Cuando Acecha La Maldad: When The Strength Of Men Fails

Something I’ve observed about movies dealing with demonic possession is how often human frailty is a central part of the narrative. More precisely, that evil is able to do its work and triumph because of human frailty. The devil, these films seems to say, doesn’t really need to work all that hard at it because people can basically be counted on to do the wrong thing, or to buckle at the exact moment they need to stand firm. Father Karras’ doubt in The Exorcist, the fervor of Thomasin’s parents in The VVitch, the sheer volume of dysfunction in the Graham family as a whole in Hereditary. All evil needs to do is sit and wait and let us do all the work.

And Cuando Acecha La Maldad (When Evil Lurks) is another strong entry in that particular canon. It’s a bleak, visceral take on the perniciousness of evil and how it’s aided by human frailty. I think it doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it’s a hell of a ride to get there.

It’s the middle of the night somewhere in rural Argentina, and brothers Pedro and Jimi hear gunshots out in the woods. It doesn’t sound like someone hunting - the timing of the shots is off, and it sounds like a revolver and not a rifle. Needless to say, they’re not going to go looking. Not in the middle of the night. Besides, it might be the neighboring landowner, Ruiz, and they’d rather not get on his bad side. Pedro’s already pretty sure Ruiz doesn’t like him. So, the next morning, they set out in the direction they were pretty sure the shots came from, and soon enough, happen upon the remains of a person, strewn along the forest floor. It doesn’t look like an animal attack - the cuts are too clean. His belongings are scattered around, including parts of some mysterious brass device, and a journal. There’s a photocopy of someone’s ID, and a map. It looks like he was headed to Maria Elena’s place. She’s reclusive, has two sons, and nobody’s seen or heard from her in awhile.

As it turns out, Maria Elena’s had her hands full. Her oldest son, Uriel, is…sick. Very sick. And sick in a way that medicine cannot cure. Uriel is hosting something. Incubating something not of this earth. And in this Argentina, that’s just a fact of life. These things happen, there are rules and procedures for dealing with them, and you have to be very careful, lest you taint everyone and everything around you with its evil. It is supernatural evil as contaminant, as virus. Pedro and Jimi realize that the body in the woods was someone dispatched to “help” Uriel - that is, euthanize him safely, in a way that would prevent the demon he carried from being born into the world. Nobody else is coming, Uriel isn’t going to last much longer, and when he dies, it will bring ruin to the entire village. So Pedro and Jimi decide that they know what has to be done.

They’re going to get Ruiz and his truck, and drive Uriel as far out of the village as possible and leave him to die there. They’re going to make it someone else’s problem.

Needless to say, their less-than-brilliant plan doesn’t go off without a hitch. And that’s when the deaths start, and Pedro, knowing that he and Jimi and Ruiz done fucked up, decides to do the right thing…well, no, he decides that he’s going to get his family together and get the hell out of Dodge. What follows feels like a simultaneous attempt to outrun disaster and reckoning for all of the mistakes Pedro has ever made. He’s running as fast as he can, his entire life unraveling one step behind him. It’s set in a world that shares some narrative similarities to the equally impressive Asmodexia – it is a world in which evil is a known fact, and has been for some time. And like that film, there’s a sense that we’re coming to this story late, as everything is drawing to an  inevitable close. One character refers to “the end of faith,” and there’s definitely a feeling of institutional apathy or indifference, as if everyone has just resigned themselves. And apathy and indifference are, historically, what lets evil flourish.

It’s a film very much with its own vision for an otherwise well-surveyed topic, though. Possession in this film is something foul – this isn’t your typical “really pale, shackled to the bed and spilling tea it couldn’t possibly have” thing, this is the metaphor of evil-as-disease painted in the broadest strokes, in bloated, festering, pustulent bodies, whose fluids communicate its evil as surely as any contagion. It’s evil as ebola or bubonic plague. It’s an ailment that is physical and spiritual in nature, and the line between it and human failings are blurred. People who are possessed say horrible things to manipulate others and cause them doubt, but so do people who aren’t possessed, who still harbor lingering bitterness and grudges. Where is the line between them drawn? Human failing, like indifference and apathy, does its part to help evil thrive, as Pedro and Jimi pretty much make every wrong decision you can make, let their impulses get the best of them time and time again, and all of it helps evil along. In that it also reminds me of The VVitch, how normally loving family impulses get bent and twisted to serve evil’s ends. Pedro is far from a perfect man, and he doesn’t redeem himself at all, but he’s just one more imperfect person in a story full of imperfect people, so he isn’t solely to blame. Everyone is. Evil is already everywhere.

None of this is, on paper, especially new. Possession-as-disease is nowhere near a new idea (though this is an especially down-and-dirty take), and as I’ve already beaten to death, human failing is a big part of this type of story. But I have to say, this is, in terms of visual storytelling, a real cut above. It places instances of graphic, shocking (and shockingly graphic) sudden violence right alongside moments that are singularly quiet and eerie, communicating wrongness with surprising restraint. It’s as content to put everything in our faces as it is to suggest and leave things off-camera, and the result can be a little disorienting, but not in a bad way. There’s a real absence of safety in this approach, and the rhythms of the film are such that those moments will absolutely catch you off-guard. It’s a film that has no interest in letting you catch your breath and that’s as much about its willingness to abandon predictability as the urgency of Pedro’s situation. There’s a sense of dread inevitability, that evil has already won and is just waiting for Pedro to catch up to that fact, and in that sense I’m reminded of The Dark and the Wicked. What does it want? Who knows. It’s just there, a fact of the world, utterly merciless and implacable. They’re going to lose, it’s just a matter of how long they have left.

Perhaps my only real complaint about the film (apart from a slightly dodgy translation) is that the ending is a little anticlimactic. It’s certainly not a hopeful ending, but after the horrors Pedro (and by extension, us) has witnessed, I expected something world-consuming, and it doesn’t quite get there. But then again, this is a film about the futility and impotence of flawed people in the face of evil, and in that sense it feels right. The outcome was never in doubt, and the strivings of men to hold back the tide meant nothing.

IMDB entry
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The Reflecting Skin: The Nightmare Of Childhood

“Kids can be so cruel.” Let’s think about that for a second. It’s certainly true, as any veteran of childhood or adolescence can attest. But it’s also often used dismissively, as if it’s a self-evident statement, not something to explore. But it’s worth looking at more closely because it’s almost two sides of the same coin. Cruelty is part of innocence, because if you don’t know that what you’re doing hurts someone or something, you’ll do it, and you’ll laugh, and their pain is no lesser for it. It might even be worse. Childhood can be full of casual cruelty because often you haven’t yet learned regard for anything outside yourself. And all too often, horror sells the idea short by going no further than the idea that if it’s creepy when an adult does it, it’s even more creepy when a kid does it.

I’ve had the cult film The Reflecting Skin on my radar for awhile, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to get around to it, because it’s really striking. It’s lyrical, haunting and strange, a story of cruelty, and tragedy, and innocence lost, all wrapped tightly together like a ball of venomous snakes.

It’s rural somewhere in the 1940s, a stretch of lonely farmhouses standing in oceans of wheat under an unblinkingly blue sky, and the film begins with summer childhood shenanigans, three friends playing out in the fields, up to some kind of mischief. It’s horrible, and bloody, and the three friends - Kim, Eben, and Seth - laugh and laugh and laugh at the prank they’ve pulled, oblivious to their own viciousness. In its wake, we follow Seth back home. His family runs a gas station and garage, and they’ve got another boy, Cameron, off fighting in the Pacific. There’s a peculiar, solitary woman who lives a little way. It was she who was the target of Seth and his friends, and he’s sent to apologize. She’s reclusive, pale to the point of colorlessness, clad all in black and although she looks young, she tells Seth very seriously that she is over two hundred years old.

Seth knows what she is. His father reads pulp novels about creatures like this.

What follows is the story of one summer in Seth’s life - the mysterious neighbor lady, the secrets everybody keeps, and a string of unexplained deaths striking at the little community’s most vulnerable members. It’s like an Andrew Wyeth painting came to cold, surreally detached life, and it’s a story suffused with pain. Everyone in this film is damaged somehow, estranged from their own feelings and experience, wounded by life in one way or another. There’s Seth’s mother, seething with rage at the disappointment of her life and taking it out on Seth and her husband alike. There’s Seth’s father, taciturn, resigned, passive and ultimately pathetic. Joshua, obsessed with his own sins, and Dolphin, the mysterious neighbor lady, brought from her home in England to this rural place by a husband now long-gone, repressed and constricted and utterly alone. And lurking in the margins, the sheriff and his deputy, both with eyes like stone, and a nameless young man in a black Cadillac, whose intentions are unclear but don’t seem wholesome at all. The result is a lot of cruelty, because everyone is disconnected from themselves and from everyone else, consumed by their own horrors and obsessions. And in childhood, you don’t know any better, so Seth, already damaged by his mother’s abuse, moves through this broken and damaged world, hurting and being hurt and not knowing the why of any of it, while real evil lurks right under everyone’s nose.

And it’s a story told vividly. This would never be mistaken for a realist piece or character study, not when everyone is so alien and alienated, but it leaps off of the screen. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, with color choices that can only be described as painterly, and careful consideration for composition in every shot. It’s full of little details and moments that aren’t exactly subtle, but convey the impression that everything about this film is pointed in the same direction, devoted to telling this story using every means at its disposal. Hell, there are moments where even the editing is breathtaking and evocative. The orchestral score is lush, prickly and foreboding, giving it the feeling of some kind of timeless fable, and the result is rife with a sense of strangeness. It’s a film that is perfectly willing to have bizarre things happen and not bother to explain them (the sheriff’s introduction is both startling and oddly funny, and Seth finds…something…in the barn that becomes a confidante), but at the same time it doesn’t feel gratuitous or contrived. It’s a bleak existence seen through the eyes of a child, and even if it doesn’t make literal sense, it makes emotional sense. The whole thing feels like a languorous nightmare.

I think it’s lazy to call things “Lynchian,” and all too often just means something is a little quirky, but here I think it does make sense. Thematically, it operates on a somewhat similar wavelength – everything and everyone seems at a slight remove from reality and each other, as if they’re sleepwalking through their own lives and only capable of communicating in the most direct, emotionally naked way possible without the heat of actual emotion. There’s a strong undercurrent of desire contorted by repression as well, and the suggestion of a small town hiding dark secrets, so I definitely see similar notes to Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, but maybe less hermetically sealed, if that makes sense. It’s a story of growing up and the loss of innocence, and a story about wounded people trying to find connection, and a story about the senselessness and inexplicability of sudden untimely death, a fable told in the merciless glare of a perpetually, unbearably blue summer sky. I don’t think I’ve seen something that hit me like this since Possession, and though this doesn’t plumb that film’s lunatic depths, it comes a lot closer that most anything else I’ve seen.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Analog Horror: Do Not Adjust Your Set

Periodically there are revolutions in filmmaking. The introduction of sound, consumer-grade film cameras, consumer-grade video cameras, digital effects, most recently platforms like YouTube and Vimeo allow anyone with an account to upload their work and allow it to find an audience. The results are…well, mixed, but of course they’re going to be mixed. At its best, there’s an opportunity to see things that’d never be given the light of day by the film industry, because they’re so idiosyncratic and resolutely noncommercial.

One particular example is the nascent movement/genre/category/whatever known as “analog horror.” I was introduced to it with The Backrooms, and in the wake of writing about it, I had a number of other similar efforts suggested to me, and I sat down to go through the collected works of three different creators. There’s even more than these out there, but these were the titles that kept coming up, so this is more of a representative sampling, than a comprehensive survey.

The term “analog horror” is sort of ironic, in that all of this work is made possible by advances in digital filmmaking, effects, and distribution platforms. But I get what it’s referring to. It’s all very homemade, typically the project of one person, with varying levels of outside assistance (and as often as not, external financial support from platforms like Patreon), and it all tends to work in the same spaces. The subject matter is typically cosmic horror, stories told using bygone media - local television, educational and training videos, low-budget animation - and bygone technologies. It’s glitchy, grainy, fuzzy, full of the wobble of poorly-tracked videotapes, cheap film stock, low-resolution images full of digital artifacts, and the crude, inhuman blare of early speech-synthesis software. There’s a sense that something has been unearthed, some long-forgotten ephemera that documents a world that could have been our own, or maybe is our own and we’re living in blissful ignorance, unable to correlate the contents of the universe. They’re successful to varying degrees, but it does seem to be the case across the titles I watched that brevity is on their side. The best of it works in short, bite-sized pieces, and tends to start to losing focus the longer the videos become and the longer a series goes on.  But at its best, it’s unnerving, full of dread, and I’m not sure it’d be possible or effective in a more conventional presentation.

Local 58 TV

This is probably the strongest of the three that I watched. It’s a series of short videos framed as broadcasts from a small, local television station, the kind that filled its off-hours programming with informercials or old movies, or simply concludes its broadcast day with a still image and a scratchy recording of the national anthem. Sometimes it’s just a framing device, and sometimes it’s integral to the overarching narrative that emerges. Stories work as stand-alone entities, and take a variety of forms. There’s grainy dash-cam footage of a driver led seriously awry by their GPS, a macabre children’s cartoon, an end-of-broadcast reel intended for a very specific situation, a weather broadcast about some very strange weather, among others. But as the series goes on, specific themes and ideas begin to emerge, so that by the end, a story is just beginning to take shape, but only just. We’re left with the nagging sense that there’s some horrible truth at the edges of our understanding, almost comprehensible. This series benefits from knowing that this kind of storytelling is a delicate balance of suggestion without revealing too much, giving just a glimpse into something horrible behind a façade of institutional blandness. That’s a tough balance to maintain, and the result is a series of brief glimpses into a friendly small-town institution that turn into something far more sinister, creating sharp jabs of icy dread with impeccable timing and precision.

Highlights: Contingency, Weather Service, Real Sleep

 

Gemini Home Entertainment

Conversely, this is probably the weakest of the three. It’s working with similar raw materials to Local 58, but it doesn’t wield them as deftly, and that makes all the difference. The framing device is a small video production company that manufactures educational material and promotional material for small businesses, but it’s a conceit that gets abandoned or at least departed from on a pretty regular basis, and the result feels less like we’re gradually piecing together some horrifying truth across disparate instances of otherwise innocuous media, and more like we’re being told a fairly stock cosmic-horror story through the most roundabout means possible. There’s a tendency to return to the same device of suddenly distorting the sound and video over and over again, and at their weakest, slack running times with little narrative movement make some of the individual videos unfocused and dull. There are good moments here and there, and at its best it punctures the cheery façade of an educational video about local wildlife or storm safety with glimpses of the bizarre that go as fast as they appeared, leaving you feeling uneasy, but more often than not, it feels belabored. I think it could work as a more aggressively curated set of videos, but as it is, it feels like it takes way too long to tell us a story that we’ve already figured out about a third of the way into the series. 

Highlights: World’s Weirdest Animals, Storm Safety, Deep Root Disease

 

The Mandela Catalogue

This one is easily the hardest one to summarize, because it takes the basic elements of analog horror as established by the other two titles and throws them all into a blender, creating the feeling that we’re watching a prolonged nightmare in which shards of old videos and antiquated technology periodically surface. It’s not so much about a single company as it is a place – Mandela County – and the people who live there. There’s a police department, a local computer and electronics store, members of a paranormal investigation club from a neighboring county, and something called The United States Department Of Temporal Phenomena. It’s weird right from the beginning, establishing a world that’s suffered some kind of existential anomaly, focusing on how it impacts one community by examining a few incidents from different angles and perspectives. The storytelling is executed using a wide variety of styles, from old religious cartoons to glitchy, low-resolution imagery to educational videos to simulated Internet conversations to live-action footage that at times resembles the grainy pointillism of Skinamarink, and at others, black and white footage with actors and dialogue that reminds me of nothing so much as a YouTube-era riff on German Expressionism. At its best, it’s unsettling, tense, and oddly melancholy by turns, evoking the feeling of a small town that’s slowly crumbling, but again, the whole enterprise goes on a little too long and it starts losing focus as it goes. This type of storytelling really does seem to be at its best when it keeps things short and doesn’t overstay its welcome, and there’s so much to this story that it feels like it’s spinning its wheels toward the end, but when it’s good it’s disorienting, laden with dread, and absolutely singular in its vision. It’s hard as hell to explain why it works, but it does.

Highlights: Overthrone, Exhibition, The Mandela Catalogue Vol. 333

Local 58TV on IMDB

Local58TV on YouTube
 

Gemini Home Entertainment on IMDB

Gemini Home Entertainment on YouTube
 

The Mandela Catalogue on IMDB

The Mandela Catalogue on YouTube

Where The Devil Roams: Love Will Keep Us Together

There’s only a handful of directors who make me legitimately excited when they put out a new film. Some careers are more uneven than others, and it’s not unusual to follow a good film with a turkey. But even more than that, it’s not that many directors whose work really engages me, shows me something that stays with me long after I’ve seen it. There’s good filmmaking, and then there’s filmmaking that makes me feel like I’ve seen something transformative. There are only a few directors who make me say “they’ve got a new film coming out? I am fucking there.”

Among them is…well, it’s not a single person. You might call them a filmmaking collective if that weren’t the most pretentious-sounding thing ever. The Adams family is a married couple - John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu. They write, direct, act in, shoot, edit and score their own films, with some outside help for effects work and marketing, via their Wonder Wheel Productions imprint. But their films are, in some important way, homemade. It’s often the case that writing and directing is shared. When one of them isn’t on-screen, they’re behind the camera. This would be a novelty if their films weren’t so good. I’m not familiar with their dramas, but they’ve made a couple of horror films that do seriously impressive things with the budgets they have, and have a style and vision absent from a lot of larger productions. They’re a little rough around the edges, but are so much more interesting than most films with far larger budgets. I’m a fan, pure and simple.

Where The Devil Roams is probably their largest production yet, and maybe it does overreach a little, but all of their usual strengths are intact, so this is still a striking addition to horror film. There’s nobody else out there making films like they do.

The opening is scratchy black and white. There’s a stage, and an attentive audience. A legless man comes out from stage left, and begins to read a prologue about the devil Abaddon and his doomed attempts at love. His heart is lost, his love scattered in pieces. The audience applauds, and so our story begins. It’s the story of three people - Seven, Maggie, and their daughter Eve. Seven was a country doctor, and the horrors he saw during World War I left him so traumatized that the sight of blood renders him catatonic. Maggie worked for him as a nurse, and Eve cannot speak, but sings with the voice of an angel. They have a family act of sorts featuring Eve’s singing, and they travel a dying carnival circuit, among the freaks and carnies, trying to eke out a living. It’s getting harder and harder to get by, and sometimes things get desperate to the point of violence. There’s one act that consistently does well. He’s a magician of sorts, calls himself “Mr. Tipps,” and his act consists of some religious testimony, followed by the dramatic appearance of a pair of shears, which he then uses to snip off his fingers, one by one. One evening, after the show, Eve comes by his tent out of curiosity, and watches him take a special needle and thread out of a box, and carefully stitch his fingers back on.

He has, he says, made a deal with the devil.

Their films typically have a pretty unhurried, conversational pace, at least at their outset, but this one is a much slower, at times almost obtuse affair compared to previous works. It’s not necessarily clear exactly what’s happening for most of the first act, and even once it is, the whole thing relies more on mood, as sort of a tone poem, than anything else. It’s a film with a lot of stillness and air between words, and I think right at the point where I was asking myself “okay, where is all of this going?” was when it all started to cohere. And it does cohere, but it takes a little bit. It’s definitely a film that requires more patience and goodwill on the part of the viewer than most.

But even at its slowest, there are things to appreciate about it. One real strength of their films is their striking, distinct visual sense, and this one is no different. There are a lot of beautifully framed shots, set up almost like tableaux, and because this film is set in the Depression-era U.S., there’s an interesting aesthetic at work, using a mix of black and white, desaturated color, and full vivid color, and the action is punctuated by photographic stills, sepia-toned, full of dusty light, reminiscent of crime scene photos from the early 20th century. The carnival itself tends toward the macabre in the appearance of the performers, and as a result the whole thing has an unearthliness to it that feels like something between the works of Guy Maddin and Diane Arbus. Dialogue and performance has typically been the weak point in their previous films, but here it actually adds to the dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality of the film, along with a score consisting mostly of drums, bass, distorted guitar and ethereal singing. It’s as singular a treatment as anything else they’ve made.

And for the most part, it rewards the viewer’s patience. Gradually, as more and more about these people is revealed, the clearer it becomes that the prologue was indeed the thesis for the film. It’s a story about love, attachment (in more ways than one), and the sacrifices we make for the ones we love. We desperately try to hold things together, to hold ourselves together, to keep our relationships together, and when they or we come apart, the things we have to do to repair that…well, we find ourselves doing things we never thought we’d be able (or willing) to do. The unhurried pacing (punctuated by striking moments of violence as the film progresses) muddies the final act a bit, drawing things out a little longer than they needed to be, though it does come good with a tragedy that escalates things quickly in horrific fashion, leading to a final image as startling as anything else they’ve done.

It’s definitely not as tight as their other two horror films, and I think their attempts to make a period piece might have stretched their resources, but the Adams family are responsible for a singular vision that doesn’t owe jack shit to traditional horror cliches. Even flawed, their films are absolutely worth your time.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon