Skinamarink: Through A Child’s Eyes

I have this vivid memory from when I was very young, like about four years old or so. I was falling asleep, and in a dozing half-asleep/half-awake state I very distinctly saw a hand creep up over the edge of my bed, feel around a little, and then withdraw back under the bed. I did not scream, I did not freak out. I did, however, spend the next several years of my life - like, longer than you’d think - sleeping at the edge of my bed with my arm draped over the side, waiting for the hand to come back so I could catch it. So maybe I am at heart one of those idiots from a mediocre slasher movie who gets offed right away when they go to check out the mysterious noise.

But the point isn’t my foolhardiness in the face of something that should have terrified me, the point is that childhood is fertile ground for nightmares and the nightmarish. At a young enough age, everything is still fairly unfamiliar (and the unfamiliar is scary), the difference between the real and imaginary is more porous than it is in adulthood, and everything is bigger and louder than you. It’s a time when feelings of safety and security are tenuous and nighttime is when the monsters come out. Everything looks scarier, more sinister in the dark.

And this is why Skinamarink works as well as it does. It’s a dense, cryptic, almost impressionistic recreation of what it means to be small and helpless in the dark, where the monsters are. And if you’re receptive to what it’s trying to do, it will get under your skin and stay there.

The film opens with a title card that just says “1995” before diving into a series of static shots of the interior of a house. We hear muffled voices of adults and children, only catching snatches of what they’re saying. It seems like the day is winding down, and we’re able to gather that in this house, Kevin (four years old) and his sister Kaylee live with their mom and dad. It’s bedtime, so Kevin and Kaylee get tucked in. We don’t actually see their parents, and we don’t see much of Kaylee and Kevin either. Everything happens off-camera, accompanied by the same fitful voiceover. Night falls and everything goes dark, until Kevin wakes up in the middle of the night - as little kids sometimes do, to use the bathroom or get some water - to discover the house otherwise empty, lit only by the still-flickering television. It’s just him and Kaylee. His mother is gone, his father is gone.

The front door and all the windows are missing too.

There’s no real story to speak of - it’s the absolute definition of a mood piece. Kevin and Kaylee wander around a house emptied of adults, and you get the sense that at first it’s kind of fun - they can stay up all they want, watch cartoons, play with their toys, but soon enough they can tell something is very wrong, maybe more wrong than they can really appreciate. Everything is experienced from the point of view of small children who have woken up in the middle of the night. This extends to the camerawork, which is very low to the ground. Furniture and doors tower over us, and rooms perfectly normal in the daylight become something far more threatening when it’s just an open door with darkness yawning beyond it.

So what we get is a visual study of a house at night, all odd angles and stark light sources and garish colors and chiaroscuro, all painted on thickly grained, almost pointillist film with veins of scratches and artifacts running through it. The end result is that even the shadows - of which there are numerous long, unblinking shots - feel alive with something seething and tenebrous. You’d almost swear you can glimpse things in it. And sometimes there are. Sound design is expertly deployed, with long stretches of silence interrupted by bangs, clatters, and bursts of white noise, with the occasional bit of diegetic cartoon music for relief, but even that is scratchy and distant. What dialogue we get is very sparse, delivered in whispered voiceover  with the occasional subtitle, often from unnervingly close in the mix as if the person speaking is just behind us. A house at night, to a small child, is a whole other world, and one that isn’t very friendly and everything - the cinematography, the sound, the pacing- captures that very primal fear very well. It’s the fear of what’s in the dark, what’s under the bed, the sounds coming from upstairs. In this context, a simple request like “come down to the basement” becomes laden with dread. It’s not a film you watch as much as it is one you open yourself up to and let carry you wherever it’s going, which is assuredly nowhere good.

It’s a very slow burn, but a very sure one. The almost-glacial pacing means it does sag a little, but not as much as you’d think, instead working as a slow boil that has you thinking it’s just something odd and quirky at first, but goes on to layer and accumulate lots of small details until something slightly strange curdles into something downright malevolent. About thirty minutes in I realized I had to keep unclenching my hands because they kept involuntarily balling into fists, and when the film finally ended, I sagged and sighed with relief because it was over - not because it was bad, but because I finally felt some respite from the constant knot of tension my entire body was coiling into. There’s no real way to anticipate what’s going to happen from moment to moment, and a lot of the shots are the kind that in a more conventional horror movie would be a prelude to a predictable jump scare. Here, you respond to the framing but it just keeps you there, this thrumming of anxiety that won’t go away.  And all of the credits are at the front of the movie instead of the end, so when it ends we’re even sort of denied the relief of that cooldown period while the credits are rolling, that feeling that it’s okay, it’s over now. It just ends, and we have to deal with it, no comfort extended.

Everything about it - the sound, the cinematography, how scenes are staged, the occasional subtitles - conspires to create a feeling of wrongness, like we’re privy to something very private that was never meant to be seen by other people. In this, even though it’s a very different film in a number of ways, it reminds me of Begotten - nothing is explained, there isn’t really a story, visuals are ambiguous and primitive, so like that film it feels like something cursed, something that shouldn’t exist or be capable of being captured on film. We don’t get details, just hints and allusions and vague shapes that nonetheless accumulate into something very unsettling. It’s not for everyone - ironically its simplicity means it requires your full attention and engagement, and if you like watching horror films for adrenaline rushes in a safe, predictable environment, you’re probably going to think this is dumb and boring. But if you can open yourself to its very strange wavelength, it’s one hell of an experience.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Phantasm: The Undertaker’s New Clothes

 I always feel a little uneasy when I plan on tackling something that’s considered a classic in one way or another, especially when it’s something I’ve never seen before. There’s always the concern that a longtime favorite won’t have held up, but when something I’ve never seen before has a history and reputation and a devoted following and it doesn’t click for me, well…

…well, then you get Phantasm. It’s a definite cult classic, spawning multiple sequels and firmly embedded in the horror lexicon. Years ago I watched it (or tried to) and I remember feeling confused and underwhelmed enough that I don’t think I finished it. But that was a long time ago, my tastes have broadened, and it’s a gap in my cinematic education. But having seen it now, I find myself very confused by the adoration for this film, because I really don’t think it works.

It opens on a man and a woman, in a graveyard, engaging in what I think is supposed to be sex. It’s tough to tell, because they aren’t really doing the things you expect from a couple having sex, like expressing enthusiasm, or moving. The man mumbles something about how good it was, in a tone of voice you usually associate with falling asleep. But suddenly the woman has a knife! And she stabs him! For just a moment, her face is replaced by that of a gaunt, unsmiling old man. On to the next scene. The man who we just saw getting stabbed was Tommy, and his friends Jody and Reggie meet outside the funeral home adjacent to the cemetery where Tommy met his end to discuss his passing (“hell of a way to break up a trio”) and the upcoming service (“I just don’t get off on funerals, man. They give me the creeps”). Jody’s thinking about leaving town, but he has his little brother Mike to think of. They lost their parents in a car accident, and ever since, Mike’s had real abandonment issues, sticking to Jody like glue. Jody told Mike to stay home because the funeral would be upsetting, and so Mike sneaks out to the cemetery (on a very loud dirt bike) and hides in the woods to spy on the funeral through a pair of binoculars. You know, like you do. And once the service is over and the mourners have left, a tall thin man comes up to the grave, grabs the casket as if it didn’t weigh a thing, and loads it into the hearse.

It's the man we glimpsed while Tommy was dying.

So a sad young boy with abandonment issues and creepy voyeuristic tendencies discovers that strange things are afoot at the local funeral home, and after that it’s all over the place. There’s no real story to speak of, this is a movie where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing happens with varying levels of abruptness. It’s one of those movies that’s so cheap and so clumsy that it attains a level of surrealism -see also Messiah Of Evil and Carnival Of Souls - but unlike those films, it never really manages to develop much of an atmosphere or mood, so all you’re left with is one what-the-fuck moment after another, and if anything the cheapness and clumsiness undercuts a lot of the horror, rendering what should be tense, eerie moments comical.

In between scenes of Mike and Reggie and Jody talking in various combinations and a puzzling interlude with an ostensibly blind and mute fortune teller, there are a couple of nightmare sequences that, to be fair, have a certain raw vitality to them, and the strange things afoot at the local funeral home are certainly very strange - whatever you think is going on, you’re probably wrong - and events go places you wouldn’t expect if you were going into the film blind. But then the action stops so Jody and Reggie can play a quick song out of nowhere. A tense chase scene involves an ice cream truck and is thus scored by an especially tinkly version of “Three Blind Mice.” Mike interrupts a potentially tense scene by literally running through it hollering at the top of his lungs, There’s little sense of continuity and no sense of narrative flow or rising tension, and that combined with wooden acting and beyond-wooden dialogue, consistently cheap art direction, effects and set design, all has the potential to lend everything the sort of gritty strangeness you’d need for the film to get over. It really does have that weird fever-dream vibe, but some of the choices made here…well, it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be intentionally comic or not. The result is a film that’s hard to take it seriously even on its own level, or even to meet the movie halfway. It feels like store-brand giallo, or the kind of film out of which Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes an absolute meal.

It does have its moments, albeit few and far between. There are some effective visuals - the antagonist is a tall, thin, unsmiling undertaker who cuts a striking presence and seems to be everywhere at once, and he’s responsible for the moments when things do work. There are some other interesting visual choices here and there - washes of bright red for a particular point of view, a moment in an antique store with an old photograph that’s effortlessly dreamlike and unsettling - but there’s too few of these scattered too thinly throughout to really feel like more than missed opportunity. And so it’s really frustrating and baffling for me, trying to find the film’s appeal as a horror film. I can understand its appeal as a weird bad movie, but it’s given the reverence of something like Halloween or Night Of The Living Dead and I just don’t get it. It’s certainly striking for its time - it was released close enough to Halloween but far away enough from A Nightmare On Elm Street that I can see how could really make an impression on someone who had no idea what to expect. The rules hadn’t been codified yet. But it’s hard enough to get past the flaws now that the gap between the film I saw and the reputation it has me doubting my own sanity a bit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

The Empty Man: Image And Substance

“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long”

        - T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Marketing is a hell of a thing. I get that you need to on some level convince audiences to come see your movie, and part of doing that is trying to convince them that it’s going to be good. I don’t think I’m offering any penetrating insight on that front, but goddamn is it annoying when the marketing for a film frames it as one type of film when it’s really another. Maybe I’m still feeling burned by discovering the hard way almost thirty years ago that Muriel’s Wedding was not, in fact, a romantic comedy about a young woman’s love for Abba, but The Empty Man is marketed as yet another movie about a bunch of kids who mess with a Bloody Mary-style urban legend and get more than they bargained for. And it’s not that.

Well, it’s not not that, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a brooding, unsettling journey into something much bigger and darker than that, and it’s a lot smarter than its ostensible premise might lead you to believe.

The film opens on four friends taking a hiking vacation in Bhutan. They’re trekking through remote villages and up into the mountains. It’s slow going, and just when they’ve gotten far away from the nearest village, one of them takes a tumble down a crevasse. He’s not okay, and there’s a huge snowstorm coming in. They find shelter in an abandoned house and things…start to get strange. They don’t end well.

An indeterminate amount of time later, in Webster Mills, Missouri, James Lasombra is living the life of a man whose wife and child are gone. Long hours at his store selling security equipment, an especially depressing birthday dinner by himself at a Mexican chain restaurant, rattling around inside a house too big for one person. It isn’t clear right away what happened to them, but whatever it was, there’s a lot of tiptoeing around it between him and Nora, his neighbor. As it turns out, Nora’s daughter has gotten involved with some new-age self-help group and has apparently discovered the secret to transcendence. You know, like you do when you’re young. And then she disappears. Local law enforcement isn’t rushing to do anything, though, because Nora’s daughter is 18 and appears to have packed up and taken a bunch of her clothes and possessions. Nothing about this says foul play, and she’s old enough to make her own decisions. But Nora feels like something’s wrong, and James - who used to be a police officer- agrees to do some digging.

Starting with the phrase “The Empty Man made me do it,” written in blood on the mirror.

For a film that’s supposed to be about a bunch of teens running afoul of an urban legend, it’s pretty audacious in its construction. The prologue in Bhutan is about the length of a short movie on its own - to the point that I paused to check that I had the right film - and it puts some pieces into place that the film takes its sweet time to pay off. In fact, that’s probably one of the film’s bigger strengths, that it’s not afraid to take its time. It rarely feels like it’s dragging or spinning its wheels, but it is a very deliberately paced movie, very careful and spare. There’s not a lot of dialogue, mostly short, economical conversations that don’t get too stagey, and the performances are consistently on the low-key side of believable. It uses a lot of shots with little to no dialogue to communicate details - the sequence where James spends his birthday by himself in a Mexican restaurant is a great example. It’ s both comic and deeply sad and works as an economical sketch of what his life is like, even sneaking in some details that become more important later. There are a lot of little character touches like this, and the film is especially good about doing exposition through glimpsed details and asides, the kind of exchanges people with a shared past actually have, fragmentary flashbacks that feel like shards of past intruding on the present. It's exposition inferred rather than laid out plain and contrived.

It’s also not what you’d call a loud movie, in the sense that it doesn’t really go for jump-scares or melodrama. There are moments of violence, but they’re largely brief and sudden, otherwise unaccompanied by any fanfare, over as quickly as they begin. The score is mostly cold ambience, like a winter wind and the cracking of icicles, and it’s a shadowy film - there are a lot of single light sources creating oases in the middle of darkness, people moving in and out of light. It’s less concerned with scary moments than it is a constant, sinister hum, a feeling that something isn’t quite right. This isn’t a movie that jumps up and screams in your face, this is a movie that sneaks up from behind you, leans over and whispers terrible things in your ear. The quiet, spare, approach and deliberate pacing mean it gradually unspools, taking a winding path where gradual recollection and revelation play out against a landscape that feels like a trip down a rabbit hole - we’re in Bhutan, then we’re in Missouri, a hiking trip goes wrong, then a bunch of kids start going missing, there’s an urban legend involved, and that somehow opens up into something else entirely, like James wandering impossibly deeper and deeper into the bowels of an old building downtown, these strange secrets stretching farther than anyone would expect. And it just keeps twisting and spiraling into some pretty unexpected places - there are nods to postmodernism, Tibetan mysticism, cosmic horror, and it hangs together well, self-assured and quietly chilling.

On the downside, the deliberate pacing extends even to the end, which could have been tighter - it’s long enough from the big reveal to its culmination that by the time it gets where it’s going, a lot of the impact has been lost and it feels more like a foregone conclusion than anything else. In that sense, it kind of ends not with a bang, but a whimper. But the ride to get there is surprisingly good - smart and restrained and atmospheric as all get-out. I often find myself watching otherwise disappointing movies and thinking how much better their basic premise could have been in better hands. This time I came away feeling like I’d seen what could have been a really tired, obvious premise done really really well, like a gourmet version of a White Castle slider. The marketing promises junk food, but you get cuisine.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Antlers: Sometimes The Monsters Are Real

 “We pray for the children…

… who never get dessert,

who watch their parents watch them die,

who have no safe blanket to drag behind,

who can’t find any bread to steal,

who don’t have any rooms to clean up,

whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,

whose monsters are real.”

                         - Ina J. Hughes, Prayer For The Children

Scary movies are often intended as allegories, addressing real-life monstrosities through mythical monsters. From something as intimate as grief to as sweeping as war, fictional monsters let us safely explore things that might hit a little too close to home otherwise. Of course, it seems like in the last few years the commingling of real and fictional monsters has become the province of “elevated horror” or “post-horror,” or “what people who’ve been looking down their noses at horror all this time came up with when they ran across films well-made enough that they couldn’t dismiss them out of hand.”

Okay, that got away from me. And it’s certainly not the first time I’ve effused about good films that examine real and fictional horrors in parallel. The point is that Antlers is another film in that tradition, a grim and somber story about natural and supernatural monstrosity. It stumbles at the finish line somewhat, but for most of its running time it’s pretty compelling.

Not that you’d know it from the opening title card, a bit about how mankind has pillaged the earth and awoken a malevolent spirit. It’s ham-fisted and totally unnecessary. But once we’re past that, there’s a little boy, playing in what appears to be the wreckage of an abandoned work site. He’s passing the time while his father takes care of some business, and soon enough makes his way back to the pickup truck. His dad cautions him about wandering off alone and tells him they’re almost finished. And so dad heads back into what turns out to be an abandoned mine, he and his brother wearing respirators as they clear out beakers, blowtorches, empty cold medicine boxes, all the hallmarks of bathtub chemistry of a certain type. But then there’s a noise, coming from further down the tunnel. It sounds like some kind of wild animal. We don’t get to see what it is, but it gets at them, badly.

We cut to the boy still waiting in the truck. And waiting, and waiting.

This film is basically the story of Cispus Falls, Oregon, a small town in the perpetually overcast Pacific Northwest. It’s a town the color of a bruise, a town where the mining company packed up and left, taking all the jobs with them, leaving the people to fend for themselves. It’s a place where it seems like almost everyone does everything with a sense of weary resignation and doesn’t aspire to much more than getting by. Julia Meadows is a recent arrival, teaching at the one school in town. She grew up here, had a really hard life here, ran and didn’t look back. Except now some unspecified setbacks in California have brought her right back. She’s living with her brother - the town’s sheriff - and it seems to be a fraught, cautious relationship. They spend a lot of time tiptoeing around what happened when they were kids. Until they don’t. Julia’s frustrated that she can’t get the kids to engage with her - she knows their situation, and it’s the knowing that frustrates her. She knows how badly they need some ray of light. There’s one kid who especially concerns here - Lucas. Keeps showing up in the same clothes, has trouble focusing, gets bullied a lot. He draws really unsettling picture of monsters in the dark.

He's the kid from the truck in the beginning.

So it’s the story of land poisoned by mining and a dying town poisoned by despair. Both give birth to horrible things. Cispus Falls is a bleak place - drug labs in abandoned mining tunnels, another eviction or foreclosure every week, all the things that go on behind closed doors, parents who homeschool their children so they can mule drugs or so the teachers don’t smell the meth on their clothes from their parents. Malnutrition, poverty, abuse of every type, a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness. It’s a town with a lot of pain, and that pain’s been taken out on its children, as it was taken out on their parents, as it was taken out on their grandparents, and so on. It’s a place that was broken long ago. There’s no shortage of real monsters here. And sometimes our real-world monstrosities coalesce into otherworldly ones, as if the earth itself came alive to protest our abuses. In that respect, the town is well-realized as a character in and of itself. Even the sunny days here feel drained of anything good. 

This is complemented by a largely understated approach to the narrative - wordless looks and terse flashbacks do a lot of storytelling here, and though the gaps aren’t hard to fill in, it’s a film that mostly trusts its audience. I say mostly, because there is the occasional bit of exposition-y dialogue (and some bigger problems around this toward the end), but for the most part it’s a story told carefully and deliberately, a bit at a time, without a lot of histrionics or hysterics. This restraint extends to a score that is mostly ambient, just there enough to color the scene, and a palette primarily consisting of muddy grays and browns, with the occasional cold fluorescent light of a corner market, and a lot of desaturation in the color. There’s occasional sunshine, but not for very long, and the even more occasional breathtaking panorama of forest or mountains to break up the sad squalor of this town the mining company forgot. It’s inhabited by characters who are largely believable, though some of them get developed more than others, and though none of them feel like sketches, some people do feel like they’re in and out of the story a little more quickly than is ideal. Even if the dialogue is sometimes a little too on-the-nose, the relationships and dynamics between people feel real.

This pervasive foreboding is helped along by thoughtful pacing as well. The first two acts are mostly subdued table-setting with just enough peeks into what’s happening to build a sense of dread without giving the entire game away at first. Something bad is going on here but it isn’t immediately clear what, and not everything is exactly what it seems to be. There’s some explicit violence, but more often we’re just witness to its aftermath, the horrible wreckage of what were once human bodies, depicted dispassionately. Quick images and little details build things up leading into the third act, where all the monsters become real - and here, the effects work (always the toughest proposition for a film like this) holds up quite well. That said, the move toward more action means that some of the atmosphere is lost. Although it never stops being evocative visually, with rainy days exchanged for foggy moonlit nights and mine interiors lit only by stark red flares, it does lose some of the mood so carefully built up in favor or something more disappointingly obvious. 

And this shift toward the more obvious is why I don’t think it quite sticks the landing either, with a climax that’s a little too obvious and an “the end…or is it?” ending that feels entirely unnecessary, given how strongly this film relies on ideas of generational trauma and the nature and consequences of abuse. The obviousness of the opening title card about what mankind has done to the earth infects the ending as well. So not a slam dunk, but there’s a lot to recommend it nonetheless.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon