Let Us Prey: All Of The Devils Are Here

(I’m going to end up spoiling this one to a degree, so if you’re interested in watching it, maybe do that before reading this.)

Sometimes, you look up a movie and it’s pretty clear what you’re going to get from the thumbnail, the title, and the brief description. And Let Us Prey isn’t exactly subtle in this regard - there’s that title (ugh), a thumbnail of a bloodied figure covered in barbed wire, and the brief description “Held in a remote police station, a mysterious stranger takes over the minds and souls of everyone inside.” So yeah, we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen: Late at night in some tiny police precinct, someone with no name or identification gets hauled in and thrown in a cell, and over the course of the night he basically possesses and/or torments everyone else there because he’s actually the devil or some shit like that.

This is by no means a fresh or original story idea, but here’s the thing: Let Us Prey is actually not what you’d expect from the description and relentlessly generic title. But, as much as I appreciate the film trying to defy expectations, I’m not sure the means by which it chose to do so actually works all that well. It’s not so much scary as a grim slog to an ending that isn’t terrible, but one that feels sort of like a foregone conclusion.

The film opens with portent - shots of crashing waves, flocks of crows against storm clouds, the sun fitfully breaking through. At first it’s nicely atmospheric, setting up a feeling of impending dread. But then it keeps going…and going…and then there’s an unnecessarily lingering close-up on a single crow, and it might be a special effect, but it’s like “okay, we get it, something’s coming and crows have something to do with it.” A lone figure appears in silhouette. Whatever’s coming, it’s here.

Elsewhere, on the other side of the title card, it’s dark early morning in some unidentified part of Scotland, and Police Constable Rachel Heggie is awake, doing push-ups, getting ready for her first day at her first assigned precinct. She heads out the door, walking to the station,, just in time to catch a young hoodlum coming the other way in a car that’s going too fast. Too fast to see the figure right in front of him, and he runs right over a man standing in the middle of the road. A man who vanishes immediately. Rachel sees the whole thing and takes him into custody.

The station is not very promising. It’s dingy and small. Sergeant MacReady, the ranking officer, is sort of a puzzle. He disapproves of profanity, but not of roughing up the kid Rachel’s brought in when he gets a bit lippy. He’s contemptuous of Rachel’s attention to procedure, but expects her to toe his line. The kid - who calls himself “Caesar” - is a bit of a regular at the station house, and gets thrown into lockup alongside Mr. Beswick, a mild-mannered schoolteacher. Elsewhere, we’re introduced to PCs Jack Warnock and Jennifer Mundie, who are spending their shift having sex in the front seat of their patrol car. Rachel radios them to look out for someone matching the victim’s description and they make fun of her over an open channel.

So we aren’t off to a good start. There’s the new cop stuck at her first probationary assignment, with what appear to be a bunch of corrupt fuck-ups stuck at a backwater station where they can’t do too much damage.

And then in walks the mysterious man, the one Caesar hit earlier, with barely a scratch on him, no name, no identification, the fingerprints of a man who died years ago, and a book. Full of names.

So yes, the mysterious man gets examined by the local doctor and then thrown into lockup himself, where he starts to make everyone uneasy. And under normal circumstances, this would be where the mysterious man would be revealed as the devil, or a demon, and start doing horrible things to everyone in the station and it’d be a siege film, all these people locked in with a personification of evil. That isn’t exactly the plot of Last Shift (there’s only a couple of people in that film), but still, you have an isolated police station and someone in the cells who isn’t who they appear to be. But Last Shift was good, and this…well, it certainly ducks expectations, but not in a way that works.

See, what we discover pretty quickly is that everyone in this police station - MacReady, Warnock, Mundie, Caesar, the doctor, and Rachel - have secrets that they’re hiding. And in most cases, those secrets are fucking horrifying. When vehicular manslaughter and killing a suspect in custody are the least objectionable ones, you know you’re in for some shit. The mysterious figure isn’t the devil here, pretty much everyone else is. So almost everyone is incredibly unsympathetic to start with, and as the film goes on it goes quickly from “unsympathetic” to “monstrous,” detailed in brutal, blood-soaked flashbacks that linger just long enough to get the point across, Apart from being kind of unbelievable in its scope, it also means that the movie stops being about how a police station full of people deal with this supernatural entity and instead starts being about us waiting for these absolutely awful people to get picked off one by one. We know that pretty much everyone (with one exception) is one degree or another of being a terrible person, so there’s no stakes or tension to their demise. It’s just a matter of waiting until they get theirs, which they do, often in supremely gory fashion, and as often as not by each other’s hand. There’s an inevitability to it, but not an inevitability that evokes dread, just a feeling of “okay, he’s probably next.” And the turn is revealed pretty early on, so it’s not like there’s a lot of horror to be found in the discovery that these otherwise average people have done awful, awful things. They’re unlikeable to start, so the only real surprise is the sheer depravity to which some of them have descended.

And I’m all in favor of subverting cliches, of taking the obvious and doing something difference with it. So there’s something interesting, at least in theory, about a movie that takes the “bunch of people trapped with a mysterious evil figure” conceit and turns it on its head, where the mysterious figure is actually more of an avenging angel and everyone else is awful and paying for their sins. But there’s no subtlety to it, no mystery. The moody opening doesn’t know when to stop, and for every shot of convenience stores or gas stations half-lit in the encroaching dark that, if they occurred in a film that played things quietly and low-key would create something haunting and uneasy, there’s relentlessly stagey dialogue, interiors that are obviously sets, and constant cutaways to flashbacks, often of horrible violence, not gratuitously lingered upon but also depicted in absolutely brutal fashion, without blinking or looking away. It doesn’t give us a chance to see the protagonists as sympathetic or relatable people before yanking that away. So we’re denied any horrifying revelations (beyond exactly how fucked-up some of these people are), and once we know the deal, the rest plays out pretty much like you’d expect. The end result means it’s not especially scary, and none of the people are developed to any degree beyond the terrible things they’ve done. We’re just waiting to find out the extent of their crimes and then waiting for them to die. In that sense it’s a lot more like a typical slasher films, where indiscreet teenagers are punished for things like drinking and premarital sex, with the lone sympathetic character surviving, complete with the sense that they’ve survived…but at what cost? You think it’s going to be one set of cliches, but it’s another.

In the end, a police station full of extremely bad people -cops and civilians alike - are shown doing bloody, horrible things to other people, and then doing bloody, horrible things to themselves and each other, and the one who’d normally be the bad guy is nothing of the sort, and maybe it’s an empowerment narrative for the protagonist, but it’s all so thoroughly nasty and unpleasant that it’s hard to care much about it. It’s grim, it’s pointless, it’s pointlessly grim and grimly pointless. Hell is empty, Shakespeare wrote, and all of the devils are here.

IMDB entry
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Prince Of Darkness: Indistinguishable From Magic

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

There’s an element to cosmic horror that I think sometimes gets overlooked, beyond the whole tendency to reduce it to tentacles and madness, and that’s its technological piece. Sure, you’ve got the stories of cultists making sacrifices to ancient gods, but as often as not those ancient gods are mixed up with equally ancient extraterrestrial races, concerned with foul experiments on humanity. And this is one of those combinations I really dig. It’s not an amalgamation of horror and science fiction, strictly speaking. Alien comes to mind there, but that’s really a horror story told through the lens of science fiction. And it’s not one of those stories where what first appears to be horror turns out to be something like alien abduction - those are disappointing, as often as not. No, this is more like a case where the ancient and incomprehensible is rendered in terms of technology instead of magic, or as a commingling of the two, and the results feel foreign to our experience. And I think part of making a good horror movie (or at least a scary horror movie) is denying the audience the comfort of expectations.

Prince Of Darkness is one of the few films to plumb this very specific intersection, and in many ways it defies easy description. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged all that well on a few fronts, but it still has its moments, and I think those moments are worth considering.

It opens with an old man lying in bed, breathing his last. He clutches a small box, and then he’s gone. A priest, called to his bedside, finds the box. Inside is a key to a reinforced door in an abandoned church in a run-down part of Los Angeles. Elsewhere, Dr. Howard Birack is teaching a graduate class on quantum physics, explaining how our understanding of things like time and space and causality break down entirely at sufficiently large or small scales. That beyond a certain point, the universe is chaotic and unknowable. Birack gets a call from the priest (who never gets a name), inviting him out to this abandoned church.

It turns out that the old man who died was the last member of a monastic order called the Brotherhood of Sleep, an order so secret that its work was concealed from even the highest levels of the Vatican. The brothers of this order have, for centuries, guarded something stored in the catacombs below this church. A tall cylinder made of metal and glass, filled with a turbulent green fluid. Carbon dating puts it at seven million years old.

Written in the old man’s journal: “The sleeper awakens.”

So Dr. Birack brings his students and a lot of equipment to the church. They’re joined by the priest, a biologist and his students, and an expert in ancient religious texts, whose job it will be to translate a book found next to the cylinder - a book written in a mishmash of Greek, Latin, and Coptic, passages erased and overwritten, over the course of centuries. They’re going to try and find out exactly what this thing is.

In style and subject matter, this film is pretty much a homage to the works of Nigel Kneale, who trafficked in similar territory in his own work. Some of it isn’t even subtle - one of Dr. Birack’s students is a transfer from “Kneale University” and the screenplay is credited to the pseudonym “Martin Quatermass.” I’ve seen some of Kneale’s work, and a lot of it is somewhat dated, but it’s still interesting in how it merges the scientific and the supernatural in really compelling ways. I don’t like the idea of remakes, but I would purely love to see Ben Wheatley tackle a remake of Kneale’s The Stone Tape. And that’s one of the best things this film has going for it - it’s an approach to the idea of supernatural evil that you don’t see very often. You’ve got a 2000-year-old religious text that contains differential equations and describes Jesus of Nazareth as a member of an extraterrestrial race tasked with imprisoning the occupant of this cylinder, with the idea that evil is a material thing, describable in terms of biology and physics. Strange dreams of future events, beamed directly into people’s brains as a stream of tachyons. In the news, the light from a supernova that occurred millions of years ago is just now reaching Earth. The sun and moon are both visible in the sky. Insects are going crazy, and people are starting to congregate around this abandoned church. As Lovecraft would put it, the stars are right.

So when it does work, it’s creepy and atmospheric, creating a feeling almost from the get-go that something very bad is coming, that events millennia in the making are gaining momentum. It doesn’t lean into many of the usual cliches about things like demonic possession and creates a pretty interesting visual vocabulary for itself in the process. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense if you look at it too closely, and not everything is explained, but I think that this actually helps it - we’re dealing with something beyond our comprehension, so of course it isn’t all going to make sense.

But there are parts that don’t work all that well, a lot of it (though not all) being a function of time. None of the characters are especially developed as people, and there’s a lot of them so after a bit they come off as kind of interchangeable. The dialogue is clumsy throughout, and the performances range from good and understated to wooden. Some of them are barely performances, not through any fault of the actors, but just because there are so many people that most of them barely get any time to develop at all, so there’s not much sense of who they actually are. It’s sort of hard to care about what happens to them as a result.

And in the moment to moment interaction, it really shows its age in terms of how it handles gender. Attitudes toward women in this film aren’t great, more chauvinistic than misogynistic, but it’s just obnoxious enough to be noticeable. In this building full of scientists and experts, the women are pretty much discussed entirely in terms of how available they are, and it’s off-putting enough to be a distraction, and the clunky dialogue doesn’t help. For a film that’s supposed to be about science trying to understand the supernatural (or the supernatural as phenomena that can be scientifically explained), it…doesn’t spend much time on the science, and the jargon doesn’t really hold up. I mean, it’ s not Star Trek levels of technobabble, but it feels at several points like an afterthought - all of these experts gather at this church and then sort of…go into different rooms and have conversations, so we don’t really get a clear picture of how science explains this thing. It sort of comes up in passing here and there, but it feels like understanding the artifact and the implications of its existence should come first, and then things should start to go south, and it doesn’t really work that way. It’s sort of scattered in what story it’s telling.

And that’s the other big problem - the pacing. It starts off strong, creating this atmosphere of looming dread, and it ends pretty well as everything goes to shit, but the middle sags quite a bit. One thing Kneale’s stories do well is create a sense of discovery, where you’re finding out along with the characters what it is they’re dealing with, and here we’re sort of shut out of that part of the story, and it suffers as a result. It’s not a very dynamic film at all, and that weakens the third act and threatens to bring the second act to a screeching halt. I suspect some judicious editing would tighten things up a bit, and I don’t think it’s just a matter of modern sensibilities preferring faster-paced films. I like a good slow burn, but this film’s missing the sort of things that would make for a good slow burn - establishing the people, gradual reveals of what they’re dealing with, mounting dread as everything builds toward a climax. Here we have an assortment of scenes put together that don’t really gel after the very promising first act.

But at the same time, when it works (and there are definitely moments when it does), it works really well. The effects work still mostly holds up, and even when it doesn’t it’s not egregious. It’s easy to overlook the technical shortcomings because it’s often in service of vivid, creepy setpieces. The cinematography is functional - solid without being flashy (with the exception of some inventively unnerving dream sequences), everything scored with ominous, pulsing synthesizer, and it ends on a strong, nicely inconclusive note, which redeems it to a degree.

So I think what we’re left with is something ambitious, trying to do something beyond the obvious, something that starts strong and ends, well, pretty strong, but really bogs down in the middle and doesn’t have performances that can carry it past the pacing problems. Which is too bad, because the idea of evil as a function of particle physics and ancient creatures from beyond the stars alike - that place where science and magic blur and become indistinguishable - is strange, fertile territory for exploration. And it’s been too long since anyone journeyed there.

IMDB entry
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The Block Island Sound: Still Waters Run Deep

Sometimes it’s hard to think of horror films like other films. Genre filmmaking in general skews toward cliché, toward hitting anticipated (if not outright demanded) beats, neglecting things outside of the expectations of the genre. I don’t think subtext is an intentional product, I think it’s emergent from choices made by people making the film, whether they’re aware of where those choices are coming from or not. Like, if a choice makes a particular scene scary, why does it make it scary? What assumptions lead to “this is scary?” That’s where things like time, place, and culture come in. That way, even some of the hackiest genre filmmaking can still tell us something about the conditions that produced it. But sometimes it’s just so pro forma, so mechanical, that no sense of the impulses that drove it escape. I feel like it’s been awhile since I saw a film with interesting subtext, is what I’m saying.

Which brings me to The Block Island Sound. I don’t know that I’d call it especially scary. It’s low-key, certainly unsettling, with a real air of tragedy to it. And a lot of this tragedy comes from the ways it depicts the costs of masculinity.

It’s the story of Tom Lynch, and his son Harry. They live on Block Island, just off the coast of Rhode Island. Tom’s a fisherman, his wife died some time ago, and his two daughters got off the island as soon as they could. Tom probably drinks a little too much, and as the film opens, Harry’s starting to wonder about his dad, no matter how many time he gruffly insists that he’s “fine.” Tom’s becoming forgetful, he’s losing time, blacking out. He wakes up on the boat in the middle of open water, everything in disarray, no idea how he got there.

When nobody else is around, he hears a deep, monolithic growling.

This ends badly for Tom, and the majority of the movie is the story of how Harry and his sister Audry - back on the island doing some work with the EPA - deal (or don’t) with Tom’s death and what seems to be Harry beginning a similar decline. There’s a lot of weird stuff happening on the island, unusual amounts of dead fish washing up on the beach, birds dropping dead right out of the sky, electrical interference. And Harry’s starting to hear something growling out in the dark. But for the majority of the film, this is all sort of going on in the background, with Harry’s gradual disintegration (and denial) making it harder and harder for him to lead a normal life and adding strain to a relationship with his siblings that already wasn’t great. It’s as much a family drama as anything else. And in a lot of ways, that’s a good thing - I think scary movies are often better when they take the time to make their characters feel real and human. Maybe sympathetic, maybe not, but like you’re watching actual people, so when things start getting dark, there are real emotional stakes.

But in this case, I think the tradeoff is that the film never really kicks into high gear. It’s more sort of a steady climb - it moves forward, but does so in understated fashion, and I think as a result important narrative moments, important beats where things should feel like they’re escalating, don’t really land with the power they should. The more powerful moments, really, aren’t the supernatural ones, they’re the natural ones. The characters in this film are people, drawn at human scale - even the really annoying conspiracy nut who opens the movie somewhat inauspiciously (though to its credit, his little introductory rant doesn’t really explain what’s actually happening like I thought it would - he’s just as wrong as everyone else), three siblings who don’t get along (and don’t get along in a way that’s believable), small-town folks with their petty jealousies, and well-meaning outsiders who don’t quite get it, This all sets the stage for something more powerfully sad than scary. Tom and Harry as perfect examples of a certain kind of man - stoic, self-sufficient, not at all willing to ask for help or even admit that they need help. And this is ultimately the tragic heart of the story - the Lynch family are basically decent people with their problems, just like everyone else, surrounded by people who are in their turn flawed in one way or another, who in one way or another let them down. All of what follows could have been avoided if Tom had just spoken up, hadn’t refused to admit something was wrong, and lives are lost because of it/

When the supernatural does kick in, it’s mostly at that same measured, understated pace. The film does a lot of its work in hallucinations and dream sequences that are well-done, and don’t really overexplain or go too big and loud, but like the film as a whole, staying at a simmer throughout means it never really comes to a boil.  It’s not totally static, but even though there’s movement, it’s sort of the same stuff over and over again, only getting a little worse each time, so this contributes to the sort of flat feeling of the rest of the film. Hackles never really get raised, and the ultimate payoff is more cerebral than visceral. It’s well-done, recontextualizing some dialogue from earlier in the movie in a way that brings the point home and it ends on a nicely inconclusive note which gives it sort of a lingering chill. But it’s like the film’s setting. It’s the flat, bright expanse of open water in daytime, churning seas at night, the overcast roads of a small island town in the off-season, night held back only by the lights of homes - gray, quiet, and enigmatic. Ultimately, the sea keeps its secrets.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

Housewife: In Dreams, I Walk With You

I appreciate a well-crafted narrative as much as anyone, both because a well-told story is engaging for its own sake, and it because it can be enjoyable to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into it. And you don’t always get that in horror film. Genre filmmaking is vulnerable to a reliance on cliché and timework expectations in general, and I think horror films are especially vulnerable to this - it’s very easy to make a commercially successful film that neglects character, mood, and skillful narrative in favor of cheap shock. And plenty of folks like that, but…I dunno. It feels like empty calories to me. So I like it when filmmakers actually make horror films that are actually films.

But…that’s not really what I’ve come here to talk about today. Today, I’ve come here to talk about films that concern themselves less with character and skillful narrative and more with just grabbing you by the collar and telling you to strap in because you are about to go for a ride. The kind of films that you just let wash over you.  

Housewife is very much one of those films, a striking combination of Dario Argento and David Cronenberg, a film more felt than thought about, a film that says pretty much from the start “hang on, because you are in for some weird shit.”

It begins with a big, old house, and a room with a shrine, dominated by a painting of a stern-looking woman, another woman praying feverishly to the picture. Elsewhere in the house, two little girls - sisters - stay inside their bedroom. They have to stay there when their mother is talking to “the visitors.” The older of the two discovers that she’s begun menstruating, and unsure of what’s happening, she calls for her mother. When her mother sees what has happened, she…well, she begins wailing in anguish. Acting like this wasn’t supposed to happen. Which isn’t encouraging. She tells the younger girl to stay in the bedroom, close her eyes, and play a counting game. She does, and counts, and keeps counting, and keeps counting. Her mother doesn’t come back. She opens her eyes to find the bedroom door open, so she walks out into the hallway, follows sounds of splashing…

…only to discover her mother drowning her older sister in the toilet.

The little girl is Holly, and both her sister and her father die that night by her mother’s hand. We don’t know why. We fast-forward to Holly’s adulthood. She’s married to a painter, Timucin, and they’re trying to have a child. Holly’s childhood left its mark - she really, really doesn’t like using toilets. But she and Timucin seem okay otherwise. And then an old friend - well, more than a friend - comes back into their life. Her name is Valery, and the three of them used to share a small place in New York, as well as a bed. Holly’s a little upset that Valery’s just shown up after two years of being incommunicado, and you get the sense that maybe this unconventional relationship didn’t end happily. But she’s here now because she’s in town for a seminar being held by a group called The Umbrella of Love and Mind. Is it a self-improvement workshop? Is it a cult that calls itself a “family” and teaches people to travel through the dreams of others?

Why not both?

So Holly and Timucin and a couple of their friends attend the seminar, and that’s where…well, it’s not where shit gets weird, because the whole thing starts weird, but it’s where it starts to get really weird. This is a film that is not really heavy on story or even plot - it sort of sets things up and then once the pieces are all in place it just starts stuffing imagery and ideas into your eyes in a way that’s engaging, even if it doesn’t always make clear, linear sense. In some ways, it’s very artificial - especially in the dialogue, which is stilted in a way that suggests it was translated or written by someone who wasn’t a native English speaker. I was actually sort of surprised that it wasn’t subtitled like the director’s previous film. This doesn’t help the narrative’s coherence, but what we lose there we gain in a pervasive strangeness. The characters aren’t explored in-depth, but they feel like people, and the relationship between Holly, Timucin, and Valery is communicated as much by showing as telling - details come out eventually, but well before that how the three of them interact gives you a pretty clear picture of who they were to each other. It’s a relationship that feels lived-in and intuitive. Other characters are less fleshed-out, but it doesn’t matter so much because once the table’s set, with Holly being singled out by the group’s enigmatic leader, Bruce O’Hara, it hurtles deliriously toward the end.

The film takes a lot visually from the work of Dario Argento - there’s a real giallo vibe to the cinematography, with lots of people in stylish, aggressively modern settings contrasted with flashbacks and dream sequences shot in soft focus, lighting heavy on reds, blues and golds, There’s a real dreamlike surrealism to these sequences that contrasts nicely with the stuff happening in the present and waking world, and the acting often has the same sense of operatic intensity you see in Argento’s work. This isn’t a naturalistic film, it’s stylized with distinct visual sensibilities used to locate parts of the film either inside or outside of the present and the real, establishing and then subverting the difference to good effect.

The story isn’t necessarily one that Argento would tell, though - narratively, it takes its cues from the early work of David Cronenberg. The meeting that Holly and Timucin attend has the same blandly sinister vibe present in Videodrome, that same intersection of salesmanship and showmanship putting a friendly face on something very dangerous. What the group does - “dream surfing” that allows them to walk around inside another’s subconscious - isn’t that far off from the strange psychology of The Brood or Scanners, and the nesting doll of a narrative, where dreams and reality commingle freely, isn’t that far off from the simulated worlds of eXISTENz. It doesn’t feel like plagiarism, just a lot of the same vibes and ideas put together for a different purpose, expressed with a distinct visual palette. This film doesn’t concern itself with Cronenberg’s questions about the relationship between biology and technology, or technology and autonomy. It has its own ideas about the new flesh, and as the film goes on, it moves from the psychological horror that you get when the line between the conscious and subconscious start to blur into the body horror of pregnancy and birth, ending on a startling note of cosmic horror that lingers just long enough for its punch to remain intact.

A lot of this recalls the director’s first film Baskin - the pervasive dreaminess sharply contrasted with gruesome, bloody imagery, the feeling that there’s something going on just outside of our awareness, the feelings that there’s more to this story than we’re getting. Like that film it doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense, but also like that film there’s a real sense of vision at work here, and this one feels more strongly realized, more self-assured than the director’s debut. It’s very much one of those films that you have to let wash over you and experience, rather than think too closely about - if you stop to think about it for too long, it kind of falls apart, but if you go along for the ride, well, it’s a hell of a ride. When the credits rolled, I sat up and said “DAMN!” out loud in the privacy of my own home, and that isn’t something that happens very often at all.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon