Horror In The High Desert: Know Your Limitations

Horror on a small budget can be tough. It’s not impossible by any means - see, for example, Creep, or The Blair Witch Project - but if you’re making the kind of film that’s going to need effects work, it’s really easy for that kind of thing to look as cheap as it actually is and be really unconvincing as a result. And when it’s unconvincing, it takes you out of the film. For my money, some of the best horror films - like any other film - are ones that suck you in so much that you sort of forget you’re watching a movie, and being reminded breaks that spell. And small-budget horror usually runs afoul of this to the extent that the filmmakers’ ambitions outstrip their budget. Monster movies are tough sells in general, but monster movies on a small budget are nigh-impossible to pull off. The limitations of budget translate into limitations around the kind of stories you can tell.

And so Horror In The High Desert - an uneven, but pleasantly surprising mockumentary - largely works to the extent it does because it not only works within its limitations, but actually uses its imitations to its advantage.

The film’s presented as a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of a young man named Gary Hinge. Gary lived in small-town Nevada, loved trains, hiking, and outdoor survival. And it was these last two that routinely took him way out into the middle of nowhere as part of his job, which is to map and survey remote areas for hikers to use as reference. To chart the uncharted so less-prepared others wouldn’t get lost. And it was on one of these hikes, that he just…vanished. He wasn’t a novice outdoorsman, he knew what he was doing. 

After three years of Gary being gone, his remaining friends and family have finally gotten some idea of what might have happened to him, and as the disclaimer that opens the film suggests, it’s not going to be pretty.

And that “warning, what you’re about to see is disturbing” is one of a few missteps here, but it’s not a fatal one. One of the things that betrays a lot of found-footage or mockumentary films is a tendency toward slickness - they’re supposed to be stories of real people, but all too often it’s clearly performance and scripted dialogue. They’re supposed to be capturing (at least in part) amateur footage of events, but all too often that gets cheated with cameras put in convenient places to capture shots a single consumer-grade camera couldn’t, or the point of view just gets forgotten entirely. Making films that are supposed to be something other than traditional films can be a safe bet from a budget standpoint, because you can cheat a lot with low-grade footage and you don’t have to worry about lighting setups or expensive camera equipment. But narratively, that kind of film is a lot harder than it looks, because we forgive all kinds of contrivances in regular films, but as soon as something is supposed to be “real,” those contrivances stick out like a sore thumb. Whether it’s a mockumentary or a more purely found-footage premise, you need to figure out the appropriate point of view and commit solidly to it, because otherwise believability goes right out the window.

And the first thing this film gets right is commitment to the point of view. Much like films like Howard’s Mill or Savageland, it looks like a true-crime documentary made by a small crew, aimed at the direct-to-streaming market. And it feels pretty damn convincing on that front. It’s clearly working from a modest budget but it rarely looks egregiously cheap, with production values consummate with a mid-level documentary. The music ranges from tastefully sentimental and forgettable to foreboding, with music stings to highlight the scary stuff. It’s a little on-the-nose in that regard, but that’s true to the form - the kinds of documentaries it’s aping aren’t subtle in the least. And the performances largely don’t feel like acting - they err on the side of understated, everyone seems like everyday folks, and they’re not always especially polished or articulate, but again, since the premise is that this is a documentary about something strange that happened in (very) small-town Nevada, it makes sense that even the professional journalist isn’t the most well-spoken person you’ve ever met. The dialogue reflects these characterizations, never really feeling glib or overly clever. The majority of the movie is a mix of talking-head interviews, archival video, and voiceover laid on top of footage of the Nevada desert, the rural blink-and-you-miss-it town where it takes place, and close-up footage of model trains, an attempt to capture the essence of who Gary was. So in that sense, the pretext is very believable and it’s easy to forget that it’s a work of fiction for most of its run time. 

The characters are largely believable as people - you’ve got Gary’s sister Beverly, racked with guilt over her brother’s disappearance, and Gary’s bewildered roommate Simon, who had no idea what sort of things Gary was up to, and who Beverly suspects had something to do with the disappearance. Peripheral to them are Gal, a local journalist who sees an opportunity for an exclusive not being covered by the big-city outlets, and Bill, a private investigator hired and extremely frustrated by Beverly, who keeps unwittingly interfering with the investigation. And at the center of it, Gary - a somewhat shy, awkward young man seen in archival footage, someone whose biggest passions are outdoor survival, exploration, and railroads. Someone who has a YouTube channel about outdoor survival and exploration, even though he’s not the most charismatic or natural performer ever. They’re all human beings, explored to varying degrees of depth, but none of them feel especially two-dimensional. It’s easy to buy into them as characters, as the kind of people whose lives get turned upside down by exactly this sort of situation.

So it looks right, and the people feel right, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, because these are the kind of details that other films of this type routinely fuck up. But there are problems with how the story plays out. Probably the biggest problems here are pacing and some of the choices made around advancing the narrative. Any crime documentary worth its salt knows how to tell a story. Usually you present the basic facts of the case, and then spend the length of the film drip-feeding hints at greater revelations, eventually dropping bombshells of one sort or another - someone’s hidden past or things they’ve been keeping secret, twists, facts that exclude the obvious culprit but make someone else look suspicious, things like that. And some of that happens here, but it happens fitfully - Gary was keeping secrets (as most people do), but they aren’t really explored - one is sort of brought up but then dropped almost immediately (it almost feels like they couldn’t afford another actor to flesh it out), another isn’t especially earth-shattering (though it is important for moving the story forward) and the way it’s presented it makes Beverly and Simon - the two people closest to Gary - look either like they didn’t actually know him that well at best, or kind of stupid and unobservant at worst. Tension between Gary and his sister over something that happened as children comes up, but doesn’t really go anywhere. Tension between Simon and Beverly gets brought up, but doesn’t really go anywhere. Bill says that Beverly “screwed everything up” (and indeed she did, to the point of evidence tampering) but it too is sort of glossed over, with little sense of how her mistake sets back the investigation. All of the pieces are there, but they’re sort of discarded as quickly as they’re introduced, as if the filmmakers knew they needed to be there, but not really why.

The pacing has problems on a broader structural level as well. A little more than two-thirds of the movie consists of interview footage and voiceovers, and though this is the stock in trade of this kind of documentary, it starts to feel a little inert by about the halfway point. The table-setting phase of the documentary, where we learn what happened and who all the players are, feels like it stretches out a little too long, the surprise revelations don’t mean much in the overall scheme of things, and each of the characters sort of exists in a vacuum relative to the others. Moreover, this film has a tendency to tell us how disturbing or unsettling or shocking something is without actually showing it to us for most of its running time. There’s a lot of variations on people telling us how bad something is instead of showing us the bad thing. It’s like we’re getting a lot of the important information second-hand, as if maybe the filmmakers didn’t have the budget to show something, so instead they had the characters describe it. And this, combined with two initial acts that have very little movement or action to them, starts to feel frustrating, as if we’re just going to get tease after tease with no payoff. 

But there is a payoff, and it does make good well enough on the first two acts. Gary’s last-known footage is recovered (and there’s even an explanation for how it was discovered, someplace where even some otherwise really good found-footage films drop the ball), and the majority of the third act is a tense sequence shot in infrared in the middle of the Nevada desert chronicling his last moments alive. It goes on maybe a touch too long, but it’s another place where the film’s limitations work for it. The footage is very much the footage of a single hand-held consumer-grade video camera, it’s not always pointed in exactly the right place, it spends a chunk of time pointed at the ground, and the stop-start nature of the filming heightens the tension nicely - every time the camera looks away, you dread what’s going to be there when it comes back, and infrared covers up any limitations to the practical effects for the most part. It lingers maybe a little too long toward the end, but I’m pretty sure it’s to a degree that only bothers me and won’t bother anyone else. So it does come good in the end, and that buys it a fair amount of goodwill.

On the other other hand, though, there’s an epilogue that undercuts some of the tension with an attempt to explain what we saw and a cautionary note about content creators not leaving well enough alone (though that’s certainly true to life too), and what seems like a hook for a sequel. It would have worked better with a much sparer ending and it would have worked better if the story didn’t spin its wheels for so long, but it plays like a documentary about actual people and an actual tragedy, and that’s not always the easiest thing to pull off. A quick look at the director’s entry on IMDB suggests his usual fare is the kind of low-budget horror films that miss the mark (at least according to people who post user reviews on IMDB, and we’re not exactly talking Cahiers du Cinema here), and apparently this film is the result of having to work around social distancing in the middle of the COVID pandemic, which is another set of limitations on top of budget. But if you’re trying to make a movie that isn’t in the traditional third-person mold, limitations aren’t just acceptable, they’re downright essential. Trying to cheat your way around those limitations really misses the point, and to the extent this film embraces them, it works a lot better than I expected it would.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Zhou: Family Obligations

Parent-child relationships show up a lot in horror movies. I mean, they also show up in dramas and comedies and martial arts films about the important of kindness and connection (seriously, go see Everything Everywhere All At Once if you haven’t yet, it’s great), but if you’re trying to evoke anxiety or dread or fear, putting a parent’s child in danger is a pretty effective way to do that. Every now and then you’ll get a film like The Omen or The Brood or Hereditary where the parent-child relationship is the horror, but even then it’s poking at the same nerve, just with a differently-shaped needle. 

One of the ways this plays out is by examining the lengths to which a parent will go to protect their child, and Zhou (Incantation) is a reasonably solid addition to that particular piece of the puzzle. It’s a little jumbled to start with, but it finds its way home in the end.

We begin with a collection of what appear to be home movies shot on phone cameras, and a voiceover asking us whether or not we believe in blessings - in the idea that our intentions can actually change outcomes, whether it’s wishing someone a happy birthday or safe travels, things like that. The voice argues that intentions do change outcomes, that our wishes have an effect. The voice belongs to Ronan Li, and she’s making a video because her daughter Dodo is very sick, and she’s trying to reach as many people as possible, to ask for our blessings, our good wishes. Her daughter is being harmed by the result of a mistake Ronan made six years ago, a mistake that resulted in a curse. If we watch the video, our good wishes can help Dodo get better, but there’s a catch: Watching the video might be dangerous to us, so we need to protect ourselves by fixing a holy symbol in our memory and reciting a protective chant.

The curse has a very long reach.

What follows is something that isn’t found-footage, exactly. It’s more like a mockumentary where the framing device is that we’re watching a video made by Ronan as…a warning? A plea for help? Both?...and the story is largely (though not exclusively) presented as footage collected from different sources - camcorders, phones, laptops, surveillance cameras, etc. In that sense it’s reminiscent of films like Noroi or Occult, presented as curated footage that documents something supernatural. It’s a little distracting when it breaks the conceit to show something from a conventional third-person perspective, but in general the storytelling is strong enough that it doesn’t become too disruptive, and it becomes a critical piece of the story by the end. When the film proper opens, Ronan has undergone inpatient treatment at a mental hospital after suffering severe trauma following a trip that she took with her boyfriend Dom and Dom’s cousin Yuan. They ran a paranormal investigation show called Ghost Busters (no relation to the New York-based Ghostbusters, presumably) and they were investigating a legend from the village where Dom grew up about a tunnel that must never be entered. We don’t find out right away exactly what happened, but whatever it was, Ronan took years to get over it, but she’s doing a lot better now, has a job and a home, and we join her as she’s regaining custody of Dodo, who has spent the last few years in foster care. 

So Ronan and Dodo get settled in, and right away things get weird. The film starts off strong with the curse’s evidence presented in striking fashion, going briskly from tragic coincidence to something more inexplicable over the course of the first two acts, but once the table is set, the decision to tell the story in what is largely a non-linear fashion dilutes the potential impact somewhat. There are roughly three timelines here - there’s the present, as Ronan is making the video, there’s the recent past, as she’s regained custody of Dodo and the proximal events that led up to the present, and there’s what happened six years before to incite all of this in the trip to the village. Part of the problem is that the time-jumps sometimes dilute the tension, another is that it’s not always immediately clear which timeline we’re watching right away. The end result is that the first two acts can be kind of confusing at times, which threatens to take us out of the movie. 

Which is unfortunate, because the moments in the first two acts when it does work, work very well. The film gets a lot out of very small things - unexplained noises, objects falling over, things suddenly changing position, Dodo talking to people who aren’t there, stuff like that. None of it is especially novel, but it’s all executed well in the moment, and the idea that this is curated footage, not raw footage, makes the staging easier to believe. The segments at home are shot through the limited field of view and limited light of a camcorder, so they benefit from the inherent spookiness of a house in the middle of the night, the single light source barely holding its own against the shadows and what horrible revelations might lurk there. It's pretty strongly diegetic - the film doesn’t really use music apart from some ambient stings and chanting, but that’s about it. Moreover, unlike a lot of found-footage or quasi-found-footage films, it pays attention to the limits of its sources and knows when and how to use silent action effectively - there are segments where no sound is available but we get everything we need from the footage, and it’s more effective for it. The filmmakers also avoid the usual viewfinder-vision cliché and accomplish some very striking and impressive effects sequences without ever breaking the conceit. The cinematography is suitably all over the place, depending on the source, but the film generally gets a lot of mileage out of dark, grungy spaces fitfully lit from a very restricted field of view. And the segments from six years before work well too - the village they visit feels strange right from the get-go, and little bits of business in the background, barely glimpsed, do nothing to alleviate that. Whatever they stumbled into feels wrong, and their insistence on pushing further builds a lot of dread because it’s clear whatever is going to happen, it isn’t going to be good. The film keeps coming back to whatever happened that night throughout the film, getting closer and closer to the awful truth, saving the worst right before the very end. I think if there’d been a more consistent use of title cards or another way to signify which part of the story we were in at any given moment, it wouldn’t have been quite so confusing.

But this is much less of a problem in the third act, when we’ve got a pretty good idea (though not good enough, as the ending reveals) of what’s going on and what Ronan is faced with, and it feels much more cohesive. At this point, as things get worse and worse and it’s clear that they’re not going to get better, the supernatural elements are supplemented by Ronan’s harrowing experience as a mother watching her child get sicker and sicker and being helpless to do anything about it. She’s trying to do what’s best for her daughter, but the right thing is sometimes the hardest thing, and you agonize right along with her. I’m reminded in some ways of The Exorcist, and Chris’ fruitless attempts to determine what’s wrong with Regan, while Regan clearly suffers. The ordering of things makes much more sense here, so even though there’s still bouncing back and forth in time, it’s easier to follow and so the dread that’s been there intermittently (though strongly for all of that) throughout really starts to build and sustain itself as the final pieces of the story fall into place.

It’s a movie about what a mother will do to ensure that her child is safe, healthy, and happy, the sacrifices that a mother will make to stand between her child and the predations of an implacable curse, and in this I see nods to Ringu and Dark Water in ways that riff on them without being blatant imitations, there’s even sort of a William Castle vibe to it in some ways that would absolutely spoil the film but give it  a nice punch in an ending that might be a trifle overlong, but comes good on what it’s promised the whole time and leaves you with something indelible, as simultaneously inexplicable and awful as the end of The Blair Witch Project. Between the people of the village, and Ronan, the film says that there are some things you do because you’re family, things that only your family can be responsible for, things that make you family whether you want to be or not, and things that family requires of you, and in this film they all exact a terrible cost.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Messiah Of Evil: So Crazy It Just Might Work

Something I’m beginning to notice is that once you start getting into older horror films (like, say, from the late 1960s onward) that aren’t the touchstone classics of their time, shit starts getting really weird. This isn’t just true for horror films - I can remember seeing a revival of a 1965 mystery called Who Killed Teddy Bear? that was easily one of the strangest, campiest things I’d ever witnessed on the big screen - but I’m starting to really notice it in horror films. Go back to the 1950s and mostly it’s stuff that has become quaint, go forward into the mid 1980s and, with some exceptions, things get formulaic for awhile. But it sort of feels to me like there’s a sweet spot from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s where the rules hadn’t really codified yet, and all kinds of oddities got made.  

And Messiah Of Evil is absolutely an example of exactly that. It’s a strange little fever dream of a film that, despite obvious shortcomings, manages to be surprisingly compelling.

It doesn’t waste any time, opening without any context at all on a man running through what appears to be suburban backyards, terribly bothered by something. He acts almost like he’s overheated, pausing to let a sprinkler douse him. He’s lying down on someone’s lawn, and a young girl comes out of the house, looks at him curiously…and slashes his throat with a straight razor out of nowhere. Smash cut to the title card. Does this man have anything to do with what follows? Kind of? Does the girl ever appear again? Nope. Does it matter? Nope. It’s played with such wild-eyed earnestness that you can tell all bets are going to be off. This cuts to the blurry, washed-out, backlit figure of a woman wandering down a hallway and a shrill, panicky monologue about how "they" are coming and how no one will hear you scream. So that's...no, that's still pretty fucking weird. 

From that, we cut to a young woman named Arletty. She’s driving into the Southern California town of Point Dume, looking for her father, an artist named Joseph Lang. There’s a voiceover from her as she drives, about how she and her father grew apart over time, until their only communication was the occasional exchange of letters, and how she hasn’t heard from him for months. She’s concerned, and wants to know what’s wrong. When she arrives in Point Dume, she finds her father’s beachfront combination home and studio abandoned. He left his diary behind, however, and in it he writes of being plagued by nightmares, of the town and all its residents being gripped by a horrible darkness.

In the diary, he begs Arletty not to come looking for him.

This is a film made in the United States by American filmmakers, and it’s shot on location in Southern California, but watching it, nobody would blame you if you mistook it for a lost Lucio Fulci film. There’s a lot of the same gonzo strangeness here that The Beyond had, the same lack of subtlety and willingness to just put something absolutely bizarre up on the screen in nearly every scene, whether it makes strict sense for the story or not. There’s nothing really naturalistic about this film at all, but an obviously shoestring budget also gives it a certain evocative rawness that you don’t really see much anymore outside of attempts at homage. It’s weird to compare something favorably to Manos: The Hands Of Fate, but it’s got that film’s same visual sense that you’re watching something between a community theater production and home movie from a parallel nightmare dimension. The acting’s better, but the dialogue is just as affected and melodramatic to the point of surrealism.

There isn’t a single conversation or interaction in this film that feels normal or natural (there’s a sequence in an art gallery - run by a blind woman - that’s especially bizarre for no apparent reason), whether it’s how people talk, how they hold themselves, the way they look at each other, everything’s just flat out weird. There’s no solid ground for the viewer, so there’s a low-level discomfort even in the moments where nothing’s actually happening. So it’s got Italian horror’s tendency to go pedal-to-the-metal strange, and  it’s also got Italian horror’s use of vivid color down pat - there’s a sequence in a movie theater that’s especially striking in this regard, and a moment toward the end that uses the paint in Joseph’s studio to create something that feels really unnerving without relying on gore. It’s not afraid of using light and color and garishly cheap-looking blood, it’s not afraid to hold a shot a little longer than you’d expect or to cut away at an odd moment, and like those classic Italian horror films, it’s all played so straight that it blows right past campiness into something almost operatic. I’m usually partial to more naturalistic films, but this one’s so relentlessly weird that it works. It just absolutely full-tilt commits to the strangeness, which is what you need for a film like this.

All of this is contrasted with settings that are - with one important exception - mundanely suburban, which just further contributes to the whole thing feeling like a nightmare, where people don’t talk like people, where the surroundings are familiar but somehow off, where everyone carries themselves as if they are harbingers of some underlying dread, not obviously stated but palpable nonetheless. Joseph’s combination house and studio is located in what might be a former church, and mostly consists of a single large, open space dominated by huge canvases of somber crowds of people and commercial interiors. At times it feels much larger than it actually is because it’s hard to tell where the actual space ends and the spaces depicted on some of the canvases begin, and the result is often disorienting on top of whatever else is happening in the scene, not to mention all of the silent, impassive faces staring back at you. Work areas and living areas are scattered throughout as well, so the whole environment feels itself like something from a dream, in the strange logic of a place that is both your bedroom but also a studio but also somehow dropped smack dab in the middle of a public area.

And then in contrast to this, you have everywhere else in town. Point Dume is a small town on the coast in Southern California, near Malibu, and it’s as everyday as that would suggest - there are grocery stores, movie theaters, motels, the whole lot, and by itself it’s not especially spooky, but it’s also largely deserted. It’s likely that the filmmakers got permission to shoot where they did in the middle of the night, which would explain the strange empty feeling, but it’s really effective. You’ve got this small suburban town in sunny California, right on the beach, and though nothing seems shuttered or abandoned, there’s nobody around. The lights are on, but nobody’s home, and this adds to the feeling of being stuck in a strange dream. At least, until there are people there, and then terrible things happen. That they’re happening in spaces like movie theaters and grocery stores just adds to the strangeness of it all.

The plot itself is pretty bare-bones - woman comes to a small town looking for her father, discovers the town has some strange, terrible secret, and the residents start bumping people off in ways that are presumably gruesome, given that most of the violence occurs off-camera or through clever editing. But somehow that’s worse, because either we don’t see what happens and people just vanish, or we see the aftermath, awful and sudden  It’s an interesting counterpoint to Dead & Buried, a film that would come along about ten years later, assaying similar Lovecraftian subject matter (town with a dark, occult secret) in a similar location (a small coastal town), but where Dead & Buried was more gothic in its approach - a fogbound fishing village in New England - this is sunny everyday California, and though Dead & Buried had its strange (and to its credit, very strange) moments, it was a much more grounded affair than this. It felt sinister, where this film feels almost hallucinatory. The result is a film that doesn’t always (or even usually) cohere, but is very rarely dull.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Rabid:The Social Disease, Redux

I’ve written here before about the films of David Cronenberg, and how they’re sort of hard to talk about while separating the film from the filmmaker. I try to keep my focus on the film itself as a finished product, since I think it’s easy for horror fandom - like any fandom - to pay more attention to the personalities behind a film than to the film itself. But as I’ve said before, it’s really difficult to do this with David Cronenberg’s films because there’s such a clear thematic through-line to his early work, and it’s in service of a vision that isn’t really like anything else in horror film. You sort of have to talk about his horror films not as horror films, but as David Cronenberg films.

I’ve looked at some of his early work here already - Shivers, The Brood, and Videodrome - and now, having seen Rabid, I think it’s probably best described in context as sort of a transitional film. It’s not one of his stronger films, in that it suffers from some of the same narrative shortcomings as Shivers (which preceded it) but doesn’t quite have that film’s audacity.

We open on a young couple - Rose and Hart - getting ready to go for a motorcycle ride in the Canadian countryside. All seems to be well, but they come around a bend and suddenly there’s a bickering family in a van stalled out across the middle of the road. They go over the hood of the van, Hart is thrown clear and Rose is trapped under the wreckage of the motorcycle.

Elsewhere - not too far down the road - is a plastic surgery clinic run by Drs. Dan and Roxanne Keloid. They’re meeting with Murray, their business partner, who’s trying to interest them  in the idea of franchising their clinic, turning plastic surgery into a mass consumer product. Dan is very resistant to the idea - he doesn’t relish the idea of being thought of as the “Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery,” but before anything can get settled, they’re informed of the accident by one of their recuperating patients, who saw the accident play out while they were outside getting some fresh air. Dan orders the clinic ambulance to provide aid, since the nearest full-service hospital is about three hours away in Montreal. Hart’s injuries are serious, but not life-threatening, so he’s triaged to get sent to the nearest hospital. But Rose is in a bad way - severely burned along one side of her body and losing a lot of blood. Dan makes the decision to perform surgery on Rose at his clinic, since she wouldn’t likely last long enough to make it to the city.

Once she’s stabilized, Dan and his assistant start in on an extensive series of skin grafts. He decides that they’re going to use an experimental technique in which the grafts are reverted back to what he calls “neutral field grafts” - that is, the cells of the graft become unspecified, so that they’ll take on the properties of whatever part of the body they’re grafted to. It’s an untested technique, but Dan’s confident that it will work. Flash-forward about a month, and Rose has been kept in a medically induced coma at the clinic to facilitate healing. She wakes suddenly, panicked and disoriented. When someone comes to check on her, she grabs him and…something…snakes out from underneath her arm and attaches itself to him.

Apparently, some of the cells decided to become something…new.

As it turns out, Rose now possesses an entirely new organ - a stinger-tipped sucker - that retracts from inside a puckered hole in her armpit. As it also turns out, Rose is now entirely dependent on human blood to survive. Animal blood doesn’t work, as she discovers the hard way. And as if that weren’t bad enough, this new organ of hers has some nasty side effects, including memory loss in the person affected, an inhibition of their clotting factor, and…oh yeah, the rapid onset of a rabies-like virus that leads to extreme aggression, then coma, then death. And it’s easily spread via saliva. So there’s really two stories here - there’s Rose and her new, increasingly untenable situation, which is a somewhat novel spin on vampirism, and the rapid spread of the rabies-like virus. Rose is sort of a Typhoid Mary, spreading the virus when she feeds, but not suffering its effects herself. Either one of these could have been enough to carry a movie on its own, but the problem is that combining them into a single narrative means neither gets explored or developed to the degree they could be. 

The epidemic piece is the more evocative of the two, ramping up in the background as the film goes on and making for some striking individual moments (especially toward the end, which is pretty much a punch in the gut), but I think epidemic stories really need to have an observable progression to really work - think about the scenes from a film like Contagion that illustrate the ease with which a disease can spread, showing how all it takes is one person in the wrong place to start an exponential growth in cases, and here that’s never really clearly charted. At a certain point in the movie, all of a sudden there are people in the middle of a major city showing symptoms without a clear indication of how it got there, given that everything started in a small clinic hours away. It’s emphasized that the virus incubates in a matter of hours and people suffering from it have a diminished capacity (and go comatose and die pretty quickly) so it’s tough to see how it just crops up someplace when we never really see how it travels there, or how it’s able to spread so quickly when the hosts don’t live for all that long. Rose spends most of the film confined to the clinic, so that’s where most of the cases crop up, but then enough time passes that the people from the clinic who get it should already be rabid and/or dead before they even make it to the city. It happens off-screen to enough of an extent that when it’s clear that it’s reached Montreal in a big way, it seems like it came out of nowhere.

Rose’s story is likewise underexplored, and suffers from inconsistent characterization. Rose wakes up from her coma unable to subsist on anything except human blood, and over the course of the film she bounces back and forth between someone who’s confused and afraid, a cool, calculating predator, and someone in denial about what she’s doing and what effect she’s having on the world around her. It’s not really a progression, it just alternates as is necessary for any particular scene, and apart from it feeling disjointed, it’s all very much just a collection of scenes - she’s over here, now she’s over there, and pretty much every scene she’s in boils down to her infecting someone, so it doesn’t take long to become sort of predictable. That Rose doesn’t really exhibit much in the way of horror or regret or disgust or confusion in those moments, slipping instead into predator mode, doesn’t really help - for a good chunk of the movie she’s less of a character than a plot device. 

Her story is pretty much a monster story, but unlike Cronenberg’s later film, the remake of The Fly, we don’t get much insight at all into her feelings about what she’s become apart from some denial at the end. The mechanism of her vampirism is the most novel thing here, and it’s of a piece with Cronenberg’s particular view of biology as articulated in his other films, but it’s never explored the way it even is in Shivers, and apart from the analogy to sex (penetration, a sense of satiation), it’ not nearly as audacious as how Shivers reduced sex to a mechanical impulse, devoid not just of intimacy but also of conscious will, how The Brood used the idea of birth as an actualization of unresolved rage and trauma, or Videodrome’s cold, clinical look at the intersections of flesh and technology. There’s some of that here with the experimental plastic surgery, but that’s an angle that goes largely unexplored - people willing to go under the knife over and over again to reshape their flesh to increasingly specific requirements seems like it’d be fertile ground, but it barely matters here.

It does have its moments, mostly around the steadily worsening epidemic in Montreal, which is evocative in some ways of Night of the Living Dead, and things like being required to carry around vaccination cards certainly hit different now than they would have even three years ago, but they’re isolated moments. The film itself suffers throughout from the same choppiness that Shivers had, fragmented into a collection of discrete scenes that don’t really flow together. The end result is that a routine starts to develop, where scenes about Rose alternate with scenes about the epidemic, and its most interesting ideas go unexplored enough that really all you end up with is a vampire movie with a somewhat novel spin on how the vampirism works. It was only his second feature-length film, and like Shivers, the pieces are all here - the malleability of biology, amoral appetites, technology and modern living having unintended consequences, threatening to separate us from our humanity - but out of all of Cronenberg’s work, they’re at their least realized here.

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