnaturally low voices and know stuff they shouldn’t be able to know. There are narrative turns that you’ll see coming if only because you know how these kinds of stories are structured. But it also avoids a number of cliches simply by being made outside of the West. The forces possessing these people are djinns, not demons, and it’s more than a cosmetic difference. Humanity’s relationship to them as a class of spirits is more complex than the Christian idea of demons, so it isn’t strictly a story of evil infiltrating a family. And Faruk is Muslim, so there’s a distinct absence of holy water, crosses and the Roman Ritual. This is, of course, not exotic at all in Turkey, but it’s new to me, and it gives me a different perspective on old ideas.

And even though the bones of the story are themselves nothing especially novel, they’re handled well and there’s a nice third-act twist that benefits from misdirection leading up to it. The imagery used to tell the story departs from cliché in a number of ways - there are some of the things you’d expect, but a lot of things you don’t see very often, some unnerving, some downright gross, but enough to keep you on your toes. It’s a story about spirits and curses and witchcraft and family secrets, giving it more to work with than the standard possession movie. Some moments may not land exactly right and might seem a little silly, but just as many contribute to a sense of dread, of the protagonists getting in over their head.

The story is told as a found-footage narrative, primarily from Ebru’s point of view, though the camera gets passed around a little, and there are some multi-camera setups for things she’s documenting. And like any other found-footage film, there’s a push and pull between plausibility (cameras being set up for interviews to capture different angles, the camera not always being pointed where it should because someone’s running for their life) and violation of that plausibility. There’s the occasional shot from an angle that can’t be accounted for, incidental music in places even though this is camcorder footage, unlikely close-ups, stuff like that, but for once it doesn’t really bother me because the story’s good enough and it has enough momentum and energy to keep me watching and not be so distracted by failures of verisimilitude.

And that momentum and energy is another thing I think it has going for it. It was obviously made on a low budget, but it isn’t necessarily cheap-looking, and the effects are mostly very simple. Sometimes they’re simple to the point of being a little clumsy or obvious, but it’s in a way that gives the film the same nervy, kinetic energy that The Evil Dead had. There’s an intensity and vigor to moments that sort of propel you past any shortcomings and keep the tension level high. It’s also got the same propensity for letting things happen while nobody’s in the room and use of camera distortion to indicate an evil presence that Final Prayer had, and the camerawork is believably jittery and close, which puts me in mind of [REC]. To my mind, this is some good company in which to be. It does dread and anxiety and creepy settings and normal settings with creepy things happening in them very well. And it’s…a histrionic film, there’s a lot of yelling, but it doesn’t come off as grating or contrived, and the relationships between people feel pretty believable. Even Ebru and Faruk, though they have very different takes on what’s happening around them, are mostly collegial, reasonable adults. And the whole thing rises to a shrill scream at the climax, ending on as dark and bleak a note as you could ask for. It’s a ride.

It does have its problems - the English subtitles are somewhat clumsily translated, which is part of what makes the title sequence less effective than it could be, and it ends up making one fairly important moment unintentionally comic. I was dismayed by the distasteful use of actual photos of children with birth defects to depict victims of a curse, and the ending, for all of its “oh shit oh shit” energy, does take a little long to get where it’s going. And that absolute gut-punch of an ending is somewhat undercut by a fairly unnecessary epilogue that pulls back a little on what we see. But all things considered, it’s a surprisingly strong effort for something that, to my mind, had so much going against it from the start.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Hellraiser (2022): The Flesh Failures

This is going to be a tough one for me to talk about. On the one hand, the original Hellraiser was an extremely formative film for me. Sitting in a free midnight screening in a mostly-empty theater, watching it play out on a big screen in the dark, it was the first time I think I ever watched any sort of film and got the feeling that all bets were off, that anything could happen. It almost felt…unsafe, and that stuck with me. It wouldn’t be the last time a film made me feel that way, but it was definitely the first. And a few years back, I waded into the nine extant films in the Hellraiser franchise (ugh), and barring some special effects that haven’t aged well, it still holds up surprisingly well.

But on the other hand, there’s the other eight films, and what I discovered re-watching the first four for the first time in years and watching numbers 5 through 9 for the first time is that not only would subsequent films fail to replicate what made the original so special, they’d decline in general quality really fucking fast. It was another example (alongside Nightmare On Elm Street) of the studio deciding to just start cranking out sequels while the property was still hot, without any regard for what made the original good or interesting. In the case of these films, the nadir was a slapdash stab at found-footage that was made - start to finish - in three weeks, purely to keep the studio’s license for the IP from lapsing. It was literally a film that wasn’t made to be viewed. It’s hard for me to think of a more cynical and calculated thing, and this is considering that every film in the series after the fourth was an unrelated screenplay that was retrofitted into a Hellraiser movie to varying degrees of success. They didn’t even bother to write them. Another one came out in 2018 to equally poor reception, but I was done.

So, Hellraiser (2022) simultaneously does and doesn’t have a lot to live up to. It has the shadow of the original hanging over it, but on the other hand the remaining films set the bar pretty low. And so my experience watching this film was a confusing one for me. It’s hard for me to tell how much I like it, or if I just appreciate it. And no, it’s not the revelatory experience the first one was for me. It doesn’t really do anything unexpected, and it does have problems, mostly in the third act. But it also does a lot of stuff right, and so it’s safe to say that even with its flaws, it’s miles better than any of the films that followed the original,

It opens on a gray day in Belgrade. There’s a man sitting on a bench with a satchel, and a woman approaches him. The whole thing feels like something out of a spy movie, in a good way. They’re there to make an exchange. She gives him a large sum of money, and he gives her a wooden box containing something that we don’t get to see. Cut to a large mansion in the Berkshires. There’s some kind of party going on, it’s all very stylish in a perfume commercial sort of way, and reminds me of nothing so much as a 1990s take on wealth and decadence. A fit young man sits nervously at the bar, and the woman from Belgrade sits next to him. She suggests that she can introduce him to the owner of the mansion and he jumps at the chance. The young man is Joey, and he’s being introduced to wealthy art collector Roland Voight. He’s ushered into a large room filled with small sculptures and art objects, and one of them is a small wooden puzzle box of intricate design. At Voight’s encouragement, Joey starts trying to solve the puzzle, and with a few twists and turns, it snaps into a new configuration, one that causes a blade to pierce Joey’s hand. Voight is unsurprised by this. The room starts spinning for Joey. Storm clouds gather, and then…something is in the room with them. Something with chains and hooks. Something to which Voight appeals. Something that takes Joey away.

Six years later, we meet Riley while she’s having noisy sex with her boyfriend Trevor…as it turns out, while her brother Matt, his boyfriend Colin, and their roommate Nora are in the other room making dinner. It’s a quick study - Riley’s a few months out of rehab, and given that she met Trevor in rehab, she’s kind of a mess. The dynamic between all of them is established pretty economically through how things are said as much as what is said - it’s a little exposition-heavy to start, but it rights itself. Riley’s underemployed, and is trying to figure out something better so she can get out of Matt’s apartment. Trevor starts to suggest something, but hesitates because she’s “trying to be good.” But when pushed, he reveals that at his job he made a lot of deliveries of “billionaire shit” to a warehouse out on the edges of the city, and after one last one, the orders just…stopped, and the warehouse seems to have been abandoned. But maybe there’s still some billionaire shit inside, and he remembers the keycode.

So they break into this warehouse and discover a single shipping container. Cutting the lock reveals a safe. Smashing the dial off the safe reveals a wooden case.

A wooden case with a familiar-looking puzzle box inside.

The film gets off to a wobbly start - the very beginning is a nice inversion of the grubby backroom deal that opens the original film, but then it cuts to the wealthy decadence thing that seems more like something out of one of the sequels. and the beats feel pretty predictable. But then when it shifts into the more intimate story of Riley and her brother, things start to feel more grounded. We settle into this difficult relationship and the people touched by it to one degree or another, and it feels pretty natural. And throughout, Riley’s at the center of all of it, as her decisions spiral outward to suck more and more of the people who care about her into something they can’t begin to explain, something full of blood and pain.

And so this is another way it’s in conversation with the original film. The original was very much about desire, and the price we’re willing to pay to satisfy our desires. And here there’s a definite narrative about needs and weaknesses and compulsions and hungers that runs through the whole film, along with the cost they exert on the individual and everyone around them. Riley has a self-destructive streak a mile wide, one that doesn’t manifest in melodramatic ways, as much as in consistently making the wrong decision, whatever form that takes. Whatever the safe, healthy thing to do is, she runs as far from that as she can. And Matt, time and time again, runs codependently after her, as compelled to try and fix her or rescue her as she is to destroy herself. So where the story of the decadent eager to seek newer and more exotic sensations drove the original film, here it’s more about someone on the ragged end of that, someone who’s become a prisoner to the things they sought. But the point is the same throughout - these needs…all of them… have a cost. And I’ll give the film credit for driving the action with human frailty to the degree that it does.

Elsewhere, it acknowledges the original film in tasteful, restrained ways - there are a number of visual and musical allusions throughout, more like it’s using the vocabulary of the first film than repeating scenes or anything obvious like that. It feels as much like an updating of what the first film did (and none of the subsequent films bothered to do) as anything else, nothing so blatant as stunt casting or fanservice, and what little bits of worldbuilding there are don’t distract from the story too much. There’s always the danger of spending more time on the mythology than the story or the people, and that doesn’t really happen here. If anything, it explores some of the ideas from the second film from a slightly different angle, in ways that are sometimes more successful, and in others less so, but never to the corny, sub-Freddy Kreuger depths of that film’s final act. In a lot of ways, it feels like what a sequel to the original film would have been with a bigger budget and a focus on making a good film instead of trying to crank something out as quickly as possible. To be fair, Hellraiser 2 had a really good second act, but that’s about it.

But as well-made as it is, it does feel like it’s missing something for me, and I can’t tell how much of it is how the film is made and how much of it is me bringing my own history to it. It has a couple of good, tense moments in the third act and a twist I didn’t see coming, but I’ve seen variations on this story, I know how the world of this film works and it never really stretches that or does much to upend it. It’s respectful to the original, and that’s good, but perhaps too respectful. I’m never really surprised or shown anything new, and though I suspect that someone who’s never seen the original film could be startled by this - it’s still got a vision unlike anything else in horror - it also doesn’t capture the grimy fervor of the original, that sense that you’re in the hands of someone who isn’t playing safe with their ideas. It gets very violent in places, though not often, so there’s still a punch to it when it happens and as much is accomplished through restraint as graphic depiction. But it’s all…maybe a little too clean, a little too polite, missing that sense of connection to hunger and desire that the original film has. It’s colder, more cerebral in ways, where the original had a kinky, transgressive heat to it. I do appreciate that the antagonists are as aloof as they originally were, and the updated designs work well in some places, less well in others. But the sense of menace is largely restored.

And there are narrative issues as well. The pacing lags at times, and the ending drags out a little too much, trying to tie up too many pieces all at once, slowing things down and reducing the tension, and the way it all resolves feels a little stock to me. There’s a coda that seems maybe a little obvious and sequel-baity, though it’s well-done for all of that. It’s certainly better than any of the increasingly misbegotten sequels that followed the original, and in its subject matter I feel like it’s a better take on what Hellraiser 2 was trying to do than what that film accomplished, but it’s not the original. You can only make a film like that once.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu