Howard's Mill: Unsolved Mysteries

True crime is kind of the place where documentary edges its way onto horror’s turf. Horror as a genre certainly doesn’t have any hesitation about using serial killers as monsters (something I find kind of insulting and disrespectful), and conversely true crime documentaries as often as not cast actual events as something like a horror film. Sometimes they’re good, but most of the time they’re sensationalistic without being especially insightful, there to serve up the lurid details.

And with the advent of podcasts and streaming video, true crime as entertainment has proliferated. What once would have been a book requiring months, if not years of research and writing and editing can now be turned into a podcast that has the advantage of being able to update with new information and juicy details quickly. Likewise, relatively low-budget documentaries that wouldn’t have even had a shelf life on video now nestle comfortably on streaming services, and Internet communities full of amateur sleuths intent on finding what detectives couldn’t provide fuel for the fire. I’ve watched or listened to a few. Enough to recognize a style, if not be impressed.

Which brings me to Howard’s Mill, a well-crafted mockumentary that absolutely nails the feeling of a modern-day true-crime documentary, but in doing so sacrifices some of the horror that it’s trying to convey.

It’s November of 2017, and two film students - Kaiser and Charlie - have come to rural Springfield, Tennessee to make a documentary about an unsolved missing-persons case. Emily Nixon was out with Dwight, her husband, doing some metal-detecting on an abandoned patch of farmland called Howard’s Mill, when she mysteriously vanished. One minute she’s talking to Dwight, the next she’s walking over a rise, and then the next she’s gone. Needless to say, the police are looking at Dwight as their prime suspect. He’s the most logical choice, but the police are stymied by a complete absence of evidence. When jealous husbands murder their wives, there’s a trail of evidence. Here, there’s nothing.

Soon enough, Kaiser and Charlie begin both documenting and assisting in Dwight’s efforts to find his wife. Part of this means looking around Howard’s Mill - a triangular patch of what used to be tobacco farmland, with a big pond and an abandoned farmhouse. And in their efforts to figure out what might have happened, Dwight comes across news accounts of another case from 2007, where a little girl named Sarah Edwards vanished almost right in front of her parents’ eyes as she walked just over a hill, on that same tract of land.

This has happened before. As it turns out, Springfield has an unusually high number of active missing-person cases.

The story is very much in the vein of any number of true-crime documentaries available on any number of streaming services. We begin with the case, and the suspect, and then as is often the case, the story begins to unfold as the film goes on, with surprising revelations and twists and reversals, new information coming to light, secrets that people were keeping. And one of the film’s biggest strengths is that it paces its central mystery well, beginning with a single missing-person case and gradually moving outward to other unexplained events, creating a rabbit hole that encompasses not only the stock elements of any true-crime story, but also details that hint at something far stranger without really beating you over the head with it. It’s there to be noticed, and becomes more prominent as the film goes on, but it feels plausible - the filmmakers don’t immediately jump to a supernatural explanation, it gradually reveals itself as more and more things that don’t fit become known.

And it’s a convincing depiction. As an example of a modern true-crime documentary, this film commits completely to the bit. The camerawork contains moody montages, lots of infographics, talking-head interviews, archival footage, repeated dramatic zooms on spooky-looking locations, and dramatic drone shots overlooking small-town America. It’s got saccharine power ballads in memory of the missing, the interviews have the requisite number of gotcha questions, the story is peppered with sudden, dramatic reveals that add new wrinkles to the story just when you think you’ve got it all figure out, it all rings true. The performances are largely realistic, with people who act like people, for better or worse. None of them are saints, nor are any of them villains. They’re flawed, complicated people stuck in a bewildering set of circumstances, and the dialogue is rarely stagey or contrived. Maybe a little expository here and there, but nothing to take you out of the story. The setting feels real - it looks like it was shot on location, and the archival materials - photographs, phone camera footage, surveillance video - all look like actual sources, which goes a long way toward supporting the conceit and preserving immersion in the story. It's not as easy to fuck up a mockumentary as it is a found-footage film, but the details can still give it away when it's clear what we’re looking at are props or pro-shot footage doctored to look like something else. It's clear a lot of attention to detail went into this, in the presentation and the narrative.

And the narrative is where a lot of the interest actually lies as well - it's a pretty well-crafted mystery all told. It begins with one mysterious disappearance and the husband who is suspect #1, trying to find his wife and clear his name, that expands into something that gets increasingly harder and harder to explain the more we learn about this plot of land and the lives of the people in this town. It does a good job of keeping you guessing, as it holds maybe two or three possibilities up all at the same time and does a good job of not committing to one of them too early. It really could be a couple of different things until the third act, when some details just totally defy a rational explanation. It also does a good job of leaving some details unexplained - in life, narratives are rarely tidy and the unanswered question do linger in ways that are more unsettling than like plot holes. I do think it fizzles a bit in terms of the final explanation, though. On the one hand it makes sense that it'd end in messy, open-ended fashion, with what appeared to actually be happening not a conclusion anyone would have come to, but it feels like the film is missing a big sting or revelation to tie it all together or to throw things even further into question in the end. There are a couple of spooky moments, but it never really rises to the level of being especially scary or making the kind of emotional impact it could have. It doesn’t end with a gasp so much as it does with a golf clap.

It's an enjoyable ride to take for the majority of its run time, but it doesn't have quite the wallop of something like Lake Mungo, or the thematic underpinning of something like Savageland, or the relentless eeriness of Noroi, all films with which I think this compares favorably. It's maybe not quite as good as any of those, and there's a post-credit sequence that's a little too contrived and on-the-nose, is superfluous given what we’ve seen, but it's developed well and doesn't really make any major mistakes. And, like The Lovecraft Investigations, it makes me wonder what else you could do with the “true crime story that becomes something horribly other” narrative that might have more teeth to it.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

The Burrowers: Monstrosity

Monster movies are about as classic as horror films can get - vampires, zombies, werewolves, mummies, stranger, squishier things than those, it’s one of the most straightforward propositions there is. It’s the threat and fear of the Other, the thing that is not like you or me. And sure, sometimes you’ll get a film that offers up the idea that we’re the real monsters, but when it comes down to it, monsters are largely defined by their difference from us, the ways in which they’re something we aren’t.

The Burrowers is a bleak and unsparing story about monsters, whatever form they take.

It’s 1879, in the Dakota Territories of the still-growing, still-expanding United States, and Fergus Coffey, an immigrant from Ireland, is sweet on a young woman named Maryanne Stewart. She and her family are settlers in the Dakotas, one of a scattered group of homesteads in what was (and arguably still is) Indian territory not that long ago. It’s a tenuous existence in that respect, but it’s one Fergus aims to be part of, courting Maryanne with an heirloom brooch, one of his last reminders of the home he left behind. He rehearses the speech he plans to give to Maryanne’s father, halting and tentative. Nevertheless, he girds himself for the task and rides out to the Stewart’s claim...

...only to find the aftermath of an attack. Two dead, others missing. Naturally, the assumption is that it’s the work of Indians. It could be Ute, could be Sioux. They’ve chased a lot of tribes off their land, a lot of Indians have died. So Fergus starts putting together a posse to find them - himself, John Clay, William Parcher, and young Dobie Spacks. Clay knows the land, and Parcher knows Indians. He’s killed his share, but he’s also learned as much of their languages as he can, and he knows who’s friendly and who’s hostile. Dobie’s the young son of a woman Parcher’s courting, and he sort of insisted on coming, much to his mother’s dismay. They’re escorted by a detachment of soldiers garrisoned in the area against Indian attacks, lead by Henry Victor. Victor is a vain, strutting, preening little man, prone to cruelty, who it becomes clear is just looking for an excuse to torture and kill more Indians. He’s less interested in who might have done it than where the closest reservation is. And so he misses things that Clay and Parcher notice. Like how the two dead settlers haven’t bled out as much as they should have. How their wounds don’ t look like they came from Indian weapons.

Like the mysterious holes in the ground all around the settlement, as if something - several somethings - dug their way up to the surface.

The story itself is pretty straightforward. A bunch of settlers go missing, and a search party made up of various types - the inexperienced one with a personal stake, the seasoned Indian hunter, the one who actually knows the land, the one who insists on going out of a sense of duty - rides off into dangerous territory on a rescue mission. It’s the story of a journey that goes ever deeper into dangerous territory, and how the hostile environment, the things stalking them, and their own frailties become their undoing. In that sense, it's not that dissimilar from Bone Tomahawk, although it's less clumsy in how it navigates the relationship between the white protagonists and Native Americans. Where that film made its antagonists human and then had to go very much out of its way to make it clear that no, these are not Native Americans, these are something separate, and it was more awkward than anything else, here the monsters are not at all human or anything close to it. Everyone in this film - Native American and white alike - is presented as a human being, flaws and all. People like Clay and Parcher have done bad things in the name of keeping settlers safe, but they acknowledge and respect the humanity of the Native Americans they encounter, and don’t seem to relish or celebrate the things they’ve done. Even Victor, the most two-dimensional character, is immediately recognizable as the kind of bully who desperately craves respect that he’ll never get, no matter how much he postures or how many people he hurts. It’s not exactly a character study, but it's very much about the characters, the things they've done and will do, the ways they come together and the ways they turn on each other. You get a pretty good sense of who everyone is through the dialogue, their actions and reactions, striking a nice balance between showing and telling.

And it’s a well-executed production. Horror Westerns are hard to pull off, and this one does a pretty good job of selling the setting. The dialogue feels right for the time without being overly mannered or affected, and it doesn't lapse into anachronism. The cinematography emphasizes the wide-open plains of the Dakotas in traditional fashion, with lots of sprawling landscapes and sunsets and shadowy camps lit by a single fire. The film has enough of a budget there that the locations and costuming all feel convincing as well, and the acting is low-key and understated for the most part (again, the character of Victor skirts the line a little here, but even that sort of works as the sort of affectation you’d expect from someone so insecure). At no point while I was watching this did I ever feel pulled out of the story by something that shouldn’t have been there or by something someone said. It’s a monster film, and this is always a tricky proposition because it’s very easy to show too much and pull people out of the story, but the practical effects generally work well - they’re a little ropey in a couple of places, but nothing approaching distracting. The result is a slow, relentless burn, as the protagonists ride deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, losing more of themselves along the way.

And at every level it's about monsters and what is monstrous. Parcher starts off kind of unsympathetic, as he’s telling Dobie about three Indians he hung from a tree, but who reveals himself to be more sympathetic as time goes on. Victor is pretty much the embodiment of the white man's cruelty, nothing more than an intemperate, callous bully whose power resides entirely in his troops and his guns. The white man has been monstrous to the natives of this territory, and while some like Parcher understand them as people and seem cognizant of what they’ve done, others like Victor do not. Who is predator and who is prey swaps back and forth across the length of the film, illustrating a cycle of violence. The whites come and kill what lives here, and their callous intrusion leads to even more suffering for everyone. In the end, nothing is learned and the monstrosity continues, passed along from once source to another.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

The Deeper You Dig: Living With Our Ghosts

Ghost stories are often stories of regret - maybe not on the part of the ghost, but on the part of the people the ghost leaves behind. Relationships vary, but haunting is often a metaphor for mistakes, bad decisions, and traumas, the ghost a constant reminder of things that cannot be undone. Stories along this line are a nice change from ghosts as evil, screaming things with hideously distorted faces who are bumping people off for reasons. Monsters are always more interesting, I think, when they’re rooted in humanity and horrors rooted in human experience. And from that perspective, The Deeper You Dig is a well-crafted low-budget indie film about guilt, finding meaning in the wake of a tragedy, and living with our ghosts.

It’s a simple film, about three people in a small town in the Catskills region of New York. Kurt is quiet and reclusive, occupied with the gutting and restoration of an old, long-abandoned house that he’s going to fix up and flip. Ivy is a psychic - or, at least, she makes her living as a psychic, keenly attuned to the necessity of stringing her clients along, not giving them what they keep coming to her for just yet. Not while there’s still money to be had. And Echo is Ivy’s daughter, a Goth kid at home in in her own skin, self-possessed and comfortable in her relationship with her mother. It’s the middle of winter, and life’s proceeding as it does - Echo’s annoyed that her teacher told her she can’t wear black lipstick to school, Ivy offers to kick the teacher’s ass. Echo wants to go sledding tonight but Ivy tells her to wait because she’s got an appointment with a regular client and doesn’t want Echo out on her own. They talk about the upcoming deer season, and Echo’s goal of bagging her seventh buck in under twenty minutes.

Kurt’s working on the upper floor of the house - sweeping out garbage, tearing out old plaster. He’s tearing it down to the studs, and that’s tough work. He stops for dinner, a few beers, a few shots to chase the few beers. After the shots and beers, he gets back into his car to drive home. It’s dark on the road at night, and he spots deer leaping across the road in his headlights. And then he hits something with a solid thud.

It’s not a deer. It’s Echo, who’d gone sledding after all.

This film is especially notable for being a literal family affair - it's written, directed, produced, shot and edited by a husband-and-wife team and one of their two daughters. They had some outside help for visual effects and publicity, but this film is overwhelmingly the product of three people, all of whom play the central roles in the film as well. I knew this going in and was expecting sort of a scrappy, "hey gang, let's put on a show" sort of thing, but it isn't really that at all. It's somber and striking, with an extremely strong visual sense and the all-too-rare ability to deliver something that works while staying inside the constraints of a small budget. This film looks and plays far less cheaply than some horror films made by studios and ostensibly professional filmmakers. It is a film that knows its limitations and knows what it can do inside of those limitations.

To start, it’s a story told at a very human, almost intimate scale. It’s about how Kurt deals with (or doesn't deal with) what he's done, his attempts to cover it up, and Ivy's attempts to find some answers to the mystery of a missing daughter in the wake of a faith long-abandoned for cynical opportunity. Over the course of the film, the two of them are drawn closer and closer together, Echo's death being the black hole pulling them both into its gravity. Kurt is haunted by what he’s done, by the choices he can’t take back, and Ivy is someone who knows something about the worlds of the living, the dead, and the space between. They’re both digging, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, getting in deeper and deeper and finally over their heads. It's not an especially intense film, with very, very little in the way of jump scares. It relies much more on small things - unexplained noises, the sound of footsteps where there shouldn’t be any, radios that shouldn't be playing, figures that are suddenly in frame when a shot changes angle - interspersed with striking sequences that are equally surreal and nightmarish. Its scares are tasteful and restrained - sometimes maybe too much so. The pace of the film is deliberate, stately, though it doesn’t drag. The result is a film that doesn’t really build up a lot of tension until the very end. What's there works and works extremely well - there are a couple of story choices I wasn’t expecting that kept me on my toes and ratcheted things up a bit, but sometimes the tension flags.

Where it succeeds to the greatest degree is in its visuals - this film has a really strong sense of composition, shots are painterly and use light, shadow and texture in combination with creative perspective to tell a story otherwise communicated through sparse, halting dialogue (which is fine, though the acting can be somewhat shaky and is probably the only place where it's clear this is a low-budget indie production). The passage of time gets told through changes in seasons, from snow to rain to sunny, all set against the rural backdrop of a New York that exists far from the city, all trees and mountains and tiny little towns made up of a main drag and houses set far, far back into the woods. It's hunting and fishing territory, moving between winters that verge on the oppressive, raw, rainy thaws, and autumns that turn everything gold. It’s evocative in its location, in its shots, in its editing, in its lighting and its score (which, for all I know, was done by the family as well).

And all of this is the backdrop for the story of a woman brought back to her gifts by a horrible tragedy, a man whose guilt is almost literally eating him from the inside out, and the nightmare prices paid for some kind of closure and reconciliation. Kurt does everything he can to run away from what he’s done, but you can’t run away from what you carry with you, and this becomes true in some unsettlingly literal ways as this man, the girl he killed, and the mother looking for her lost daughter come together in a reckoning. If you're looking for something to make you jump out of your seat, this is probably not it, but if you want something equal parts sad and creepy with a growing undercurrent of menace, something with a vision that encompasses the beautiful and the strange and the morbid in equal parts, this is definitely worth a look.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Titane: My Mother The Car

Let’s consider the idea that a film is “about” something. This can mean different things. At one level, it’s the plot. At another, it’s ideas and themes addressed through the events of the film and the characters within it. Possibly even how the film is constructed. At another it’s what all of the above says about the time in which the film was made and the culture of which it is a product. Not every film engages at all of these levels, or at least not to the same degree. Sometimes a film about zombies chewing up reckless teenagers isn’t much more than that. Sometimes you know exactly what you’re getting. It’s about what it’s about, and exploration of anything deeper than that can sometimes be challenging.

Titane (Titanium) is “about” a lot of things, but whatever you think it’s going to be, you’re probably wrong. Delirious, evocative, and singular, it defies easy categorization and refuses to hew to expectations, genre or otherwise. And the result is excellent - harrowing, moving, uncomfortable and tender in equal parts.

We begin in a car, driving down a highway in France. There’s a little girl in the back seat humming, making engine noises with her mouth while her father drives. This irritates her father, so he turns up the radio. She hums louder. He turns up the radio more. She hums even louder. She starts kicking his seat. He endures all of it. And just as she’s unbuckled her seat belt and her father turns to make her put it back on, he has to swerve to avoid a car in the other lane, crashing into a concrete guardrail..

There’s surgery. The little girl (named Alexia) has a titanium plate inserted into her head at the site of a severe injury. It leaves her with a dramatic, looping scar outlining a hill of puckered flesh. When she finally leaves the hospital, she lets go of her mother’s hand and runs up to the family car, embracing it. Kissing it.

Years later, Alexia’s working as a dancer in what appears to be something between a car show and a fetish nightclub. Scantily-clad women writhe on and grind against various makes and models of cars, from sports cars to pickups to sedans with wild paint jobs. Men circulate throughout, looking, but not touching. The bouncers see to that. At the end of her shift, Alexia showers, changes, and walks back to her own car. A man waiting outside asks her for a selfie. Then for an autograph. She’s just trying to go home, and he keeps following her as she walks away. She walks faster and gets to her car before him. He apologizes, says he just wanted an autograph. Says that he is in love with her and even if she doesn’t feel the same way, maybe they could be friends. Says he wants to kiss her. Doesn't give her much say in the matter. He puts his hands on her head and pulls her toward him through her car window…

..and it ends badly. You get the sense that this isn’t the first time.

If you think you know where this is headed, you really don’t. There’s Alexia, her life with her parents, an unusual relationship with cars, and in the background, the news reels off the anniversaries of missing-persons cases and a recent rash of murders. We don’t get any explanation, just events that unfold and spill out with a sense of hasty improvisation, of someone making it up as they go along because their bridges are burning behind them. There’s not a lot of dialogue. Conversations are brief and mundane, but not meaningless or opaque. It’s a film that tells its story through action, rather than words, and we learn who these people are primarily through what they do, through a look or a pause. The result is a film that never feels predictable, that captures the moment where an already-unhappy life begins to go completely off the rails. Like a car in an uncontrollable skid - you know it’s going to come to a stop eventually, it’s just a matter of how ugly the crash is going to be when it does.

And it’s a hell of a ride. A big part of this film is the intersection of metal and flesh in contexts both mundane and bizarre. A frame is screwed into Alexia’s skull to keep her head steady, hair gets tangled up in body piercings, people jab themselves with hypodermics, metal and flesh come together in ways that are violent, ways that are sexual. Right alongside this is a very strong sense of the malleability of flesh (through surgery, piercing, medication, and violence, self-inflicted and otherwise) and just as the body is malleable, so is identity, so is gender, so are our relationships with each other. There isn’t so much a single thesis as a constant combination and recombination of these ideas in ways you wouldn’t expect.

But make no mistake, there is horror here. This is a very violent film, and the violence runs the gamut from the implied (one of the most chilling scenes in the film is one where someone just gets off a bus, but context is everything) to the blackly comic to the absolutely excruciating. With the malleability of flesh and its meeting with metal comes body horror as well, adjacent to films like Videodrome and Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and allusions to the vehicular fetishism of David Cronenberg’s Crash. But it’s as much about transformation as all of that as well - not just the body becoming something else (through means both commonplace and more exotic), but also people becoming other people, becoming the person someone else needs for us to be, in ways that aren’t always healthy. It’s what happens when - like Cronenberg so often did in his early films - you don’t so much set out to shatter those taboos as just sort of disregard them, and let differing ideas and experiences normally kept separate exist in the same space. The result is unsettling and surprisingly lyrical, as much about the humanity of relationships told through monstrosity (as in films like Spring and The Endless) as it is about inhumanity.

It's also visually striking in how all over the place it is. There are sequences saturated in purples or pinks or yellows, dingy spaces lit by harsh fluorescents, softly lit, slow-motion reveries, hard, overlit sequences drenched in lens flare, nighttime exteriors and the streetlights that provide a feeling of safety in unsafe places, fire and sunlight pouring through smoke, It’s all here in riotous, chameleonic fashion without ever feeling jarring or contrived. The music is equally mercurial, moving between pounding techno, synth-pop and old spirituals, especially working to underscore the complicated dynamics of gender, both rigid and fluid. All of it works together - the music, the cinematography, and striking imagery - to tell the story that the economical dialogue doesn’t exposit, and to present ideas for interrogation. What does it mean to have a body? What does it mean for metal to become part of the body? What does it mean to be male or female? What does it mean to be someone’s daughter? What does it mean to be someone’s son?

This is a film that defies easy explanation, is dreamlike and gritty by turns, and vividly evokes a world where barriers - between metal and flesh, between masculine and feminine, between family and strangers, all break down. It’s not every day that a horror film wins the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but I am completely unsurprised that this one did.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon