I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale: Sex And Violence

For as much lip service as Halloween gets for being the beginning of slasher films, there are any number of films that precede it, and something I’m starting to realize the more I dive into Italian horror is just how much of the prototypical slasher film’s DNA comes from giallo. Sure, it’s a term that encompasses more than just horror, but within the ones most commonly associated with horror, starting with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, you see what would eventually lead to Halloween and all the dross that came after. And as someone who doesn’t really like slasher films, a lot of the early examples are more interesting in how they don’t hew to a formula (because the formula didn’t exist yet) or bring in elements of other films. 

And to this end, I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale (Torso) is a noteworthy addition to the list. It’s an Italian horror film that doesn’t have the visual flair of something like Suspiria or Deep Red, or the gonzo weirdness of something like The Beyond, but acquits itself well and probably works even better now because of a shift in cultural norms.

It opens, as many of these films do, lurid and weird. Someone’s photographing a bunch of women sort of writhing around naked in soft focus. There’s a child’s doll, and a set of fingers comes into frame to gouge out its eyes. So already we have a pretty good idea of what we’re in for. Cut to an art history lecture, and a professor examining the relationship between sacred art and artists who are non-believers. We’re introduced to a number of female students - Flo, Carol, Dani, Katia, Jane and Ursula. It’s coming up on the weekend and they’re making plans. For Flo, “plans” consist of driving to a remote area and making out with a guy.

They did not include a masked figure murdering both of them, but there you go.

The basic structure of the film is as simple as any slasher film - people try to figure out who’s doing all the murders, murders keep happening, often strangulation with a very distinctive-looking scarf, eventually there’s a final reveal and confrontation. The music’s pretty stock, the settings aren’t especially flashy, but it’s well-paced and has, I think, a couple of things going for it. First, intentionally, it makes good use of the trappings of the whodunit. Just when you think you’ve got a particular character nailed as the killer, something comes along to upend that and make you question your own judgment. It’s pretty engaging on that front, and the final reveal feels earned, if not just as melodramatic in its explanation as any other film in the genre. I don’t like thinking of films in terms of “kill scenes,” but I think it handles the requisite scenes well - they’re mostly set-up, and though the violence is sufficiently graphic, it’s not lingering or gratuitous. It gets pretty gnarly at points but you never feel like it’s indulging for the sake of it.

The second thing is, I think, not intentional, but more a factor of the way sensibilities have changed since the 1970s, when this was made. It’s a film that is very much of its time. The original title translates to “the body showed traces of carnal violence” and if I didn’t know better, I’d say this film was key in the inclusion of sexual content in later slasher films. There is lots and lots of gratuitous nudity in this film, starting with the opening credits but by no means ending there. The scenes don’t need it, and it’s lingered upon. It’s strictly directed at the female characters and it’s utterly unapologetic. The camera leers and so do pretty much all of the men in the movie. Like, literally there’s one scene that’s just a bunch of men gawking at a woman. Like, that’s it. Both in how they’re treated visually and in how the male characters talk about them, the women in this film are completely objectified. So right off the bat, there’s something alienating about this film, in the degree to which it is the product of a sensibility you rarely see depicted so blatantly any more. But I think the alienation helps it - we’re presented with a world very different from our own, and that creates a certain atmosphere.

This is further assisted by the nature of the men in the film. With a couple of exceptions, all of the men in the film are creepy to one degree or another. It’s tough to tell how much of it is intentional and how much of it is just because it was an Italian film made in the 1970s. but, as it does in Black Christmas, it adds this uneasy layer to the film - it’s already a hostile atmosphere, and on top of that, pretty much anyone could be the killer. Is it the art professor who hits on Jane and takes a compliment about his eyes really strangely? Is it the student clearly obsessed with Dani, who wears a suspiciously familiar-looking scarf and starts choking a sex worker when she suggests he might be gay? Is it the apparently well-meaning doctor who gives a bunch of them the once-over on a train out of town? Is it the weaselly owner of the newsstand who sells scarves like the one from the killings? Is it one of the two dudes who grope Katia and then try to beat her up when she rejects them? Is it Dani’s uncle, who isn’t above checking her out surreptitiously while she’s just wearing a towel? It could be any of them because they’re all equally complicit in treating women like objects that exist for their pleasure and nothing else. It’s like these women are adrift in a sea of predators because misogyny makes everything a minefield for them.

The first act sets up all the suspects, the second act starts picking people off, and the third brings it home, though interestingly enough, instead of getting more frantic toward the climax, it slows way down and plays most of it as an extended game of cat and mouse, making the big reveal pretty much at the last possible minute. True to the form, there are plenty of cryptic flashbacks, murders performed by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves, the requisite pop-rock soundtrack (chase scenes are never more mellow than they are in films like this), and plenty of blood. There’s strangling, stabbing, eyes getting gouged out, heads getting crushed by a car, the usual, though the violence is far less fetishized in this film than the sex, about which attitudes are as confused as you’d expect - plenty of women traipsing around naked for reasons, dialogue about what this particular man would do to that particular woman, but a scene of the killer peeking in on two women kissing has the kiss itself obscured by a conveniently placed headboard. There’s also an early instance of the Final Girl, predating Halloween by a good five years. It doesn’t hit the most deliriously berserk heights of the form, but it’s also much more coherent and keeps up a good sustained feeling of tension and unease. Nobody and nowhere feels safe in this film.

It is, in some ways, a very workmanlike film. It doesn’t exceed expectations, but there’s also not too much to complain about - there’s one very goofily choreographed fight scene that looks more like a slapfight than anything else, but that’s about it. If you have a low tolerance for men being gross about women, this is not your film, and though it isn’t as transcendent as something like Suspiria or The Beyond, it’s very solid.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities: A Whitman's Sampler Of Horror, For Good And Ill

It’s been awhile since I tackled a horror anthology. When they’re good, they do with film what good short story collections do with literature. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, it’s easy for horror to get sort of bogged down in the longer form - I think horror is at its best most often when it’s concise and doesn’t overexplain or overstay its welcome, and the longer the story goes on, the tougher it is to really sustain whatever mood or feeling the story is trying to evoke.

But if I’m being honest, I didn’t necessarily watch Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities with the express intent of writing about it, but it made a distinct impression (not always good, but still), and the film I intended to write about this week ended up being sort of a dud - it wasn’t horror (even by my admittedly generous standards) and moreover it was, well, just sort of there. And I think didn’t think “gosh, that was a really dull story in some very lovely settings” was going to be much of an insight. Cabinet Of Curiosities doesn’t always work - it doesn’t have a single cohesive tone running through the stories, and many of the episodes drag on too long, but there are some real gems in there too.

There are eight episodes, each with a different writer and director, and they end up breaking down into three groups: EC Comics-style morality tales, H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, and more straightforward horror. So, I’m going to group the episodes that way, instead of strictly chronologically.

EC Comics-Style Morality Tales

Episode 1: Lot 36

Nick is an Iraq War veteran with a lot of resentment about the way he was treated when he came back home, and he’s decided to blame it on minorities and immigrants. He does what he can to get by, and that mostly consists of a tidy little scam he’s got running with the owner of a local self-storage place. Periodically, the owner will place the contents of units that haven’t paid their rent up for auction. This is apparently pretty commonplace, as the existence of the show Storage Wars would suggest. Except that Nick is able to outbid everyone else with the assistance of the owner, and then they split the profits from the content of the unit. So the owner’s basically double-dipping with Nick as his proxy. Nick’s in a bit of a tight spot - his truck gets vandalized by an angry competitor, he gets banged up in the process, and the last couple of hauls haven’t been great. So the most recent lot - Lot 36, the property of someone who just died of a heart attack - needs to pay off. And Nick finds all kinds of stuff in there - lots of antique furniture, including what appears to be a séance table…

…and three books about the summoning of demons. The fourth volume is missing, and Nick can get a lot for a complete set.

I think there are a couple of things that keep this from being an especially strong episode. First, it feels like thirty minutes of story rattling around in forty-five minutes of run time. The setup is fairly simple - weaselly jerk gets in over his head out of sheer greed and ends up tinkering with forces he doesn’t understand - but it’s not presented in a way that’s enough to sustain half of a feature-length film. It feels padded, and the time isn’t really used to flesh out the characters. Which is another problem - most of the characters feel like they inhabit the same world, but there are two who feel dropped in from a much more cartoonish story, and it’s jarring as a result. This could have been played much lower-key and I think it would have worked a lot better. But instead we have some unnecessary back-and-forth before the story really comes to a head, and when it does, the inevitable moral comeuppance feels sort of bolted on, like they decided at the last minute to make it that kind of story.

Episode 2: Graveyard Rats 

Masson is a grave robber in post-WW1 Salem, Massachusetts, doing his best to keep his head above water. He’s in debt and increasing competition in his unsavory trade is making it harder and harder for him to really bring in profitable hauls. Not to mention the rats, who seem to be able to tunnel right up through the caskets and make off with the pretty, shiny things that Masson needs to make any money. But he gets wind of a wealthy aristocrat who has just been laid to rest, and so once again he sets out in the dead of night, locates the grave, begins digging, unearthing the casket, only to find that the rats have beaten him to the punch, making off with the entire body. The bottom of the casket is completely gone, and in its place, a tunnel leading down deep into the earth.

And so, desperation nipping at his heels, Masson crawls into the earth.

In some ways, this episode is an improvement over Lot 36, in that it’s much more concise. It’s only about eight minutes shorter, but it uses its time much more efficiently, establishing the situation and then using most of its running time on Masson’s claustrophobic journey through an extensive warren running under the graveyard and the horrifying things he finds there. There’s much more beneath the earth than he thought, and what started as a dive down becomes a frenzied scramble to reach the surface. This episode is much more in the classic mold of the EC Comics-style morality tale, complete with a twist comeuppance that ties the whole thing together elegantly. And all of that is good about it, but it’s based on a story from the time in which it’s set, and something about the dialogue, though appropriate for the period, comes off as more affected than anything else. I don’t know if it’s the performances, but it all feels sort of stagey and artificial and so I found it hard to really get into it. Everything felt a little caricatured, and though campy is definitely in the wheelhouse of these sorts of stories, here the ingredients didn’t quite gel.

Episode 4: The Outside

Stacey is a shy, awkward teller at a bank. She has a loving husband, she enjoys doing taxidermy in her spare time, but she feels left out of things at work, where the other tellers - so much prettier and more glamorous - natter on about the expensive, exclusive things they buy, the vacations they take, gossip about the other employees at the bank, and Stacey wants more than anything to be able to join in, to be accepted by the rest of them. And one day, she gets her chance - one of the other tellers invites her to her annual Christmas party, and Stacey does everything she can to doll herself up, labors over just the right present, worries over every detail. And, of course, she’s totally out of place and out of her league among these women, and her handcrafted gift has nothing on the fancy gifts the hostess has gotten everyone - tubes of fancy skin lotion called Alo Glo. It’s the latest thing, extremely hard to get, very exclusive. And Stacey is sure it’s everything she’ll need to be just as pretty as the other women, to finally belong. Except when she uses it, her skin starts to redden and peel. But that’s normal, she thinks. So she uses more. And more.

And her body starts to change.

Of the three morality-tale episodes, this is easily the most successful. It locates body horror in a glossy, garishly colored vision of 1980’s Midwestern life seen through a slightly fisheyed, distorted lens. It all looks slightly unreal, and the performances follow, pitched at a level of deadpan absurdity that brings to mind Fargo by way of David Lynch. Stacey is both protagonist and antagonist, her own worst enemy as her insecurities consume more and more of her waking life. And what I think makes it work is that it’s played very straight, on a very even keel, no matter how horrible it gets (which it definitely does toward the end) and it ends in a way that isn’t typical for morality tales, refusing to tie everything up neatly and ending on a distinctly unsettling note.

H.P. Lovecraft Adaptations

Episode 5: Pickman’s Model

The time is 1909, and the place is an art school in Arkham, Massachusetts. Will Thurber is there to become the best painter he can, to make great art. Like his fellow students, he’s fiery, passionate, and extremely competitive. And mid-term, along comes a new student named Richard Pickman. Pickman is older than the rest of them, and has something of a shadowy past, his family having been the subject of some rumor. But he’s an excellent artist, inspiring a mixture of awe and jealousy in the rest of the students. He seems driven by something, even more than the rest of them, as if he’s trying to exorcise something through his art. He and Will strike up a friendship, and Pickman invites him around to his quarters to view the paintings he’s been working on outside of class.

Paintings that give Will nightmares.

Right off the bat, I’m going to give the filmmakers for both this and the other Lovecraft adaptation props for choosing stories outside of the Cthulhu mythos. That’s already pretty well-trod ground at this point, so it’s nice to see some of his other work getting attention (and removing the grosser elements of Lovecraft’s sensibilities in the process). The settings feel right, and unlike Graveyard Rats, the characters act and sound like people from the early 20th century without coming off as performances or caricatures (though it is sort of interesting to see what part of the U.S. Pickman's accent is going to visit from one scene to another). But I think this episode, more than any other, suffers from an overlong running time. It’s slightly more than an hour, and the original story was pretty succinct, so there’s more than a little wheel-spinning. And, although it’s been a long time since I read the original story, I don’t recall the climax and conclusion being part of the story at all - it’s much more generic horror, out of step with Lovecraft’s style, and feels like it was appended to flesh out the running time. It isn’t necessary and doesn’t add anything to the story.

Episode 6: Dreams In The Witch House

Walter Gilman has spent most of his life trying to part the veil between this world and the next. It’s personal for him, as he saw his ailing twin sister Epperley, in her final moments, dragged away through some portal into a mysterious forest. It’s haunted him ever since, and he’s determined to find a way to get to her and bring her back to the world of the living. But for all of his time as a member of the Spiritualist Society, he’s never found a legitimate instance of someone speaking to the dead. They all end up being frauds and charlatans. At the end of his rope, he follows up on a dubious lead about a substance referred to as “liquid gold” - a drug that allows you to see into the spirit world and gives you access to the “Forest of Lost Souls.” So Walter - at a loss for reliable housing and about to experiment with some really dangerous shit - rents a room in a boarding house that’s seen better days. It’s going for cheap, and the last occupant - a woman named Keziah Mason - was executed for witchcraft.

The walls are covered with arcane writing and symbology. And there’s something scuttling behind them.

Unfortunately, I think this was the nadir of the series - the episode is disjointed, the performances range from decent to hammy, there’s not much of a clear through-line for the story, and things that I’m pretty sure worked well on the page end up coming across as silly on the screen. Is it the quality of the effects? Is it being maybe too faithful to the text? Possibly. All I know is that between one particular casting choice (whose performance is fine), the setting, and the way the story is realized, the whole thing sort of feels like Harry Potter on bath salts, but not, you know, in a good way.

Straightforward Horror

Episode 4: The Autopsy

It all begins with a horrible mining accident. An elevator full of miners is coming up at the end of their shift, when one of them, Joe Allen, comes barreling along behind, landing on top of the elevator cage. Something tumbles out of his hand - some kind of small, spherical piece of technology. It starts humming and beeping, and then it explodes, killing him and the other miners. This is the worst accident they’ve seen in awhile, and so the sheriff, Nate Craven, calls in for expert help. There are something like eleven autopsies that need to be conducted in short order, so the mining company can distance themselves from it and avoid any liability. So Nate calls in his old friend, a medical examiner named Dr. Carl Winters. Carl’s getting on in years, but he’s very good at his job, and knows the score. A makeshift morgue has been set up for him, and he’s going to be at it all night. Once he’s settled in and has all of his equipment laid out, he looks at the file to determine where to start.

And as he does, Joe Allen’s body starts to move.

I think all of the straightforward horror episodes are the strongest ones in the series, and this one’s a doozy. It’s got a great graveyard shift vibe, this doctor all alone across the hall from a roomful of corpses, lit from above, everything else silent as the rest of the town sleeps. The performances are convincing and understated, with some later revelations emerging naturally from what went before. And once it gets rolling, it’s a doozy - sharp, merciless, grisly, and even more impressive, it’s as carried by one extremely unnerving monologue as it is the more explicit stuff. In its own way, it’s as Lovecraftian as the actual Lovecraft adaptations (if not moreso) and it just tightens the screws tighter and tighter and tighter until it ends with a great twist and moment of discovery. Short-form horror at its best.

Episode 7: The Viewing

It is very much 1979, and wealthy, enigmatic recluse Lionel Lassiter has invited four people to his home for a special occasion. There’s the famous music producer Randall Roth, astronomer Charlotte Xie, best-selling author Guy Landon, and celebrity psychic Targ Reinhhard. If they know each other at all, it’s only by reputation, and none of them really know why they’ve been invited here. Lassiter and his doctor, known only as “Dr. Zahra,” want their input into the nature of an artifact that has come into his possession. Words, music, the mind, the stars - he thinks all of these will be important. So he prepares them with a mixture of cocaine and a bespoke drug of Dr. Zahra’s design, to put them all on the same wavelength. They walk into the next room, where the artifact sits on a pedestal, part sculpture, part meteor.

And then someone touches it.

What follows is mostly everything going berserk all at once. This episode was directed by Panos Cosmatos, whose previous films - Mandy and Beyond The Black Rainbow - are definitely an acquired taste, but one that I very much have. If you’re on his very specific wavelength, you’ll be into it. If not, it’ll probably seem like self-indulgent nonsense. And it sort of is. His films are very much about style and aesthetic over everything else, but it works, at least for me, because in addition to pressing very specific aesthetic buttons that are very much my shit, he turns everything up to the point of near-surrealism. This is no different. Lassiter’s house is a marvel of early 80s cocaine chic (complete with gold-plated AK-47), the majority of it is shot like a music video from the time period, and Lassiter is delightfully sinister - like Timothy Leary gone rancid. When things pop off (literally, in some cases), it lurches immediately into Cronenberg territory, a little bit of alien biology and a little bit of Scanners. Sure, some of the other characters are saddled with kind of goofy dialogue and Cosmatos really likes his shaggy-dog endings (which I think is a weakness), but if you can overlook those things, this is a ride - equally strange, funny, and gross.

Episode 8; The Murmuring

We open on a research presentation. Nancy and Edgar Bradley are ornithologists, studying the murmurations of starlings - when they flock, it’s more like a swarm than anything else. There’s an intelligence there, and they’re getting close to a breakthrough. So they pack up and head out into the country, someplace close to the water, where they can observe flocking from a great distance, record their songs and film the murmurations as they happen. They can focus on their work, and very much not focus on their recent tragedy. Edgar’s holding up, Nancy less so. It’s a secluded home on the beach that’s been tended to by a caretaker ever since the original tenants - a mother and son - vacated it. At first, everything’s fine, Nancy’s maybe a little hesitant, a little closed-off, a little private, but given what they’ve just been through, that’s understandable.

And then Nancy starts seeing apparitions - a crying boy, and a screaming woman.

This is very much a straightforward ghost story in the traditional style - beautiful old home with lots of secrets and dark corners, beautifully overcast and windswept vistas, and ghostly figures urging someone to tell their story. Much of the tension comes from Edgar’s insistence that Nancy is seeing (and hearing) things as the result of unprocessed grief and Nancy trying to convince Edgar that what she’s seeing is real while at the same time being in absolute denial about her grief. So it’s as much a story about the corrosive effects of unprocessed grief and trauma as it is about the supernatural and how one parallels the other (much like the director’s equally excellent prior film, The Babadook). It’s spooky without relying on jump scares, atmospheric, and smart, with excellent performances from both protagonists.

So by my estimation, about half of the episodes are good (with two being flat-out excellent), three are flawed, and one just doesn’t work. Given how diverse the episodes are in tone and how different the source material and directors are, this is probably not a bad ratio. I’d be happy to see another season of this, if only to see more good work from established writers and directors and picking up some new ones to check out. And, apart from some of the stuff from Turkey and India that they’ve got right now, some of the better examples of horror on Netflix right now.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Dashcam: The Ugliest American

Folks, I am not gonna lie, this one’s going to be difficult. Not for you to read, I don’t think, but for me to make some sense out of, because Dashcam was an extremely frustrating film to watch. It’s a found-footage film, but for once that’s not a bad thing, because it’s got the sort of headlong plunge-into-nightmare intensity of the best moments in V/H/S. No, the problem here is that it’s also got a protagonist so deeply unpleasant and unsympathetic that it’s a huge distraction. Every now and then I’ll watch something that sticks with me for awhile, and this film does, but for all the wrong reasons.

It opens cold on what appears to be a livestream for “BandCar: The Internet’s #1 Live Improvisational Music Show Broadcast From A Moving Vehicle.” You’ve got the name of the show at the top of the screen and her show’s audience chat scrolling up in the lower left-hand corner, and it becomes apparent pretty quickly that “live improvisational music show” consists of Annie taking words suggested by her chat and working them into one of the most puerile, clumsy attempts at rapping ever. So we’ve got a white girl…in Los Angeles…rapping…usually about buttholes…and livestreaming it for an audience. As protagonists go, already a tough sell.

But wait! There’s more! This is all taking place during the height of pandemic lockdown! And she’s a dedicated conspiracy theorist! She thinks masks are a government plot! And she taunts people about it everywhere she goes! So, sick of the “oppression” she’s experiencing in the United States, she decides to take off for England - she’s going to stay with her former bandmate Stretch, just get away from all the stress and hassle of a novel virus causing hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. When she gets to England, she greets her sleeping friend by spitting in her hand and slapping him awake. Charming.

One huge fight with Stretch and his partner (who has less than zero interest in putting up with Annie’s shit), she steals Stretch’s car for reasons and drives off into the night. After getting ejected from a coffee place (a pattern is starting to emerge), she ends up in a deserted chip shop. She contemplates cracking open the cash register, but before she can, she’s interrupted by the owner, who offers her a large sum of cash to drive her friend someplace. At this point, it’s clear that Annie doesn’t exist in a world where good judgment is an option, so she agrees. The woman’s friend is Angela. Angela is a silent, masked, elderly woman who looks extremely ill. Soon enough, Annie decides this was a bad idea and shoves Angela out on the side of the road, driving off looking for god-knows-what…

…only to realize that Angela has reappeared in the back seat.

What follows is the story of what has to be the worst night of Annie’s life, and normally I’d talk about how the narrative proceeds, what the cinematography is like, and all of that. But Annie sucks all of the air out of this movie. I cannot stress enough how obnoxious this character is. She’s the picture of a very specific type of person - she lives in Los Angeles, her only source of income is what could generously be called niche livestreaming content (but she can still afford to jet off to England at a moment’s notice), and she expresses herself by engaging in what is absolutely the most rudimentary form of rapping in the most juvenile fashion possible. Constantly. She never drops character, everything is a joke to her, everything is another opportunity for “content.” Speaking only for myself, she’s like nails on a chalkboard made flesh based on this alone. On top of that, we have her atrocious, conspicuous posturing - she wears a sweatshirt with the word “liberal” crossed out on it with a MAGA hat, and she’s written the word “SLAVE” across the mask that she habitually wears under her chin. It’s ideology as temper tantrum, desperate attention-seeking like a five-year-old shouting the one bad word they know in the middle of the room, waiting for someone to react. If someone this simultaneously antagonistic, self-involved, and unconcerned with the people around her did not already exist, they would spontaneously congeal from the grubbiest corners of the Internet like a fatberg of all of our worst impulses.

And I think playing the character so bad and so loud ends up being harmful to the film. First, our engagement with the protagonist shifts from “oh no, what’s going to happen to her?” to “I cannot wait for this person to die,” and that tends to make horror less effective for me. I don’t ask that the protagonists of a film be angels or even necessarily good people, but I think they should be, at the very least, relatable. They’re our way into the world of the film, so when they’re alienating, we’re alienated from the experience of the film. Second, a lot of screen time is taken up with her antics, which ends up having sort of a numbing or deadening effect. There’s no opportunity for rest, no quiet spaces to accentuate the loud ones. It’s just a barrage of chaos. Sometimes it’s the antagonist, as you’d expect, but then it’s also the protagonist throwing one shitfit or another. It just never stops, and so what should be building intensity is instead just one insensate blare. There are still some effective moments of escalation, but I can’t help but think they’d hit even harder if our main character weren’t filling every quiet moment in the film with more of her bullshit. 

Finally, for a good chunk of the film, her stream’s chat scrolls up the left side of the screen, and the majority of them are enablers, egging Annie on, taking her side against the people she’s abusing, using terms like “cuck” and “libtard” freely, and treating everything they’re watching like it’s entertainment, no matter how awful it gets (and it gets pretty awful). If it happens on the Internet it’s not real, so why care? The few people that do seem to take the atrocities unfolding in front of us seriously get mocked and shouted down. They’re basically a Greek chorus of shitheads. The chat itself is a distraction insofar as it divides our attention, as well as being depressingly accurate at showing how the distancing effect of Internet communication can bring out our worst impulses. One way or another we’re spending most of our time with monsters, so it’s hard to feel much of anything for anyone except Annie’s poor friend Stretch, who gets put through a wringer for absolutely no good reason.

But apart from that (in a “how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln” sort of way), it’s actually a pretty well-constructed film. It uses signal loss plausibly to subtract the distraction of chat during especially tense sequences, steadily raises the pitch from sketchy to full-on nightmare, and doesn’t noticeably violate the constraints that come with everything being streamed through phone cameras. Shots aren’t always perfect, sometimes the camera’s pointed at nothing, and sometimes that nothing turns into something in ways that actually elicit dread. The stunt and effects work is very good, and the filmmakers know not to linger too long on anything - just a glimpse of blood, bared teeth, something getting torn is enough. There are some really creepy moments as well, and a sequence toward the beginning that has to be one of the grossest things I’ve seen in awhile (this is a film in which not all, but most, bodily fluids come into play). So if Annie were played much more low-key, like she and Stretch were both normal human beings, I think this film would have packed a wallop. As it is, it’s sort of tiring because we’re mostly just trapped with this awful, awful person who is as much a force of destruction as the actual monster of the film, if not more of one.

If I were to quibble, there are a couple of moments that stretch plausibility - people sort of reappearing out of nowhere, the action conveniently ending up at one particular location toward the end) - but the lunatic momentum sort of carries you past it. It’s deeply frustrating - it really does feel less like a horror movie and more like an exercise in different types of disgust. It’s a hard watch, but not in a good way.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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Deep Fear: Not As Deep As It Thinks

Trying to make a movie - any kind, really - that is “about” something is, in my opinion, generally a losing proposition. Mostly because all films are about something insofar as they’re a product of a particular time and place in a particular culture, rely on a particular level of technology (which feeds into an aesthetic), as well as the experiences and worldviews of the director and cast in terms of the choices they make. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, thematic narrative is an emergent property of the filmmaking process. So when someone consciously decides that they’re going to make a film that addresses a specific theme or issue, they run the risk of making it didactic, hectoring, and obvious. Not always, but usually the ones that work the best in my experience address whatever it is in terms of someone’s experience, through the circumstances of their life. There’s a difference between telling a story that leads to the viewer saying “that’s fucked up” and making your entire film 90 minutes of you telling the audience “well, actually, this is fucked up.” It really does come back to “show, don’t tell” most of the time. 

And this is one of the problems with Deep Fear, though not the only one. It’s only fitfully effective, lacks structure, and in its attempts to say something about a larger issue, can’t quite overcome its clichés. 

It doesn’t get off to a promising start, with one of those prologues that tells us what we already know, that there’s something bad down in the tunnels below Paris. A graffiti artist is listening to music on a cassette Walkman circa 1989, but it just happens that he can fast-forward exactly to the start of the next song. As someone who actually used that technology, that is…not really a thing. Right off the bat, it seems like plausibility is not going to be a concern. Soon enough, there are strange noises coming from the end of a tunnel, artist gets dragged off. 

Fast-forward about four years or so, and three friends are sitting in a bar, shooting the shit over drinks. Henry is celebrating his last weekend as a civilian before reporting for military service. Max and Sonia are there for moral support. Well, Sonia does nip off to the restroom to meet an acquaintance who sells her a little baggie of something to keep the party going and clues her in to something fun he’s going to be doing tomorrow night if she and her friends want in .And this is how Henry, Max, and Sonia meet up with Sonia’s friend Ramy for a night of exploration. See, Ramy knows a way into the Paris catacombs, the ancient tunnel system running under the span of the city, once used for the disposal of the dead, now an enormous labyrinth ripe for exploration and the sort of things you do away from the prying eyes of the law. 

There are all kinds of things down there.

Apart from the on-the-nose prologue, it takes awhile to set things up, spending a lot of time with the characters Which is fine, but it doesn’t do much to develop the characters themselves. Henry is kind of a bro, Max is a dorky hypochondriac (we know he’s a dork because he wears glasses), and Sonia is…not white. That’s kind of it. So we’re given the opportunity to learn about them, but there’s nothing to learn. There’s a nightmare sequence that underlines Sonia’s otherness in a way that feels shoehorned in, and kind of unnecessary given what happens later. Ramy is their guide, and otherwise kind of a nonentity. There are a few other characters, but they’re even less than that. None of them are especially obnoxious, but nor is there enough to really feel much of a connection to them either. 

Once they get down into catacombs, things pick up a bit with the blind claustrophobia of the setting. There are lots of tight squeezes, uncharted areas, and unstable tunnels, and the precariousness is pretty well-realized. It’s by no means of the same caliber as The Descent, but it’s reminiscent, especially in terms of needing to manage your way through increasingly smaller spaces and worrying about collapses, not knowing if there’s another exit somewhere. There’s good potential here, and a run-in with some neo-Nazi skinheads sets up the opportunity for real tension (as well as making the earlier nightmare sequence less necessary than it already was), but though it provides the impetus for everything that happens in the third act, it’s sort of forgotten almost immediately until it becomes relevant again, but when it does, it’s not in any meaningful way. It’s a very fitful film in this way - it has promise that goes undeveloped, tension that dissipates when its cause is sort of abandoned for the next thing, and the third act starts by developing something interesting before discarding it for a pretty stock-standard “people get picked off one by one by implacable monster” thing. The nature of the monster, without spoiling it here (don’t even read the IMDB entry for this one, really, the brief blurb gives too much away), isn’t especially imaginative either. It’s something we’ve seen before, and ultimately it doesn’t amount to much beyond people getting fed into a metaphorical meat grinder, with an ending that makes a fairly on-the-nose statement about the immigrant experience in France. 

It's interesting to think about alongside As Above, So Below, though - that film used the premise better but had an utterly ridiculous protagonist. This film had the better protagonists (or at least more believable as people) but didn’t use the premise all that well. There’s also a touch of Creep (the somewhat icky 2004 one) in the idea of the ghosts of war continuing to lurk under the surface of the cities wounded by it, and though it isn’t as invested in humiliating its protagonists as that film, it’s not really doing anything with the idea either. It sort of feels like the filmmakers had a generically solid idea for a monster movie set in the Paris catacombs, but decided it needed to “mean something” and so they made character and narrative choices that amount to “treating people badly because they’re different from you is bad.” Which isn’t exactly earth-shaking as revelations go. Fairly shallow for a film set so far below ground.

IMDB entry

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