Dabbe 5: Zehr-I-Cin: The Devil’s In The Details

When I wrote up Dabbe: The Possession about seven months ago, I observed that by all rights, I should not like it. It was a found-footage film about demonic possession, and the second in a series of seven films. I’m really picky about found-footage films, stories about demonic possession can get very cliched very quickly, and I am not at all fond of sequels or (ugh) franchises And yet, I really liked it. It had a real energy and sharpness to it, and coming from a culture fairly different from my own, it felt fresh in a number of ways. It wasn’t perfect - the translation was pretty clumsy and there were some pacing issues, but overall I thought it was a solid effort, intense and spooky in equal measure.

So I was genuinely curious to see if lightning would strike twice, and I have to say, Dabbe 5: Zehr-I-Cin (Dabbe 5: Curse Of The Jinn), an eerie and tense account of the sins of someone’s past, makes a good case for itself.

The film opens in voiceover, with an account of something that happened in the village of Viransehir in 1979. It’s the last recorded testimony of a mullah who lived in the village, alluding to something terrible that he warned the villagers against trying. The villagers didn’t heed his warning, and terrible discoveries were made there. Black magic, human sacrifice. The mullah vanished, leaving behind only some notes and audiotapes. We cut to a cave, a woman giving birth surrounded by other women. As soon as she’s delivered the child and the cord is cut, the baby is whisked off someplace by a group of men carrying rifles. The woman screams in anguish, begging to have her baby brought back to her.

Meanwhile, in present-day Istanbul, Dilek and her husband Ömer are asleep in their home, when Dilek is startled awake by the sound of someone in their house. She tries to wake up her husband to see what’s going on, but he just rolls over and pulls the covers over himself even tighter. Not exactly the picture of chivalry. As she moves carefully through the house, she can’t find anything. The next morning, she’s fighting exhaustion while getting Ömer off to work. The noises in the middle of the night didn’t help, and when she tries to settle down for a nap she’s plagued by nightmares.

Strange noises, nightmares, and soon enough, doors slamming shut by themselves, glassware smashing onto the floor. There’s something very wrong going on in their house.

So this is the fifth in a series of seven movies, which let’s face it, if these were being made in the U.S., would mean we’d be faced with a stale retread of something that might have been good the first time around, but is now just a bunch of motions through which everyone is going, with a storyline as contrived and convoluted as Godzilla is tall and irritable. But in this case, based on the two that I’ve seen, what we have instead are distinct, unrelated stories that share a number of broad narrative beats. They’re more like variations on a theme than anything else. Which means, on the one hand, that we don’t have to navigate the tiresome rationalizations for why this particular monster/demon/serial killer is on the rampage yet again, which is nice. On the other, the similarities mean that some things that should be a surprise end up being less of a surprise, and afterward I realized just how many of the same notes both films hit. I suspect that if I watched a bunch of these films back-to-back that they’d get formulaic pretty quickly.

But in the moment, it works, and that’s largely because it’s also as much its own thing as it is a riff on the same themes as the previous film It’s not a found-footage film like Dabbe: The Possession was (and thank goodness for that), and it’s more visually inventive as a result. The color grading runs from warm tones to sickly, grainy, greenish pallor, many shots are slightly distorted with fisheye or tilt-shift effects and vignetted, giving even mundane moments a sense of unease or unreality. Points of view change regularly - there’s some SnorriCam work, shots framed like they’re from surveillance footage (even though they aren’t), shots that are surveillance camera footage that glitch and stutter to good effect. So things seem slightly unreal, but there’s also paranoia, a feeling of being watched. Sound design is very good as well, using slamming doors and sudden crashes to keep things feeling tense. The tools are all pretty simple, there’s not a whole lot in the way of special effects (which is good, because some of what there is ends up being sort of dodgy), just knowing what looks and sounds creepy, and it goes a long way. And when things really start to pop off, it can have the same kind of frenetic intensity that reminds me of The Evil Dead, which goes a long way toward giving what could otherwise be fairly simple conceits some real edge.

Like the previous film, it’s a story about curses and djinns, not demons or devils, so it’s something a little more complex than your usual “demon possesses young woman for reasons” story. Again, there’s a past at work here, the culmination of something that happened a long time ago, so on top of the horror there’s something of a mystery element to it that keeps it from descending into an assemblage of scares. It’s not an especially character-driven film, the performances seem fine, though again I think stuff gets lost in translation and though none of the characters are really obnoxious, nor are they especially developed. It doesn’t really hurt the film, and you don’t have any unintentionally comic translations this time around, fortunately, but I wonder if a little more subtlety would have helped. It does share pacing problems with the previous film - for most of its running time things move along at a nice clip, but the end drags on a little too long and threatens to lose focus.

And I think this is ultimately my biggest concern with the film - all of the ways it is broadly, structurally similar to the previous film. The characters are all different, details are different, how the story gets told is different, and this is all to the good. But in both films, you’ve got an opening alluding to something terrible that happened in a small village years ago, passing references to apocalyptic events, a young woman suffering under a curse, a betrayal, a return to where it all started, and a framing that suggests this was based on true events. None of those things are by themselves problems - some of it is a little hackneyed, maybe - but it meant I was able to anticipate some things that would have been better off as surprises. It’s still a formula, even if it’s not the one I usually find tiresome. But on their own, both films in this series that I’ve seen have been very well-executed, enough that I’m genuinely interested in seeking out the others. But I’ll probably give myself some time in between them, in the hopes that maybe I will be surprised the next time around.

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It, Chapter Two: Second Verse, Same As The First, A Little Bit Louder And A Little Bit Worse

Two-part horror movies are a rarity. I don’t mean a movie and its sequel, in horror those are a dime a dozen, not including prequels, reboots, remakes, “re-imaginings,” and every other dead horse you could beat into the ground, well-assured it would rise from the grave in a fortnight. No, I mean a story so big that it gets told across two movies as an ongoing narrative. That’s far more common in science fiction or superhero films.

And that really is a big part of the problem with It, Chapter Two. It’s got more of the characteristics of those sorts of films than it does horror. I talked about this in my write-up of It, Chapter One, the way that blockbuster elements work against horror’s strengths. But Chapter One had its moments, and Chapter Two is just a mess. It manages to take all of the weaknesses of the first film and turn them up, magnifying them in every direction. And I think a lot of it is due to the requirements of big-budget, major-studio blockbuster films and a need to adhere to the source text even when it doesn’t really serve the film.

Picking up 27 years after the end of It, Chapter One, we return to a Derry that hasn’t changed much in all this time. Same picturesque park in the town center, same annual fair, and the same lurking rot and seething undercurrent of violence that’s been there since the town’s inception. In short order, we’re introduced to a young couple, the intolerant bullies who harass them, and then beatings, and a death. There is still something dark at Derry’s heart, and it’s waking up again. Of the seven kids who stopped its (or Its) predations back in 1989, only one stayed in Derry. Mike Hanlon works at the Derry library, lives upstairs from the library, and has spent the last 27 years researching the town’s history and looking for a way to stop the cycle for good. And when his police radio scanner goes off, reporting the horrible, senseless death that’ s just taken place, Mike goes to check out the scene…

…where he finds a traumatized young man muttering about a clown, and COME HOME scrawled on an underpass in blood.

So yes, the other six people responsible for shutting It down back in the summer of 1989 have to return to Derry to finish things once and for all. All the ones who’ve left Derry have done quite well for themselves. Richie Tozier’s a high-profile stand-up comedian, Eddie Kapsbrak does well for himself as a risk analyst, Bill Dembrough is an author whose books get made into films, Beverly Marsh is a well-known fashion designer, Ben Hanscom is a successful architect, and Stan Uris…well, Stan doesn’t take the news that It’s back up and around very well. He doesn’t make it back to Derry. Their time away has made them forgetful, has put the events of that summer in the rear-view mirror, to the point that Mike has to remind all of them who he is and what happened back then. Mike never left, so Mike never forgot. It’s sort of how adulthood gives us a chance to leave the horrors of our childhood behind. But Mike, as one of the few Black children in Derry, never had that luxury.

But the longer they’re in Derry, the more things come back to them, The things that happened, the terrors they faced, the friendship forged in shared adversity. They wonder how they could have ever forgotten each other. And soon enough there are reminders - dark, terrible reminders - of what brought them back, and so Mike tells them that his research has uncovered a ritual that might end the threat for good. So after establishing the adult versions of all of the characters and getting them all back to Derry, the film sort of shifts into sort of a fetch-quest mode where each of them has to retrieve something for the ritual, along with flashbacks to the rest of that summer throughout. The interposition of the present and past is mostly pulled off skillfully, and there’s potential for some interesting stuff about the things we remember and the things we wished we could forget, especially relevant to people whose childhoods were marked by bullying, trauma and abuse. They pretty much have to go home again and to varyingly literal degrees go right back into those places that held such horror for them then. But it’s just potential because you only get glimpses of it, fitfully, around all of the other stuff the film is trying to do.

And that’s a big problem with the film - it’s trying to do so much in the time it has that none of it gets the attention it needs. Like Chapter One, it’s really long (just shy of three fucking hours) but it still manages to feel cursory. There’s a lot that could be explored here - the idea that Derry was a corrupted place from its very start, something black and rotten at its heart, visible between the lines in the town’s history, the way that many of the protagonists sort of brought their trauma and dysfunction with them into adulthood. Eddie’s wife is just as smothering and encouraging of his hypochondriasis as his mother was, Beverly has an abusive, controlling husband, and Richie has pretty much just turned the humor he used as a defense mechanism into a career. There’s definitely the idea that no matter where you go, there you are, but all of it is just briefly alluded to before moving on to the next set piece. Secondary characters turn up and then are sort of gone with little fanfare in either direction, there’s little character development (except for Richie, who was always the most opaque of the group and here we get some hints at why that might be the case) and there are moments of real dread, but they’re few and far between. The film needs restraint, and there’s certainly evidence dotted throughout that the filmmakers are capable of it, but instead we get lots of slam-bang moments with frenetic scoring and lots of yelling. The climax is especially guilty of this, a drawn-out barrage of special effects and running around and screaming that takes entirely too long to get where it’s going, without any real tension. It’s just loud.

Like the first film, there’s still a good horror story in here somewhere. This film also has its surprisingly vicious moments (the damn film opens with a hate crime, for pity’s sake), but the comic elements are also ratcheted up considerably - the adult Richie wisecracks just as much as he did as a kid (though now it’s more funny than grating) even at what are supposed to be tense moments, and it tends to kill the mood. And again, there’s some nice attention to detail and willingness to let creepy things sort of happen in the background, but even more than the first film these moments ae drowned out by thick layers of CG creature effects which are often more cartoony than anything else, draining any ounce of subtlety out of it. So it’s not just loud, it’s also even more tonally jarring than the first film, and the whole thing isn’t so much paced as it is just one thing after another. It feels much less like a story and much more like an assemblage of scenes.

I think another part of the problem is that with any popular adaptation, there’s going to be the sense that certain things “need” to be included, and so instead of an organically developing story you just get a bunch of “that part where” moments chained together, whether they make sense or not, whether they make for a good narrative flow or not. And on top of that, there are things that work absolutely well in the novel that just look silly on screen, though this and the previous film don’t suffer so much from King’s very specific authorial voice making everything sound stilted. It’s very much a matter of, “you can write this stuff, but I sure can’t say it.” It happens a little here and there, but the much larger problem is that everything that would make this good horror is sacrificed for everything that the film is expected to be, and by the big-budget major-studio tendency to turn horror films into action films played in a different key. 

The director has talked about doing a massive supercut of both chapters, and if it were handled episodically, that would be a good start, but then there’s all the ropy CG and the possibility that no, the interesting, personal stuff wouldn’t actually get explore much, so at this point I think all I can be is disappointed. So far, adaptations of King’s longer epic works have suffered in translation, and this is no exception, unfortunately.

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It, Chapter One: One Crazy Summer

There’s something about the term “blockbuster horror” that rankles me. I try not to be a film snob and I have enjoyed my share of blockbuster movies, but I just don’t know if multiplex bombast really plays all that well with horror. Mass-appeal horror films tend to play it safe, rely on easy scares and well-worn cliches. It’s less about horror than just startling people.

But here’s the thing - it’s really difficult to adapt the work of Stephen King, perhaps the most monolithic writer in the genre over the last several decades, and not bring blockbuster expectations to the table. He’s easily the most prolific writer in the genre and easily the most successful. He’s pretty much an institution at this point. People who don’t like horror like his stuff. So an adaptation of one of his most popular books is going to be a big production. And on top of that, King is one of those rare writers in horror who writes absolute epics - sprawling stories that cover miles and years. So an adaptation of one of his most popular epic novels is going to be an even bigger production. And honestly, when it comes to film, I think “big” works against horror in a way that it doesn’t for other types of film.

And so this is the primary problem with It, Chapter One. It is a big story, and it covers a lot of ground, and although it definitely is less compromising than I would have expected, it’s also sort of three movies at once, and it suffers in places as a result.

It’s a rainy day in the Maine town of Derry, and Bill Dembrough, laid up in bed sick, is making a paper boat for his little brother George to take out and sail in the streams made by the rainstorm. He writes “SS Georgie” on it, waterproofs it with wax. George goes out into the rain to try out his new boat, and no sooner does it set sail than it gets washed into a storm drain. Despondent, George kneels down to see if he can get it back, but there’s something there in the storm drain. Something that has his boat. And then there is blood, and screaming, and that is the last we see of George Dembrough alive.

There is, and always has been, something very wrong with Derry.

The film really is kind of a mixed bag - like the King adaptation Doctor Sleep, it really falls somewhere between horror and dark fantasy, and where that film had some genuinely unnerving moments early on before ultimately settling into something more of a fantasy adventure story (albeit one set around the location from The Shining, which does add its own undercurrent for fans of that adaptation), this one suffers more from tonal shifts that don’t quite reach jarring, but make it difficult for the film to really settle into a groove. At some points, it’s a coming-of-age story similar to something like Stand By Me, following a group of friends old and new as they try to navigate the perils of pre-adolescence. At others, it’s a reasonably understated examination of the real-life fears that accompany childhood, especially among kids doomed to be outsiders, and then at others it’s a more straightforward supernatural horror film. It doesn’t have the same kind of sprawl that Doctor Sleep did, being set in one place over the course of a single summer, but it does feel like it would have worked better as a more personal, intimate story. It’s not that it does anything really badly, but there’s so much that even with a running time well over two hours, nothing really gets explored in depth. It’s sort of one thing, then on to the next.

At its heart, it’s a story about what it’s like to be a kid in a world where there are dangers of one sort or another all around you. All of the protagonists are outsiders in one way or another. Bill has a stutter, Ben Hanscom is overweight and the new kid in town, Mike Hanlon appears to be one of the only Black people in Derry, Stan Uris is one of the few Jewish kids in Derry. Eddie Kapsbrak has asthma and an extremely overprotective mother, Richie Tozier is scrawny and spectacularly nearsighted, and he compensates for his insecurity by using humor as a defense, and Beverly Marsh is being abused by her father and has somehow garnered a reputation for being “easy.” These are kids with all the usual kid worries, but also all the worries of any kid who’s ever been singled out as a target, or victim, or just as Other. And on top of that, they are witnessing horrors all around them in their hometown, horrors to which the town’s adults seem almost willfully blind. The moments where we see what they have to deal with, how few places they have where they really feel safe, work. The occasional idyllic moments they have, just hanging out and shooting the shit or swimming at the quarry., really do feel like a momentary respite from the dread that follows them around all the time in the form of bullies and the dread facing them at home. 

And they’re all depicted pretty realistically, for better or worse. It’s easy to make child characters into cartoons, but for the most part they feel like regular kids. That said, it does mean that Eddie, with his finely honed hypochondriasis, is kind of defined almost entirely by that at the start of the film, and Richie, easily the most insecure of the bunch, is a nonstop fountain of wisecracks and mom jokes and the kind of desperate overcompensation that you only get when you’re aware of just how awkward you really are. And honestly, he’s pretty grating all the way through. But I also knew kids like this. Fuck, I was a kid like this. It doesn’t make it any easier to sit through (fun drinking game: take a shot anytime someone says “shut up, Richie,” and then die of alcohol poisoning), but it does ring true to life. These are kids who walk through their days like they are minefields, and that comes across very well.

The supernatural stuff is more of a mixed bag, though, mostly in the execution. There are lots of great little details and bits of business happening in the background, content to let you notice them without calling attention to themselves, and there are moments that are genuinely nasty, like Stranger Things with the gloves taken off. For a film that could easily turn into some kind of wistful nostalgia trip with some ghosts, it does not fuck around. But over time it leans a little too much into creature effects and as is often the case, the more the creature is on screen, the less frightening it becomes and the more it just feels like you’re looking at special effects. I think this is endemic to pretty much any big-budget major-studio horror film - it ends up being kind of as much of a spectacle film as something like Jurassic Park or one of the eighteen million Marvel Universe film-type products coming out in any given week. And those aren’t really scary, they’re ultimately just action films using a different vocabulary and the film finally sort of gives in to this in the third act, all hectic yelling and action when a defter touch is needed.

Again, a lot rides on the kids at the center of the film and fortunately, they aren’t saints. They get angry at each other and don’t want to do the right thing and that helps give the film some gravity, but the further away it gets from the very specific, personal horrors of this cursed town, the effects it has on the adults, and the nightmares lurking behind any doorway and the closer it gets to CG effects pieces and big showdowns, the less effective it is. I didn’t feel like my time was wasted by any means, but I do feel like the popularity of the story (and of King as an author) gets in the way - it’s not enough to make a solid scary movie, it has to please the fans (and the author, who has been critical of adaptation in the past the further they stray from his text) and bring in big enough crowds to justify the budget needed to bring the story to life. And that’s not where horror does its best work, in big flashy hero moments. It does its best work in dark corners and behind the door nobody opens and in the house that has been abandoned for decades and the things in the between the lines of a house’s history. There’s still Chapter 2 to go, but honestly, I think this would have probably worked better as a limited-run series.

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Historia De Lo Oculto: We Interrupt This Broadcast

There’s this short story by Charles Stross that I really like, titled “A Colder War.” It posits a world where U.S./Soviet relations were still just as tense as they were in our world in the period from about 1947 onward until the early Nineties, but also a world in which Lovecraftian beings with their strange magics and even stranger technologies and sanity-warping enormity exist. Instead of ICBMs, satellite footage shows trailer trucks moving through Russia carrying huge impossible shapes under tarps covered with protective sigils. It’s an intersection between cosmic horror and political thriller, and I am here for it.

Historia De Lo Oculto (History Of The Occult) isn’t exactly this, but it’s also not dissimilar either, and it makes for an interesting mix. It’s hurt by a spotty translation and pacing issues early on, but it picks up and comes good in the end.

It’s late at night in Argentina, in a house somewhere out in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Four people are hunched nervously over a stack of binders and folders, staring at a television. They’re producers on the investigative news show 60 Minutes Before Midnight, and tonight is their last broadcast. After they aired a piece on the current president’s business ties, suddenly almost all of their advertisers pulled out of the show all at once and the station decided not to renew their contract. So they’ve got one last shot at it, and things are appropriately tense. They’ve gone to the mattresses after receiving enough advertising money from one last sponsor to air one last show, holed up in this house in what could be described as an “undisclosed location,” taking a huge gamble on exposing what they believe is massive corruption in the current presidential administration. It’s a time of considerable political unrest, and there’s a massive protest rally planned to start at midnight, exactly when this program ends. So everything is cloak-and-dagger. There’s a minimal crew at the studio along with the host and the program’s three guests for the evening. They’ve sent one of their reporters to another house far outside the city limits on a tip that they’ll find something important there, though nobody knows what. And their last remaining sponsor, the ones who bankrolled the last episode, send over a box with materials they think might be useful. It all has to come together exactly right.

And this is where it starts getting weird. One of the guests for the evening is a self-proclaimed warlock, and the box they receive contains a powerful hallucinogenic root and instructions for a ritual.

The president has some very powerful friends.

Right off the bat, this film reminds me of stories like All The President’s Men, where the majority of the action is people on the phone or sitting in a room poring over files and documents. Which may seem like an odd choice for what is ostensibly a horror film, but there’s a sense of urgency communicated right up front - it’s the last night of this investigative journalism program, which appears to be getting taken off the air due to covert government interference, they have an hour to get information out that could potentially topple the current regime, all leading up to a protest rally at midnight. So even though it’s a bunch of journalists holed up in a house somewhere in the suburbs, there’s tension there. Adding to this is a film-noir feeling that comes from it being shot almost entirely in black and white (the “almost” is very important - color is used to striking effect in places), ramping up the feeling of intrigue. A lot happens in shadow in this film, and it reinforces the idea that this is all furtive, clandestine, covert.

So it could just be sort of an Argentinian take on Good Night, And Good Luck, but there’s all the weirdness around the edges - the mysterious murder of a John Doe, his body discovered surrounded by signs and sigils, the current administration’s ties to a mysterious corporation who once numbered someone called “Brother Darkness” among their ranks, some strange inconsistencies in people’s memories. There’s a repeated television advertisement for an initiative to protect the nation’s children, describing them as “the fuel on which our future runs” that becomes more sinister the more it is repeated. There’s the sense of something about to happen, something about to be revealed and you aren’t getting more than snatches of it, that largely works when the rest of the movie doesn’t.

I don’t know that it’s entirely the film’s fault - the translation job seems a little sloppy and clumsy, and I suspect some of the meaning and mood is lost as a result. Of greater concern is the pacing, which becomes sluggish and unfocused in the second act, so even though it’s not even 90 minutes long there is some feeling that it’s sort of spinning its wheels. After a pretty strong opening, it really starts to sag and occasionally strange things will happen, but there’s not much to connect them or give them a context, so they don’t have the impact they could. There are a lot of questions and possibilities raised to maybe not as much effect as they could be, and the television interview sequences especially suffer from the clumsy translation, making some characters feel less sinister and more like cryptic blowhards.

But in a lot of ways, the sense of desperate isolation helps carry it even at its weakest moments, and things really start to come together in the third act as the tension starts to ramp up, things start to connect, and a lot of what came before pays off as everything converges - documents, official confirmations, revealed identities, a mysterious object in an even more mysterious house, and a hallucinogen-fueled ritual that lays reality bare. The whole thing ends on a really strong note that to me almost - not quite, but almost - entirely makes up for its weaknesses. If you’ve got the patience to wait out the slow, confusing parts, this is a pretty good one.

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