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.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon