From Black: Grief Endured

When you think about it, the death of a loved one fuels a lot of horror. Parents, children, spouses, all used as the catalyst for something much worse, whether it’s psychological or supernatural. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work, I think it’s because the death is used as sort of a shorthand for “and then this person lost their marbles.” Or, sometimes, “and then the loved one came back, except now they’re evil.” These are shallow, reductive takes, not interested in actually looking at how grief actually plays out. And grief is messy, ugly, complicated, in and of itself. I think it deserves better than being relegated to a one-size-fits-all plot device.

And I don’t know that From Black completely undoes that relegation, but it definitely helps. It’s a taut, understated look at the lengths grief takes us to that may not avoid some of the usual stops, but goes past them as well.

It opens on a 911 call. Someone’s in danger, there’s someone in the house. They have to hide. This cuts to a house, standing silent with crime scene tape flapping in the breeze. A police officer is walking through it, taking in everything she sees. A line of salt across a hallway, smudged. A chalk circle full of symbols, a pile of bloody bones in the middle. A couch covered in blood. Something very bad happened here.

Back at the station, the officer sits down with the woman who made the 911 call. She’s shell-shocked, spattered with blood and wrapped in a blanket. Her name is Cora, and she has a story to tell. She hasn’t always been the best mother to her son Noah. She’s spent a lot of time on hard drugs, in unhealthy relationships. And one day, as she lay on a couch in a filthy trailer home, deep on the nod, Noah walked out the door and just vanished. And she didn’t even realize it until it was too late. That’s the sort of thing that gets some people to rethink their life choices, and Cora cleaned herself up, moved back into her mother’s old house, and started going to a support group for bereaved parents. But the guilt and the shame are still there. When she finally speaks up in group, it’s like a flood coming out of her. All of the things she wishes she’d done differently and how tired she was of empty platitudes. How so often other people’s sympathy seemed more about them than about her. After the meeting, she’s approached by the group leader, who tells her that there’s a way to fix it, to undo all of it, to get Noah back.

There is a ritual.

As I said above, the story of someone who goes to any lengths to get their loved one back is not an especially novel one, but that’s not the point - this film does, I think, a better job than most at highlighting the anger, the rage, the resentment that attends especially difficult losses, like the loss of a child. When well-meaning people say things like “we’re in this together” not only does it not help, it actually makes it worse, and it’s not all that often that I see horror films get that emotional balance right. It’s maybe more common in drama, but in horror the tendency is to just dip it in histrionics and call it good. And one of the best things about this movie is how Cora isn’t suffering in noble silence. She’s furious and she’s sorrowful and she doesn’t trust anyone because she’s been at the receiving end of so many empty promises and silent judgment. She’s very wounded, and it comes across vividly and gives the movie some depth it could easily have missed.

I’ve seen this film get comparisons to A Dark Song, which is also an excellent film, but I really think the similarities don’t go any deeper than both films being about a woman who undergoes a difficult, dangerous magical ritual with the hopes of repairing the loss of a child. Everything outside of that is different. This is much closer to a conventional horror film than A Dark Song was. It bounces back and forth in time between the present and the events that Cora is recounting, as the police try to make sense of what they’ve found and make sense of what they’re telling her. And it works well in that regard - the returns to the present are like little spaces to breathe and moments to move the investigative pieces forward, and bit by bit the pieces come together over the course of the film. It’s deliberate, but not slow, and understated, except when it isn’t to sharp effect.

Likewise, the writing is mostly very good - sometimes it verges on speeches, but pulls up short of feeling artificial or contrived, and the performances are solid (Cora’s ex-boyfriend is one of the most believably loathsome I’ve seen since Bug). Everything is pitched to a human scale, and it does a very good job of showing instead of telling throughout. A lot gets revealed in little things narratively, asides and small gestures and background details, and it relies a lot on suggestion, on leaving things unseen, punctuated with moments that are lyrical, startling, or both. It’s also a film that’s content to let things happen in the background without calling our attention to it, and that’s a big one for me. It’s a film that respects the audience’s intelligence without being clever or precious about it. The details of the ritual, while maybe not as textbook as those of A Dark Song, don’t feel hokey or lurid, and the last act of the movie is a slow and steady ramping up to the point where Cora realizes exactly what the cost of her decision is going to be. The imagery is largely effective, and though the creature effects don’t really hang around long enough to start looking cheap, they come close. Though, I have to say, I’m ready to call a moratorium on drone shots of roads and landscapes, it’s starting to get out of hand. 

No film is perfect, but honestly my complaints here are pretty small. There’s maybe one really obvious plot device (you pretty much know one character’s eventual fate as soon as they get some real screen time) but it doesn’t really hurt the story, and the score is maybe a little too much, all rattles and thumps and ominous synthesizer and scraping, squeaking strings. It doesn’t really let up, and a number of scenes could use a little more silence and room to breathe, but when it’s appropriate it contributes well to the tension and unease. 

Grief really is something endured - it’s there all the time whether you want it to be or not, and even if it lightens over time it never really goes away and just like Cora spends most of the movie trying to convince the people around her that what happened was real, it can be extremely difficult to get people who aren’t sharing your burden to understand that it is a burden. And the people, like Cora, who bear that burden, aren’t perfect by any stretch. They make mistakes, they lose their temper, they fall apart. The film ends on a nicely inconclusive note that avoids the obvious and keeps things up in the air enough to leave a feeling of slight unease as the credits roll. That’s the thing about grief - it’s never really, truly resolved.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

The Last Broadcast: Who Wore It Better?

I’m going to start talking about this movie by talking about a different movie. When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it was something different. The use of the Internet to create a myth ahead of the movie and suggest that three people had actually gone missing was a big part of this, but ultimately it was the film’s conceit - that what the audience was seeing was the recovered raw footage shot by three film students in the days leading up to their disappearance. This was not what horror in the 1990s looked like, and it blew up big.

And, as is often the case, the success of The Blair Witch Project was attended by controversy, as people came out of the woodwork to claim that it plagiarized The Last Broadcast, which was, these critics would say, the real first found-footage horror film. So, as picky as I am about found-footage horror, I figured I should watch this at the very least as a historical artifact. And you know what? The claims are baseless. The Last Broadcast is barely a found-footage film. And even if it were first, The Blair Witch Project is significantly better. More to the point, The Last Broadcast is incoherent, amateurish to the point of ineptitude, and not so much poorly paced as not paced at all. 

On December 15th,1995, four men - Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler, hosts of the cable-access show Fact or Fiction, Rein Clackin, expert in paranormal sound recording, and Jim Suerd, their guide, went into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to investigate the legend of the Jersey Devil. Then, on December 19th, Jim Suerd comes staggering out of the woods, miles away from where they started, and calls 911 because the rest of them are missing. 

Two days later, the bodies of Wheeler and Clackin are found. Avkast is never seen again.

In the wake of these deaths, a documentary filmmaker named David Leigh has decided to make a film about the case and Suerd’s subsequent murder trial. The film is presented as that documentary, complete with talking-head interviews and examination of both archival footage and footage shot by the group in the Pine Barrens. Before getting into the film itself, I want to look at the idea that the filmmakers who made The Blair Witch Project plagiarized this film. It’s important to note that neither group of filmmakers ever dignified the idea - this seems, in retrospect, like a collective eruption of know-it-alls attempting to maybe gatekeep low-budget horror, I guess? Regardless of motivation, it’s a groundless assertion. The Blair Witch Project was already in pre-production by the time The Last Broadcast was released, The Last Broadcast isn’t really a found-footage film (arguably the first found-footage horror film is Cannibal Holocaust, made years earlier), and the only thing the two films have in common is “group of people who have no business being in the woods go into the woods and meet a bad end.” By that criterion, both films ripped off Deliverance. 

But again, the whole thing is irrelevant because as it stands, even if it were true, the people who made The Blair Witch Project made a far superior film by pretty much every metric. Or, to be less gentle about it, this is not a well-made film. It’s let down by its production design, its writing, and its pacing.

It's pretty clear that the entire production is a homebrew affair. That’s not an indictment in and of itself, I’ve seen any number of really good horror films made on a shoestring budget, and this was filmed for, like $900. That is, even by mid-90s standards, insanely cheap. But…it looks it, at every step. Part of doing something well on a small budget is knowing and working around your limitations. A film that is ostensibly the last footage of a bunch of dudes who go into the Pine Barrens to look for the Jersey Devil? That’s doable for not a lot of money. So it’s baffling as to why the filmmakers chose to make the film a mockumentary with only a smattering of found-footage set in the woods. None of the mockumentary stuff is believable. It works for the protagonists’ cable-access show, which is just as cheap and amateur hour as you’d expect, but when the whole film exists at that level, it looks like you’re just watching someone’s attempt to approximate something outside their grasp. Maybe two of the interior sets (that aren’t explicitly someone’s residence) are believable. A woman tasked with restoring some highly-damaged videotape has a “studio” in what appears to be a gutted or under-construction building, complete with plastic tarps everywhere. Jim Suerd’s “child psychologist” (who, against all ethical guidelines, is happy to talk about client sessions to a documentary film crew) is introduced…examining a dog in what appears to be a veterinarian’s office. Which suggests to me that he is, in fact, a veterinarian, not a child psychologist. This entire production is being directed by a former soap opera director (whose existence in the story is never really justified), and he appears to live in a single room with random post-it notes studding the wall behind him. Maybe he’s seriously down on his luck, but it kind of screams “wellness check.” A law enforcement officer from the county sheriff’s department wears an ATF shirt. Which is, well, a federal agency, and not a country sheriff’s department. Although he does have a hat with “Baroake County Sheriff’s Department” on it in what appear to be iron-on letters.

It’s not just that it looks cheap, it’s also that the filmmakers didn’t do the most basic due diligence on the elements of their story either. Forensic evidence is described as circumstantial evidence. IRC messages are apparently impossible to trace despite IP addresses being something even the most bottom-feeding script kiddie could access back then. On the other hand, their broadcast is described as being a “live Internet cable broadcast” in an era before livestreaming existed at all and video compression was still extremely primitive. All kinds of wireless Internet access tech that’s easily accessible today is handwaved into existence before the existence of commercial broadband or wireless Internet access. They’ve just got a bunch of desktop computers and video and audio gear set up in the middle of the woods under a plastic tarp without even a generator. Believability and realism are paramount for mockumentaries and found-footage films to work and nothing about this is believable or realistic in the slightest.

As poor as the attention to production detail is, the writing is even worse. Human beings simply do not talk like this. Some example dialogue:

“The magnifying glass of the prosecution’s microscope.” 

“We have found bodies. We don’t know who they are or how many we have found.” 

“I had heard of the Fact or Fiction murders. They were big news for a period of one year, and then like so many things in today’s fast-paced world, were forgotten.” 

“Our job is to eliminate suspects based on the evidence that we sift through and that we gather. And as we sifted through and gathered this evidence there was only one suspect left at the end.” 

“The tapes show a group of men going through a wide range of emotions.” 

This isn’t just stagey, artificially expository language. This is some Ed Wood shit. It makes sense for some of the characters to be inarticulate, but everyone talks this way. 

On top of all of this, the story and packing are clumsy and incoherent. The most violent thing that happens on screen (for most of the film) is a shove and someone half-yelling “I’ll see you at camp, man!” and this is treated as evidence that someone is a homicidal maniac. It’s barely a found-footage film, spending its entire first act in documentary mode setting up the whole situation and making a big deal about the footage they shot, only for us to be shown a few snatches of footage shot in the Pine Barrens, all of it too noisy and degraded to really be understandable (we get two people stumbling on a patch of blood, and some awkward conversation between the four of them, that’s about it) which is a fair amount of buildup for nothing. The third act bounces between the ostensible restoration of the rest of the footage (which even restored is too garbled to make sense of) and a rambling tangent about the nature of truth and how the real Jersey Devil is the media or something, climaxing in an utterly ridiculous non-sequitur of an ending that goes on far too long. There’s a reason this is consigned to historical curiosity.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

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The Black Phone: Escape Room

Maybe it makes me kind of a film snob (okay, it definitely makes me kind of a film snob), but I have general aversion to big-budget, mass-marketed horror films. Which isn’t to say that all indie horror is good (far from it) or that films with large budgets are all bad, but films with a certain level of star power, coming from certain directors or distributors, getting a certain amount of publicity push, tend to get my hackles up. In general, I don’t like franchising and I don’t like films that insult their audience’s intelligence. And since I think of horror as a valuable way to tell stories that can push buttons, take us places we wouldn’t otherwise go, I like those things even less in horror film. 

So I gotta say, I went into The Black Phone with reservations. It was produced by Blumhouse, who have, to my mind, a mixed track record - they’ve put out some reasonably good (or at least non-mainstream) stuff, but also a lot of the slick, glossy dreck that gets franchised and spun off to death. Multiplex thrill rides. The director made Sinister, a film that had a lot going for it right up to the point that it totally derailed in the name of franchisability. So it didn’t really look promising. The premise didn’t help either, though we’ll get to that.

But on top of my film snobbery, I have a perverse streak. And so the more I saw ads for this thing come up, the more I simultaneously though “ugh, no thanks” and “you know, I really should check this out to see if it’s bad as I think it’s going to be.” Like, I don’t especially like to shit on films, even though I recognize that’s some of my most animated writing, but sometimes I feel the urge to see if my prejudices bear out, or if they’re just prejudices.

And in this case, well, it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. There are things about it which I deeply dislike and I think drag it down, but there are also some real strengths that kept me from dismissing it entirely.

It’s 1978, and we’re in Denver, Colorado. We meet Finney, and his sister Gwen. They’re trying very hard not to make any noise around their dad. He works the night shift, and when he’s not working the night shift, he’s deep into his vodka and orange juice. So every day is walking on eggshells, and coordinating whose turn it is to take care of him. On top of that, Finney gets bullied a lot. Things aren’t easy for them, and haven’t been since their mother passed away. Things are tense at home, and things are tense at school, especially since kids started disappearing. Police have no leads, just black balloons at the site of some of the disappearances. And then one day, walking home, Finney stops to help a man who drops some groceries outside his van. 

One flourish of black balloons, and Finney wakes up in a soundproof basement.

So, the premise here is, well, kind of high-concept. There are a number of moving parts here. You’ve got this mysterious masked figure who’s been abducting adolescent boys from around north Denver, boys who vanish without a trace, never to be seen again. You’ve also got an old rotary phone in Finney’s basement prison, one that isn’t connected to anything, but rings anyway (and there are…voices…on the other end). And Gwen is…maybe psychic? That sort of feels like a lot to buy into all at once. This was another big part of my skepticism going in. But honestly, it ends up being less of a problem than I thought it would be. Oh, sure, when I stop to think closely about it, it all threatens to fall apart (police are not getting a warrant based on a little girl’s dreams), but in the moment it was only slightly distracting. 

I think, overall, the film’s biggest problem is probably the writing, especially with the kids, of which there are a number. As someone who was actually a kid in the period this movie takes place, I don’t remember anyone actually talking like this. It all sounds very much like dialogue,, and the actors playing the kids have trouble selling it, so it all feels very artificial. This is less of an issue with the adult dialogue, and it becomes less of a problem overall once Finney’s been abducted, but it’s still there and makes it harder to really get into the film. You’re being constantly reminded that this is just a movie. The performances range from adequate to excellent, and if they suffer it’s mostly from the aforementioned dialogue. But even apart from its artificiality, there’s also a tendency to cram in exposition or overexplain. Which is odd, because there are some places where it uses flashback effectively, so a scene where a character just says a whole bunch of stuff to another character that is clearly meant for the audience (because the person they’re talking to already knows all of it), it stands out even more. 

Again, it’s just a movie. If anything, it suggests that the filmmakers thought the audience wouldn’t be able to piece it together on their own. Oh, was that too hard to follow? Here, I’ll tell you what you just saw, and I’ll speak slowly and use small words. Fuck that. It’s also hard to get invested because in some ways, you have a pretty good idea of what the broad strokes are going to be (of course Finney’s going to get abducted, of course he’ll spend most of the movie trying to escape and failing) and the problem is that there aren’t really any surprises in that regard. There’s no attempt to twist or subvert our expectations, so at its worst, it sort of becomes an exercise in waiting for the climax (which itself throws in an unnecessarily convoluted twist that stops the momentum short). I kept waiting for the story to surprise me, and it didn’t, at least not until the climax. But it wasn’t really a jaw-dropper, more of a “oh, that’s kind of a cool way to handle it.”

So yes, it had a lot of weaknesses. But like I said at the start, I can’t dismiss it outright because it does some things very well. It gets the period details pretty right in ways that feel realistic and unfussy. It doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to it taking place in the 1970s. It looks right and feels right in that regard. I’d have to say that generally, the visuals are a real strength of this film. It takes place in a world that feels sort of brown and overcast (the 70s did have a lot of wood paneling), and there are some really nice moments of visual flair - abductions told in rapid fadeouts, well-placed flashbacks that sometimes turn into dream-logic insights, not dissimilar to moments in Audition, which is not a comparison I thought I’d be making. Lighting (especially in Finney’s interactions with the abductor) is on point, and Finney’s conversations on the titular phone are staged almost theatrically in a way that embodies the disembodied voices to good effect.  So it looks good and even if the writing and performance is obvious, the cinematic storytelling isn’t. And however ridiculous the things people say to each other, the characters don’t themselves feel ridiculous. This is especially important concerning the abductor, who doesn’t play like a monster or a villain so much as a deeply troubled, stunted man who is constantly reliving some awful psychodrama. And the climax has sort of a puzzle or escape room feel to it that wasn’t obvious to me at all ahead of time, so when it all came together it felt nice to see how all of these disparate things had a purpose that wasn’t obvious from jump. But then the end ran too long because the filmmakers threw in a totally superfluous twist right at the end, one that I suspect created the need for the scene that followed it, where a character literally explains what we just saw. 

And this is the problem with mass-market horror, I think. On the one hand, you want to make a good film, but  on the other hand, you need to make a film that’s going to put enough butts in seats to generate a profit, and that can mean making a film for people who don’t really appreciate nuance, or even pay attention. So everything becomes kind of loud, kind of obvious. I had the same problem with the director’s previous film - it started strong and then crashed in the third act with the introduction of elements that were clearly meant to make it into a franchise. And here, as then, we have what could have been a really good horror film undone by the need to make it justify its budget. I wish I were wrong sometimes, and this is one of those times.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

The Backrooms: Strange Terrain

A few months ago, I was made aware of a whole bunch of different creators doing unconventional short-form horror on YouTube. Which makes sense, really - the quality of what’s possible with consumer-grade video equipment and effects software has gotten so much better over the years, and YouTube is a platform where anyone can set up an account and upload stuff for whatever audience is out there. Horror runs the gamut from slick Hollywood productions to grungy shot-on-camcorder stuff as it is, so it makes sense that it’d find its way there too.

And I have to say, having just dipped my toes in, what I’ve noticed is that it runs the gamut - there’s the fairly conventional stuff produced on a budget, but then there’s the instances where things get, for lack of a better word, really fucking weird. This doesn’t mean it always clicks with me, but at the very least I have to applaud how far out there some of it is willing to go.

And so today I want to talk about a collection of short films I’m going to refer to collectively as The Backrooms. They represent a really impressive example of independent filmmaking, as well as a certain type and style of story that I hold close to my heart.

But before I dive in, first, a little context. The Backrooms is a product of Internet-based collective storytelling, where multiple contributors produce creative work (images, writing, video) around a central idea. It began as a single image on 4chan (which, if you aren’t familiar…don’t) and from there, it took off into organizing wikis and evolving narrative and lore, built and developed by multiple independent collaborators. In that sense (as well as others), it’s not that different from the SCP Foundation. It’s a bunch of people creating an emergent narrative around a set of central rules or principles or idea.

So, to be clear, I’m not going to be writing about the entire phenomenon, just a collection of 16 short films made by Kane Parsons, which stand as a single narrative within the larger fiction. Other people have written about or made films in the world of the Backrooms, though what little else I’ve seen hasn’t impressed me so far to the degree that  Parsons’ work has.

It all begins with some industrial test footage - an array of some sort, all pointed at a suspended metal ball. There’s a hum, and a crackle, and the ball vanishes. Call it a proof of concept. It demonstrates that something…we aren’t sure what…is possible. There are notes, diagrams, voices discussing something technical. It gives way to an impersonal concrete room full of equipment, cabling, and the low hum that comes with dangerous amounts of electricity. It’s all pointing at a rectangle of metal mounted on the wall, about the size of a doorway. This is the application of that proof of concept. And it doesn’t work right away, but eventually the equipment holds, the hum is replaced by a screeching, tearing sound, and where the metal rectangle was there is now a blindingly bright light. It all builds to a crescendo and then…stops.

Where there was a plate of metal, there is now a hallway. A hallway that stretches into someplace that shouldn’t exist.

What follows is a largely oblique account of the exploration of the space that’s been pried open in reality. If it were just an exercise in visual effects, it’d just be a impressive demo reel. Don’t get me wrong, it’d still be impressive - Parsons started making these at 16 years old, and when I think about the kind of shit I was writing at 16, it’s humbling, What I think makes this collection of short films work to the degree that it does is that it takes the time to build a story, largely told through inference but still there, out of individual, disparate sources of footage. It’s very much found footage, but avoids a lot of the obvious pitfalls that pull more “professional” efforts under. There’s very little exposition (until the last two entries, which are the most conventional and I think the weakest as a result), instead building the story in sequence out of a mix of internal research footage, business development presentations, as well as footage sourced from people outside the facility who stumbled on this space outside of space accidentally, to no good end. It’s not hard to follow, but it doesn’t hold your hand either. Installments range in length from about a minute and a half to about 14 minutes, and few overstay their welcome. There’s a pervasive feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty which at its best sharpens into dread, and there are a couple of jump-out-of-your-seat moments along the way. There’s the sense that the company responsible for this research is tampering with things they shouldn’t, that there were places we were never meant to see.

So it’s already a pretty smart application of the found-footage approach, which is nice to see. But on top of that, it’s a narrative in a style for which I have a huge weak spot - a secret history of the world told in the intersection of the anomalous and the mundane, the point where the unknown is breached by some human institution determined to understand or explore or contain it. In that sense it shares DNA with the SCP Foundation (the film adaptations of which I’m generally less impressed by), the video game Control, the film Annihilation, the miniseries The Lost Room, among others. I love stories like this, where the mysterious, the unexplainable, the possibly horrifying is attended to by scientists and engineers and bureaucrats. The SCP Foundation’s dry filing classifications and experimental logs, Control’s mid-century modern office stretching out to an impossible vastness, endless halls filled with mundane objects kept in secure observation rooms, personnel in Annihilation occupying a facility that overlooks a growing stretch of land that refuses to obey the laws of nature, The Lost Room’s story of an entire motel room vanishing and how its contents are finding their way back into the world, changed. All of this is absolute catnip to me. This collection works as well as it does in this mode because it never really tips its hand in that regard. The footage is often mundane in nature, as blandly institutional as the Backrooms themselves, and whatever dialogue we get is just the bored chitchat of people who’ve done this a dozen times before and radio communications about procedure and mission updates. At least, until things go wrong, which they do.

And the Backrooms themselves are wonderfully uncanny - endless expanses of drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, institutional carpeting and sickly bland yellowish walls to start, giving way to even more bizarre expressions of the mundane the deeper they go. The further in you go, the stranger the geometry becomes, the less sensical - it’s all familiar and not in and of itself scary, but there’s the strangeness of empty office buildings to start with, and then the doorways start being the wrong size or shape, or positioned strangely on the wall, hallways in the floor and the spaces that lie beyond them, and what inhabits them. Nothing is ever really explained, so the things that interrupt the monotony seem even worse somehow. It takes settings so commonplace that we take them for granted and recombines them until they feel alien and arbitrary, and the end result is this strange feeling of being…not exactly in another world, but more like this world has glitched out. Copying and pasting never seemed so alien or sinister before.

These sixteen shorts are just the thinnest slice of the world of the Backrooms committed to video, but what little I’ve seen so far outside of this collection hasn’t impressed me as much. A lot of it tends gets the form right, but misses the importance of atmosphere and storytelling. Like they know what to put on the screen, but not why. But if anyone ever decides to make a film adaptation of The Navidson Record, I’d put Kane Parsons in the mix immediately.

IMDB entry
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