Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

I made this observation a few weeks ago, but it continues to interest me how you can start to pick up on particular cultural touchstones once you’ve watched enough horror movies from a particular country or part of the world. Spain really likes demons and demonic possession as the prime mover behind its horror, Japan has its nods to animism, the importance of the family unit, and water as a symbol for the presence of the supernatural, England does a lot with ancient beliefs and pagan tradition. This doesn’t describe every film from these places, of course, but they pop up enough to seem like things particular to those places.

And I’m starting to figure out some stuff about Indonesian horror as well. It’s interesting how much of it serves as cautionary tales about what happens when you don’t live a pious life – curses that follow generations when someone violates Islamic traditions are pretty common – and just how…wacky…it is. At their best, Indonesian horror films, whatever they might lack in technical polish or savvy, have a wide-eyed earnestness to them that carries the films over rough spots, like an Islamic Chick tract. It’s very no-fucks-given, and Siksa Kubur (Grave Torture) is one of the better examples.

Sita and Adil are brother and sister, who until recently worked in their family bakery. But something terrible happened, something driven by religious fear, and now they’re orphans, taken in by an Islamic school where they are taught a trade alongside being taught how to be good Muslims. But Sita isn’t having it – it was religion that got her parents killed, stories about the torment that the impious suffer even as they lie in their graves. The soul is tortured in the afterlife, the body is tortured after burial. She’s angry and determined to believe that it wasn’t her parents sinning that got them killed – it was religion that killed them. Her teachers can’t answer her questions, they just call her a sinner for her troubles, and she doesn’t want to stay there. She grabs Adil and they head for a tunnel that’s supposed to take them off the school grounds, but it goes on a little too long, it gets a little too dark, and they meet someone there. A young boy named Ismail…

…which just happens to be the name of a former student who died under mysterious circumstances.

Probably this film’s biggest strength is the way it plays around with conventions of the genre. Normally Indonesian horror films are pretty straightforward, but this one isn’t afraid to leave the whole “protagonists have to return to some kind of cursed village to undo something terrible” story in the dust and set everything much more firmly in the modern world. It’s a story about the tension between faith and doubt, how religion is used as justification for violence, the way unresolved grief can become obsession, and the nature of morality. Which is a lot to pack in, but it doesn’t really feel forced, everything plays a role in getting the audience to the end of the story, which takes detours through revenge stories, attempts to apply scientific methods to the supernatural (an obsessed sibling out to disprove supernatural phenomena gives this some definite Oculus vibes), meditations on aging and mortality, and stories about the wealthy and powerful attempting to cheat hell. You think you know where it’s going, but there’s a real WTF-ness in how the story unfolds in some surprising directions as it goes, but without ever feeling jarring – everything emerges from what precedes it, while packing in the requisite moments of supernatural menace and a walloping dose of “say your prayers and you won’t get tortured in the afterlife” that is becoming, to me, an absolute staple of Indonesian horror films.

Another staple of Indonesian horror films is energetically janky effects work and this film is no different in that regard. In this case, though, the production values are really good otherwise so it’s a more jarring contrast than in other Indonesian films where the whole thing feels sort of grungy and so relatively primitive effects work blends right in. In a couple of places it’s especially glaring, almost comic when it shouldn’t be. Blackly comic, but still. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that do a lot with less – voices where there shouldn’t be any, little bits of creepy business in the background, an especially grisly game of hopscotch – which buy the film a fair amount of goodwill for the moments when things don’t really land. The performances are a little variable, but the actors playing Adil and Sita – as children and adults – do a really good job and keep the film feeling grounded. And even when the performances aren’t as strong as they could be, there’s a lot of raw emotion in them which gives the whole thing a feeling of intensity and genuine unease that you don’t always get in horror films. Sometimes the story feels like it’s turning on a dime but it manages to make it work in the end, especially in a third act that gets seriously weird in places – I can’t remember the last time I saw a film actually pull off nested nightmare sequences this well.

Apart from the uneven effects work, there are a couple of other problems – the end is an absolute head-scratcher, the setup for the central conceit is a little convoluted (like, that’s a lot of work and planning just to prove a point), but it manages to stay away from easy jump scares, has some nice moments of visual flair, and some surprisingly heartfelt acting that manages to elevate it above your basic ghost story and your basic Indonesian religious tract. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s nice to see something a little more contemporary-feeling from this corner of the world.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Milk & Serial: J/K Bro, It’s Just A Prank

I don’t think this is any kind of huge revelation or anything, but some of the best horror films being made right now are not coming out of the studio system. Which makes sense – studios are in the business of making profitable films, and when you’re in the business of making profitable films, you aren’t going to want to take chances. You want product that’s going to bring in an audience. Has this lead to a glut of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and (ugh) franchises? Yes. A lot of slick, glossy exercises in jump scares. And there’s an audience for that, but I’m not it. So in an environment where there are actual alternatives to the studio system and consumer-grade cameras and editing software are getting better, you get people willing to take chances and pursue their vision and actually getting it out there in front of eyeballs like mine, and it’s refreshing.

Milk & Serial is a great example of this. It’s a sharp, nasty, unnerving bit of short horror that does a really good job of working within its limitations and making its apparent amateurishness an asset.. And it’s on YouTube, of all places!

The whole thing picks up in medias res, as a dude nicknamed Seven is setting up some kind of a prank as part of his buddy Milk’s birthday party. Milk and Seven have a YouTube channel called “Prank Bros,” where they are…well, two bros, pulling pranks. It’s a pretty involved stunt, using bullet squibs and an actual handgun firing blanks. Seven’s invited some rando to Milk’s birthday party, someone he knows from, well, somewhere else, and Milk isn’t happy about it. While they’re arguing about it, there’s commotion from the living room and they run in just in time to see this rando holding a gun on their friend Naomi. He fires and Naomi goes down. And then, once the initial shock has passed, she pops back up and they all start singing “Happy Birthday.” Those kinds of pranks.

The party is brought down a little when someone knocks on the door to complain about the noise. Nobody recognizes him, and after they placate him he goes away, only to be discovered hanging around outside.

The next day they find him sitting in their living room.

It’s a little more than an hour long, clearly shot on a shoestring budget, and it ends up being really impressive – it doesn’t have much to work with, but it tells a story that doesn’t need much to work well. It’s a story told through the cameras that Milk and Seven use to film their pranks, which are consumer-grade camcorders, there are phone cameras, there are even spy glasses at once point – it creates the feeling that everything these two guys do is recorded to be turned into content. At the same time, it’s pretty clear pretty quick that this isn’t strictly raw footage. So calling it a found-footage film (which is how it’s marketed) sort of does it a disservice. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem too bound to the conceit, and the ways it breaks plausibility are fairly easy to overlook in favor of what it does well. It looks like jittery cinema verite, shot by the kind of frat-bro assholes you’d expect to do a prank show on YouTube, giving it a nastiness and immediacy that fits the narrative perfectly. It really does feel like you’re watching something that’s going to end up being evidence in a manslaughter trial or something similar, and still manages to fit in some nice camerawork, using focus to dramatic effect in a couple of places and benefitting from an abrupt, clipped editing style that jumps between perspectives with a suddenness that communicates tension and unease even at relatively mundane moments.

On top of that, the type of story it is, told the way it is gives it some thematic heft. It is nominally a film about a prank that goes wrong, and it does a good job of keeping the audience on its toes. It’s almost a nesting doll of a story, and setting things up that way means that it’s very much a story about the line between truth and fiction. Where do the pranks stop and real events begin? What even is real in this context? It’s true for both the audience and for characters in the story as well – we’re watching a story that looks just like something you might find on some random YouTube channel, and we’re watching it on YouTube, so there’s a lot of reflexivity to it. Meanwhile, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is for the characters in the film to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a setup for yet another prank until it’s too late. It ends up going some very dark places, and it works in that regard because the performances are strong and naturalistic - which they really need to be for a found-footage movie -  and in at least one case, sincerely unnerving. So you get what looks at least initially like something you might actually find on YouTube (and you’re…watching it on YouTube), you get a sense of how it’s going to unwind…until it doesn’t unwind that way and you realize that something really, really bad is going on.

Some time back, I wrote about a film called I’m Just Fucking With You, which largely squandered the opportunity to be a horror film that digs into the inherent viciousness and cruelty of pranks. This film doesn’t squander it, instead it faces it head-on and then blows right past it in something that reminds me of nothing so much as Creep and the segment “Amateur Night” from V/H/S – it’s persistently uncomfortable in the best way and is a great example of how budget doesn’t dictate quality.

Between the Adams family, analog horror like Local 58, Kane Parsons’ work on The Backrooms, and people like Kyle Edward Ball and the Phillipou brothers getting feature-length films distributed off the back of their own work on YouTube, this is a really good moment for indie horror, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

IMDB entry
Available on YouTube 

Chernobyl: Palatable Fictions

Nothing spices up the prospects of a horror movie like the phrase “based on a true story.” Of course, it’s total bullshit as often as not, but it does give the film a frisson of danger, like maybe this isn’t as safe as our usual serial-killer, ghost, or monster movies. And as often as not, what you get is…a fairly pedestrian serial-killer, ghost, or monster movie. What a lot of these films fail to understand is that the reality is so often so much worse than anything a screenwriter or director could come up with. The horrors that are possible in the real world far outstrip our imaginations.

Chernobyl - a five-part miniseries about the titular disaster - is based on a true story, and it’s very faithful to that story. No ghosts, no monsters, no serial killers. And although very few people would call it horror, make no mistake. It is.

It’s early, early in the morning on April 26th, 1982, The night shift at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in Ukraine, has just come on duty, surprised that they’re going to be running a safety test. The test was scheduled for the day shift, but delays pushed it back well into the evening and then into the night. The night shift hasn’t been trained or prepped on the test procedures, and they have maybe ten minutes to figure it out because the supervising engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov, is bound and determined to see it completed and shouts down any reservations. So the completely unprepared night crew - including a reactor control engineer who’d been on the job for all of three months - begins reducing the reactor’s power output for the test. And something goes wrong. The reactor power starts plummeting. Steps are taken to raise the power output, and then the power starts spiking, going higher than it was ever meant to. An engineer presses the emergency shutdown button. And then something explodes. And then something else explodes.

The structure that holds Reactor 4 has been replaced by a column of fire.

If you aren’t familiar with what is still one of the worst nuclear accidents in human history, there are any number of accounts that you can read, but what very few of them can do - and what this miniseries does extremely well - is provide a sense of immediacy. This is not a careful, considered retrospective, told from a safe distance. This is a depiction of the disaster as it unfolded, and it is kaleidoscopic in its dread. In some ways, it almost serves as a survey of horror while still being a factual account of something that actually happened. Dramatic license is taken here and there, but every episode finds a new way to horrify us. It begins with the panic and terror that immediately follow the explosions as workers at the plant gradually discover just how absolutely wrong everything has gone and how absolutely fucked they are. The reactor core is completely exposed and burning, spewing instantly lethal amounts of radiation into the air. It is literally the worst-case scenario and it’s happening. Everything has gone wrong, and unless something happens immediately, millions of people will die, and it’s all on the backs of a handful of engineers who, merely by being on-site, have signed their death warrants. As in your typical slasher movie, people split up to look for survivors and some of them never return.

And then there is body horror, as we’re witness to exactly what radiation sickness looks like at the absolutely massive doses these people have taken. It’s never fast, and it’s always agonizing. And the amount of death is staggering, matched only by the death to come if steps aren’t taken to bring a raging nuclear inferno under control. Every bit of dust carried by the breeze carries death. And as the series moves into the remediation following the accident, we see just how many more people are going to sacrifice themselves just to keep it from getting worse. There’s a sick, clammy dread that comes with knowing that everyone we’re watching is doomed. Whether it’s a week, a few months, or a few years, what they do here today is going to kill all of them. With this comes the realization that the Soviet Union was massively underprepared for an event like this. Firefighters rushed into lethal amounts of radiation thinking they were just dousing an electrical fire. Equipment that could measure radiation levels was either broken, locked away where nobody could access it, or just shorting out because its measuring capacity couldn’t go that high. People acting on bad information and passing that bad information up the chain to do further damage. Officials motivated less by saving lives than saving face, blandly insisting that nothing is wrong. It’s like the cliché of disbelieving law enforcement and parents writ large, your anxiety rising as you realize that there’s something really dangerous out there and nobody’s going to take it seriously.

And then as the investigation and resulting trial begin, we are shown exactly how an obsession with preserving the infallibility of the state, shoddy workmanship, dangerously careless engineers, substandard training and an inability to face the reality that the worst has happened lead to catastrophe. It was no one thing that lead to the reactor’s explosion, it was so many little things, one thing on top of another, one mistake on top of another, one bad judgment on top of another, all leading to this. And then when you think your capacity for horror is exhausted, we see how the state deals with those who would see the truth come to light, crushing them into forgotten people, erasing them and leaving them to die by their own hand in disgrace. The destruction, this miniseries says, is total.

It's bleak, it’s harrowing, and it’s superbly made. Performances are top-notch throughout, careful and down to earth, full of small moments and character arcs as people are changed forever by what they’ve seen. The cinematography juxtaposes gray, drab, overcast cityscapes with sun and trees, finding beauty even in destruction as a bright blue light flares into the sky from the wreckage and radioactive particulates float through the air and land gently, like fairy dust. The soundtrack is ominous electronic hums and pulses and clangs derived from the ambience of a neighboring power plant, and the chattering of dosimeters work as well as any sudden shrieking violin would. Each episode tells a contained story featuring a different aspect of the disaster before ending where it began, with the same question - what is the cost of lies? - before concluding with an epilogue that robs you of any of the distance afforded by fiction. These were real people, and this is a real place.

Horror movies are palatable fictions, moments of terror and dread that we experience vicariously knowing that they are fiction. We vent our fears safely through them. What happened at Chernobyl was at least in part due to a culture of palatable fictions, and the resulting horror is undeniable. Easily one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon