Nosferatu (2024): The Shadow

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.”

                                                                                 - Carl Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul

I don’t think I’m coming up with anything revelatory when I say that vampires are often symbolic of what psychologist Carl Jung referred to as “the shadow.” It’s the part of us that we don’t like to acknowledge, our flaws, failings, shames, as well as our more potentially monstrous qualities. Qualities that are, nevertheless, part of us. Vampires historically represent our darkest desires and the equally dark means by which we satisfy those desires. This is all firmly in “no shit, Sherlock” territory.

And yet, they’re also just as often depicted as romantic figures, doomed to spend an eternity watching their loved ones waste away while they live forever, as if they’re the real victims here. You don’t even need to go as far as the Twilight movies to find this, though they’re probably the most egregious in this regard. And…I don’t like that. I tend to prefer films where our sympathies lie with the victims, not the monster. It’s possible to write a monster who is sympathetic, or has sympathetic elements. Hell, it’s possible to write a vampire like that, but if we’re talking classic vampires, as often as not they’re suave and charming, with fangs. And I like my monsters to be monsters.

Which is one of many things the 2024 remake of Nosferatu does right. It manages to take a well-traveled story and put some interesting spins on it, while still acknowledging its roots in German Expressionism. It’s reverent, but not rigidly so, and takes advantage of an established story to tweak some of the particulars in interesting ways.

It opens on a lonely little girl, who wishes only for a friend. There’s something special about her, she has visions, prophetic dreams. And it is in her dreams that someone comes to visit her, someone who wishes to be her friend.

Someone rotting and hulking, with long sharp fingers, and sharper teeth. And the sharpest of appetites.

The film picks up many, many years later, with the little girl - Ellen Hutter - all grown up and married to Thomas Hutter, a young man with employment at a prestigious real estate firm. He is eager to establish himself, to begin building his household so he and Ellen can begin their family. Mr. Knock, a senior partner at his firm, has a very special assignment for him. They have a very wealthy client, Count Orlok, who wishes to purchase an old, dilapidated property in their city; Thomas is dispatched to Carpathia to meet the client and secure his signature and payment.

Needless to say, it goes much, much worse than expected. If you’ve read Dracula, or seen adaptations of Dracula, you know the characters and the general story beats. Bram Stoker’s estate sued the ever-living fuck out of F.W. Murnau for making the original Nosferatu, which just moved Stoker’s story from England to Germany and changed a bunch of names. Fortunately, some copies of Murnau’s film escaped court-ordered destruction, and it’s gone on to become one of the most influential horror films ever made, inspiring multiple remakes and copies, and even fictional accounts of its making. So if someone is going to make yet another run at this story, it’s going to need to be very good and make some kind of unique contribution to justify its own existence, and luckily this film does exactly that.

First, it does some interesting things with the protagonists. The two most important women in the story - known originally as Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra – are usually portrayed as delicate hothouse flowers, fainting paragons of femininity who exist only to be rescued and defended. Here, they have a fair amount of agency. Anna Harding, wife to Thomas’ friend Friedrich (a prosperous shipbuilder) has two children and another on the way, and doesn’t want to see her husband and father of her children going off doing weird, dangerous shit. She isn’t shrewish or hectoring, just assertive as someone in her position would be. And Ellen Hutter is much more central to the story than Mina Murray usually is. She appears to have some kind of psychic ability or insight into the spirit world, and it is this ability that draws Orlok to her as a child. It’s not addressed explicitly in the film, but Orlok claiming her as a child and coming to collect her once she reaches adulthood does feel a little like she has been groomed, which makes Orlok even more monstrous in a way not normally seen in versions of this story.

Ellen refuses to be sheltered and defended, and is essential to the monster’s undoing, not just Hutter’s prize for defeating the monster. She is haunted and tormented by what happened to her as a child, and as Orlok’s influence begins to assert itself, she turns feral, in a performance reminiscent of (and apparently directly inspired by) Isabelle Adjani’s absolutely unhinged turn in Possession. It’s striking, and gives the character much more power than she usually gets. The doctor is competent, the Van Helsing character is suitably eccentric, but in a way that isn’t necessarily comic. He’s less a vampire hunter than a renegade scientist occupied with mysticism, and this film’s Renfield isn’t who you’re expecting. Making Harding a shipbuilder adds a little something to the Demeter’s return (its brief moment in the story more interesting than the trailer for the feature-length exploration of its voyage released a couple of years ago), and there’s a return to the idea of the vampire as disease-bringer, as its return heralds the arrival of a plague that punctuates the urgency of the situation throughout the second half of the film. Nobody is dramatically different, everyone plays the same roles, but who they are is just different enough to feel fresh.

And this film’s Count Orlok is one of the most impressive takes on a vampire I’ve seen to date. Ironically, part of what makes him feel so different from prior depictions is a return to the earliest ideas for the character. He’s a Carpathian nobleman, with an appearance roughly similar to that of Vlad Tepes and the assured arrogance of the nobility. He is someone who does not countenance being refused and will exercise his considerable power to take whatever he wants. He’s a decaying figure in decaying royal finery, with a voice that fills space and a raw appetite for blood that disregards gender and charm. This vampire does not seduce. He feeds. There is nothing romantic about this vampire. He is a monster in totality, and even shrouded in darkness, his evil radiates from the screen. There are some hints that he has been drawn or summoned here through the use of old, dark magic, and it serves to emphasize that he is something utterly outside of humanity.

And this film has a lot of darkness in it. It’s not shot in black and white, but it might as well be for as desaturated as everything is. There’s a blue tint to things that suggests cold, contrasted with the warm tones of home and hearth (and the cleansing, purgative power of fire) and the bright red of blood. This is a world with very little color, and even less as Orlok’s influence spreads, shown in one striking sequence as the shadow of a clawed hand stretching across the city. It’s one of many nods to Murnau’s original expressionist use of shadow, incorporated throughout. It’s a less-stylized film than Murnau’s original, but it definitely knows its roots.

There have been so many tellings and retellings and remakes and reboots of the classic Dracula story (not to mention all of the other vampire films out there), but this one more than any other I’ve seen engages with the idea of shadow, both cinematically and in the Jungian sense. This vampire is just on this side of humanoid, human enough that that’s how we read him, but horrible enough to evoke a sense of repulsion and horror; it’s underscored at the climax in a way that manages to engage with more romantic ideas of the vampire, simultaneously acknowledging and subverting them, ending the film with a deeply powerful image that takes the beautiful, the primal, and the grotesque and burns them into your brain. This vampire, more than most, is our shadow.

IMDB entry 

Nude Per L’Assassino: Sex And Violence And More Sex

Horror movies, like pretty much any other movie, are products of their time and the culture in which they’re made. And horror movies also tend toward transgression, since they’re largely dealing with the kind of stuff more polite entertainment doesn’t. What this means in practice is that the older the film, the more likely it is that it will have…not aged very well. Values and norms change over time, and some things that used to be acceptable aren’t any more. So I’ll sometimes find myself watching a movie where I’m more grossed out by the way the people in it behave than I am by blood and gore.

In my limited experience, gialli are especially susceptible to this. A type of film made largely in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, gialli have some ideas about sex, sexuality and gender that are by modern standards pretty repugnant. And Nude Per L’Assassino (Strip Nude For Your Killer) is definitely no exception. I mean, with a title like that, it was never going to be subtle. But even though it isn’t as viciously nasty as some I’ve seen, the way it seems to be equal parts murder mystery and softcore sex film ends up being pretty distracting.

It comes in pretty hot, opening with a woman at a doctor’s office getting an abortion. It’s not as lurid as it could have been, thank goodness, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Halfway through, she appears to expire quietly in the chair. It’s an unusually low-key sequence, ending with the doctor calling someone in a panic. They’re going to move her back to her apartment and make it look like she died of natural causes. They dump her in the bath and start the water running, then they leave.

Some days later, a mysterious figure catches up to the doctor as he’s about to walk into his house, and stabs him to death.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, fashion photographer Carlo is busy trying to bed an attractive woman while he’s out in public…taking photographs, I think? He’s very much the kind of dude who doesn’t take “no” for an answer, which is gross enough, but somehow it’s worse that the woman he’s pressuring into sex (in a public place, no less) relents and goes along with it. Apparently, “no” means “yes” in this movie, and it’s pervasive. When Carlo brings her back to the fashion design house, he sort of dumps her on the head of the agency and finds out that one of their models apparently died of natural causes. Hmmm. And then only a couple of days later, another employee dies. It takes a bit for people to start putting it together, but a mysterious killer is targeting everyone who works for this design house. Someone’s out for revenge.

The biggest problem with this film is the same problem as pretty much any other Italian movie in the genre from the mid-70s – pretty much every man in this film is one flavor of pig or another. It’s more chauvinistic than misogynistic or homophobic (I still haven’t gotten the taste of New York Ripper out of my mouth), but there’s plenty of dudes who don’t take no for an answer, who have no sense of boundaries, who’ve never heard the word “consent.” And on top of that, most of the women in this film are sexually available in one way or another. Carlo has a brief, tense exchange with aspiring photographer Magda, who is intent on proving herself as a photographer on her own merits, but this doesn’t stop her from turning around and seducing Carlo in a darkroom for…reasons? It really does underscore the idea that boundaries and consent don’t really mean anything. No matter what she says, she really wants it. Even a scene with two cops interviewing someone can’t resist having one of the cops spend the whole thing leering at a scantily-dressed woman in the office. Why is she scantily-clad? That’s a good question. With the exception of two nurses in a brief hospital scene, pretty much every woman in this film ends up getting naked, whether it makes sense or not. It ranges from the somewhat uncomfortable - there’s a brief scene of a woman getting slapped around toward the end - to the pathetic, as another executive at the design house attempts to pay a woman to sleep with him, and when he’s unable to perform, he cries for his mother. I didn’t feel dirty after watching it (still looking at you, New York Ripper), but I did yell “ew, gross!” more than a few times at the way dudes acted in this film and at the subtext about sexual availability. I’m usually able to calibrate for older films, but in this instance it ends up being distracting.

So it’s very much of its time, to the point that it is kind of a distraction, but there’s also not a whole lot of movie outside of the gratuitous T&A. Apart from that, it’s sort of a mixed bag. The editing comes straight from the school of “meanwhile, in another movie,” the acting is nothing to write home about, and there’s very little mystery to it. It’s not so much that the killer is immediately obvious as it is it just one person after another dropping like flies until the very end, where the killer is revealed mere seconds before process of elimination would make their identity clear to the audience. It doesn’t have the stylishness of Argento’s work or the deranged vision of Fulci at his weirdest, but it’s mostly cohesive (if not especially interesting in how it develops the story) and it does manage a decent amount of suspense with a repeated motif of running water, heavy breathing, and a near-subliminal insert shot from the beginning of the film heralding the killer’s arrival. The deaths are quick and nasty, full of blood that looks like tempera paint, but they aren’t overly sadistic, and both men and women get killed. So it isn’t as icky as I was afraid it was going to be, landing more on inappropriately horny in a way that mostly just made me roll my eyes. It’s grainy, with pops of color and rainy streets at nighttime, and it’s got the requisite cop-show up-tempo score mixed in with some lighter pop music from the period. I’m beginning to see what people mean by “Eurosleaze” after watching this, and though it has its merits as a style of film, the “sleaze” part makes it a little tough to appreciate.

Film - especially horror film - is a place where you can explore difficult or upsetting ideas, grapple with uncomfortable emotions and express things in strong, vivid terms. I don’t like moral panics or pearl-clutching, and I don’t think that any particular creative work’s value should be determined by its adherence to a particular set of norms and values. Judging the films of 40-plus years ago by the values of today doesn’t make much sense to me. But anything that yanks me out of a movie is going to be a problem, and this one’s just juvenile and gross enough to be distracting. 

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Longlegs: Bad Vibes

What makes a horror film scary? I feel like this is a question that maybe isn’t wrestled with as much as it should be, given the amount of dreck that stops at “murder a lot of people in as messy a fashion as possible” and calls it a day. But to be fair, it’s not always easy to quantify what makes something really scary. Often it comes down to, for lack of a better word, vibes.

And sure, vibes don’t come out of nowhere, they’re a product of things like performance and mood and cinematography, but they’re ineffable in the sense that either you’ve got the vision and the way to see it realized or you don’t. If you don’t have a vision, the best you’re going to do is something competently produced that might get a few jolts out of people, but isn’t really scary. Vibes can go a long way toward making up for flaws, because unless it’s really egregious, I won’t remember bad filmmaking choices, but the creepy, haunting, unnerving stuff will stay with me for ages.

Longlegs - a bleak, deeply unnerving marriage between police procedural and occult nightmare - does fumble things a little, but as a vision it is so fully and confidently realized that you’re mostly too busy trying to crawl out of your skin to notice them in the moment. It is all about the vibes.

It’s the story of FBI agent Lee Harker. She’s withdrawn, odd to the point of being off-putting, but she’s also shown an unusual amount of insight into difficult cases. And right now, her insight is very much needed, because the FBI have a serial killer on their hands…well, that’s not exactly right. They have a number of crime scenes, where entire families have been brutally murdered, typically by the father. What’s giving law enforcement trouble is that at every scene, they find a letter written in some kind of code that they aren’t able to crack. No other physical evidence that anyone else has been there, just the letters.

And each letter is signed “Longlegs.” 

As it turns out, Harker can decode these letters. She doesn’t know how, but she can. And she can tell where the killer’s been, or about to be. On paper, this shouldn’t work as well as it does, because on paper it’s a movie about a mysterious serial killer who shares what appears to be a psychic link with a detective. I fucking haaaaaaaaaaate shit like that. Hate hate hate hate hate. But here, it works. And I think it works because even though it’s the corniest kind of story you can tell, the way it’s told transforms it into something warped and sinister. So it’s almost like you’re watching a cursed version of a mediocre thriller. A lot of this is accomplished through performances that are uniformly a little…off. Everything’s a little stilted, everyone’s a little distant and strange. There’s a medical examiner who’s almost creepier than the actual serial killer, and it’s not because the medical examiner is evil or the serial killer in disguise…that’s just how the actor played him. Everyone in the film is like that to one degree or another, and that alone contributes to the feeling that you aren’t so much watching a movie as you are having a nightmare in which you’re watching a movie.

The visuals are equally unsettling - the film is set in 1990s Oregon, and everything is gray and cloudy and damp, with traces of snow clinging here and there. Interiors are often dimly lit as well, though not to the point of being unreadable. This is a world where there’s just not a lot of light, and we move from the institutional strangeness of FBI headquarters (if you’re at all familiar with the very good game Control, it’s definitely giving The Oldest House in places) to crime scenes that suggest awful, awful things without ever really tipping their hands entirely, to the cramped, stifling home of Harker’s mother, a woman damaged by some past tragedy to the point of hoarding and agoraphobia. Even Harker’s own home, which should feel warm and cozy, just feels like a place where something awful is just waiting around the corner all of the time. It’s the unease of places that you know aren’t normal, of homes that aren’t home-like, of innocuous spaces late at night, when they should be empty but aren’t. This is not a film where anywhere ever feels safe. There are flashbacks to crime scenes smeared with blood, bodies under blankets and location markers, again giving us glimpses that only fuel our imaginations, all punctuated with title cards in stark black and red. There are very few shots with more than one person in the frame at once (and sometimes shots where the tops of heads are out of frame, which is especially disconcerting), creating a sense of isolation and disconnectedness, emphasizing the alien feel of the entire thing. It’s something of a slow burn, punctuated with sudden moments of terrible violence, arresting, surreal imagery, and grainy flashbacks to the 1970s that shrink the aspect ratio to a square, like home movies that you’re pretty sure nobody was ever meant to see.

So the vibes are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and doing it admirably. That said, there are some places where it trips a little, mostly in the third act. It spends the first two setting up this really unsettling world, but there are some elements of the story that are maybe a little too easy to see coming from very early on, and others that really get sprung on the audience in the last act in what does amount to a bit of an exposition dump, albeit one that manages to sustain the atmosphere of the first two acts. There’s an element that’s important to how the killer is doing what he’s doing that gets introduced in the second act, but because the whole film feels so fucking weird already, its importance doesn’t really come across and when it’s brought back in the third act, it does feel like it’s coming out of nowhere. Finally, there’s one particular twist that was just convenient enough to leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, even though it was, once again, revealed in fine, striking fashion; something hidden and in plain sight the entire time.

The overall effect is, as I’ve said, like you’re watching a film with elements that you recognize and a story that you’re pretty sure you should be able to follow, but feels wrong somehow, as if whatever evil lurks in the story has managed to infect the film itself. It’s been getting a lot of (simplistic) comparisons to The Silence Of The Lambs, and if you’re looking for that kind of macabre crime procedural, this is not going to scratch that particular itch. But if you’re willing to immerse yourself in its nightmare logic, it’s one that will stay with you.

IMDB entry

Lux Æterna: Film Horror

The process of making movies is sometimes referred to as “magic,” and that’s usually meant in a benevolent way, describing the process of surprising and delighting an audience. But magic also involves deception, trickery and misdirection. And other types of magic involve blood sacrifices and bargains with powerful evil. The more powerful the magic, the higher the cost.

Lux Æterna (Eternal Light), a short, dizzying blast of a film, makes a good case for the filmmaking process involving all of these things, if only metaphorically.

It begins with a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky about the supreme happiness an epileptic feels in the moments before the onset of a seizure, followed by old black-and-white footage that illustrates the type of torture implements used in the Middle Ages to get witches to confess. And then from there, we’re presented with a conversation between two women, with one asking the other if she’s ever been burned at the stake. It’d be easy to dismiss this as arty nonsense, but it doesn’t take long for things to come into focus. The two women are Béatrice and Charlotte - Béatrice is directing a film and Charlotte is her lead actress. They’re preparing to shoot a scene in which Charlotte is going to be burned at the stake, and at least for the moment, it’s a quiet, pleasant conversation between two veterans of the industry about their experiences.

And then they’re called to set.

This is not precisely a horror film, the same way that Berberian Sound Studio was not precisely a horror film. It’s not a horror film, and it’s not a film about horror. It’s more a film about the horror of film, of the deep, dark holes into which people fall as a result of trying to get something up on the screen. We get about ten minutes of quiet, thoughtful conversation before we’re pitched headlong into the roiling chaos of a movie set. And it really is chaos - this isn’t a lot of people moving purposefully and doing their jobs like some kind of industrious beehive, this is a lot of messily egotistical people playing tug-of-war with everyone’s time and attention. Béatrice is an actress-turned-director and it seems like nobody has any faith in her, with her producer openly conspiring to get her fired and replaced with the director of photography, who himself seems like an obstinate shithead. There are extras and supporting actors to wrangle, some of whom are not happy with the demands being made of them. There’s a particularly annoying film journalist who’s managed to worm his way on-set and is trying to pull people aside at the worst possible times, and someone named Karl whose purpose there (if there is one) is never made clear, and all he does is pitch actresses on his “new project” when they need to be getting ready. The producer and DP yell at Béatrice, she yells back at them and at everyone else not doing their jobs, and Charlotte sits in the middle of it all, the closest thing there is to the calm in the eye of the storm.

It's a short film (slightly less than an hour), but I think that’s for the better because it’s a very uncomfortable experience. The majority (if not entirety) of it is shot using hand-held cameras, which gives everything a raw immediacy and a bit of seasick wooziness to it. Following Béatrice and Charlotte as they try to get from point A to point B to shoot a single scene only to be waylaid at every turn by yet another person who needs to speak to them right now about stuff that really doesn’t matter gives the whole thing the feeling of one of those dreams (or nightmares, depending on how you think about it) where you’re just trying to get someplace, but the harder you try to get there, the more lost and sidetracked you get. And the cinematography is as aggressive as the characters; there’s a lot of split-screen work used to show us two different people’s experiences at the same time, or showing us one person from two different perspectives, in some moments even turning away from one camera to confront the other in a manner that reminds me of nothing so much as Timecode, a film I haven’t thought about in years. It, too, was a film about the messy way films get made, but it never reaches the hysteric heights that this one does, nor does it make the point this film makes about women, the men who are sure they know what is best for them, and the way that the former are often (as they have been for hundreds of years) sacrificed for the egos of the latter. It’s not an especially subtle point, with a small handful of female characters endlessly surrounded by hordes of men cajoling, flattering, ordering and threatening them, clearly resentful of their agency or casually underestimating them. Whether the stake is real or set dressing, someone’s getting burned.

All of the disparate ideas - witch trials, the demands of cinema, the power of light to create feelings and experiences (some overwhelming - the film opens with a warning for people with photosensitive epilepsy and believe me they are not fucking kidding) come together in a climax where a lighting glitch turns a scene full of angry men ranting at three women posed on stakes into a stroboscopic frenzy that eventually swallows everything. But there is none of Dostoevsky’s ecstasy, just the final moment where the center fails to hold and everything falls apart.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Fresh: Men Only Want One Thing, And It’s (Really) Disgusting

Last month was full of varying flavors of cinematic disappointment at this here thing of mine, and it was starting to annoy me a little. I can handle the occasional stinker, sure, but after awhile it starts to wear on me. I like watching good films, not dunking on bad ones.

So I’m really grateful for Fresh, a very tense, sharply pointed story about women as commodity and objects for consumption. It isn’t subtle, and it’s pretty straightforward in its construction, but it’s very well-executed.

We meet Noa on what is clearly not a good date. There’s awkward silence, a lack of chemistry so absolute that it creates a vacuum, and it goes painfully downhill from there. Dating apps are full of inane come-ons and unsolicited dick pics. It’s tough out there for her, and she commiserates with her friend Mollie about it. Mollie thinks she needs to be more willing to take risks, to just say “fuck it” and follow her heart. And that’s how she finds herself in the grocery store one night, talking to Steve. He’s handsome, charming, funny…a plastic surgeon, so he does well for himself. There seems to be some chemistry there. And so they go out for a drink, and he’s still handsome and charming and funny, so Noa says “fuck it” and takes him home. And that turns into something more promising, so when Steve invites her away for a romantic getaway out in the country, Noa - despite Mollie’s concerns - goes for it. One snag, though - Steve’s got something he has to do, so instead of heading out directly, they’ll overnight at his place and leave first thing in the morning. Mollie’s really concerned at this point, but Noa’s sure it’ll be fine.

And Steve has a really nice house, as befits a plastic surgeon. It’s modern, sprawling, but still feels pretty cozy. There’s easy conversation, some dancing, some drinks…and the next thing Noa knows, she’s waking up in a windowless room, shackled to the floor next to a futon mattress.

As it turns out, Steve services a very particular clientele, made up of people with very specific appetites. He’s not going to kill her, because his clients prefer the taste of the meat when it’s fresh.

This is a great example of what I like to call a film that isn’t a horror movie until it is. Most of the first act could be any kind of romantic comedy - you’ve got the dating woes, the supermarket meet-cute, the flirty chemistry. If you just happened across it, you’d think it was a rom-com. It’s only as it starts to move into the second act that notes of unease really begin to creep in, and then it all snaps shut like a steel trap. And once it does, it is firmly and unapologetically about women as something to be purchased and consumed. As I said, this is not a subtle film, but it does manage to both make observations about the things women have to deal with every day, large and small, while at the same time being a tense, economical story about survival. The men in this film don’t fare very well, but it’s in ways that are entirely believable, and speak to the ways that male selfishness and entitlement constantly betray women.. The date Noa is on at the beginning of the film is excruciating in and of itself - we wouldn’t call it horror, but it is an especially mundane, banal form of horror, the indignities waiting for you out there as a woman.

And as the film progresses, the horrors become more explicit, but no less rooted in the ways male selfishness and entitlement cause suffering on whatever scale. Men who only want one thing, men who can’t handle rejection, and the women who sell out other women to maintain their own comfort and prosperity, it’s all very much up there on the screen. There’s maybe one moment during the climax when it’s more than a little on-the-nose, but it doesn’t really ruin the moment or anything, and the film manages to mine a narrow but deep vein of black humor throughout that runs the usual problems with dating in the modern world through a bloody funhouse mirror.

It's not an especially flashy film, visually, but it’s got a consistent identity and a nice sense of place. A lot of the film takes place in Steve’s house, which looks like something out of a relatively restrained Michael Mann film, all brick and earth tones and natural rock and moody lighting. He’s a well-to-do man whose relationship with an attractive woman rides this woozy line between captor/captive and suitor/courted, which gives it a seductive element that seems adjacent to what (little) I’ve seen of Fifty Shades Of Grey and in that sense could be seen as a sardonic comment on it. That’s the fantasy, this is the reality. The rich man will keep you in his red room because you are meat to him. And we get sporadic flashes of his customers, lovingly unwrapping the parcels they’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars for and consuming them in ways both crude and impeccably refined. The soundtrack is an impeccably curated mix of the sort of pop songs and ballads you’d expect in romantic movies combined with foreboding ambiance and sharp, discordant stings. Flashes of its romantic comedy beginnings shine through in what doesn’t quite ever broaden out into grim parody, but definitely creates a feeling of discordance that almost seems mocking. And late in the game, it presents a nice juxtaposition between the idea of the object (women as actual meat) and the subject (the personal effects left behind), how behind dehumanizing terms like “the product,” there are actual lives and identities and futures lost, which takes what is already a pretty harrowing experience and makes it sobering as well.

For me, this film brought to mind the use of the phrase “body count” to describe the number of sexual partners someone has had. That strikes me as gross, but it seems apt here. Steve’s got a high body count, and even if it isn’t sexual conquest, the women are still objects to be consumed and discarded, commodities to be purchased in order to satisfy desires, and the film makes that point with the confidence of a cleaver chopping through the meat on a block.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

No One Will Save You: Taken Away

There’s a podcast that is, as near as I can tell, about films that are so bad they end up transcending their own badness. It’s called “How Did This Get Made?” and although I’ve never listened to it, that phrase got me to thinking. See, I’ve seen some real stinkers over the years I’ve been writing this thing, but I’ve never really asked myself how those really garbage films got made. I know how they got made. There’s a mindset out there that horror movies don’t need to actually be good, they just need to deliver scares and gore and maybe some titillation. So somebody puts up the money, the assumption being it’ll be a pretty safe bet to turn at least a modest profit. This can describe exercises in ineptitude and in slick mediocrity alike.

And it’s not like the people responsible are really to blame for this - if a casual look at box office numbers and the state of criticism in the enthusiast press is any indication, a lot of the people spending money on horror films aren’t exactly picky. Maybe scares and gore and titillation is all some people are looking for. Hell, the notion of a horror film that’s actually thoughtful and intelligent and made with some level of artistry is so alien to some critics that they’ve invented the term “post-horror” or “elevated horror” to describe it. And…no. It’s not elevated, you’ve just set the bar that fucking low because you’re a condescending jackass. How do those films get made? They have commercial potential. That’s it.

And this is why I find myself asking how No One Will Save You got made. It is by no means inept or mediocre. But in its premise and narrative and execution, it’s very hard to sum up neatly, and it’s certainly surprisingly non-commercial for something distributed by 20th Century. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before, and that’s not something I say very often.

It opens on a lovely old farmhouse set back in the woods on a beautiful, sunny day. A young woman named Brynn lives there, and she’s up and about, sewing cute sundresses, packaging them with ribbon and thank-you cards to mail off presumably to paying customers. It’s easy to imagine that she has a successful Etsy store. The house is sunny and full of charm, and in her basement workspace, she’s got a whole miniature town laid out across a long table. A picture-book village being kept by a picture-book young woman, shot in picture-book colors and lighting. You half-expect animated birds to land on her shoulders before she bursts into song. She grabs the packages she needs to mail and drives into town. The town is Mill River, and it’s as lovely and charming and bright and sunny as her house and the world that encompasses them both.

But all is not well here. As Brynn drives through town, heads turn to stare, lips curl in disgust. She waves at someone, and the wave goes unreturned. She tosses the packages in the mailbox, shunned. From there, a visit to her mother’s grave, and then home to write a letter to her friend Maude. She notices an odd circular patch of dead grass on her lawn, and gives it extra water.

And then, that night, when all is dark - that real country dark, just you and the stars - Brynn notices that her door is open. The door is open, and she hears footsteps. Footsteps and low, inhuman chattering.

This is the kind of film that might get tagged as “high concept.” It’s ultimately an alien-invasion film very much in the mold of something like Signs or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (with which it shares a basic visual vocabulary, all tall, skinny grey aliens and floods of light so dense they’re almost solid), but as the film goes on it gets gnarlier than Close Encounters ever did, and all of this is surrounded by the mystery of how Brynn ended up with the life she did, young and alone in this big old house, a pariah to the local community. And, on top of all of that, it’s doing this with an almost total absence of dialogue. Apart from a diegetic piece of music with sung lyrics, there are a total of five words spoken throughout the entire film, and two of those are repeated, so it’s only three distinct words. It could be very easy for this to devolve into a gimmick, but it doesn’t - there are a lot of things almost said, faint murmuring in the background too indistinct to make out, so the end result feels more like an entire film of the awkward silences that come when the person you’re talking about enters the room. The tentativeness before saying the thing that’s hard to say. It’s not that people don’t talk, they just don’t talk to Brynn. And since Brynn is the only person on screen for large swaths of the movie, it creates a palpable sense of isolation. The film’s title feels like it’s directed at her.

And this is on top of the faint but persistent strangeness of the film’s tone. It really does feel like it takes place in some kind of idealized all-American small town, but almost as soon as that impression is established, it becomes clear that something’s off - the way nobody talks to or even smiles at Brynn, all of the miniature houses arranged as if she’s building her own perfect little town, in her letters she alludes to something she regrets. From the start, there’s a sense that something’s off here. There’s a mystery to unfold, and then when night falls, it all turns into a siege film.

And the siege film works pretty well. It’s a mix of cat-and-mouse and fraught confrontation, and the beats are all pretty familiar but executed crisply and with restraint and a good sense of rhythm. The aliens start off as your garden-variety greys, strange but not especially threatening. But as the film goes on they become increasingly more inhuman, their features becoming more exaggerated, their manner more savage. They chase Brynn, roaring, clambering and skittering like spiders. There starts to be some suggestion that maybe they’ve already infiltrated the town, leading to a bit of body horror to round things off. Between the wordlessness (compensated for by a score that knows exactly when to sting),and a lot of the action taking place in a big house late at night, there’s a good, solid hum of tension to it that never really crescendos but never flags either, ticking along like a slightly too-loud metronome. You can’t really ever quite relax, right up to a climax that eschews edge-of-the-seat thrills, leaning more into revelations about how Brynn’s life ended up like this, before dropping an ending into your lap that somehow manages to recapitulate the film’s sunny opening in a way that is now, with context, chilling.

It makes sense that a film about an alien invasion is going to deal with the idea of people being taken away, but there’s a lot of different ways you can be taken away - alien abduction, sure, but also nostalgia, wishes for a better time, and worse. Some are taken from us too soon. Somehow this film manages to do justice to all of them. It’s both intensely familiar in its feel and simultaneously like nothing else, and I’m sure a lot of people aren’t going to know what to do with it. That’s their problem. There’s a lot to like in a film that harnesses nostalgic ideas about Americana and classic alien-invasion imagery and uses them to tell a surprisingly tense story about the escapism and denial of nostalgia. I’d rather watch that that the umpteenth iteration on Saw any day. I don't know how this got made, but yeah, more risky stuff like this, please.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu 

Busanhaeng: The Hero’s Journey

I’m sort of tired of zombie films in general. The idea of a zombie apocalypse has been so overdone that it’s hard for me to see how you can mine any real dread out of the concept. As often as not, the ones that aren’t outright goofy or excuses for rivers of gore boil down to Mankind Is The Real Monster, which okay, sure, but after awhile there’s not a whole lot that’s new or interesting that you can do with that. I get that you sort of have to focus more on humanity because zombies, at their most effective, are effective because they are ciphers - a human form with all the humanity drained away - and that kind of blankness is unnerving when handled well, but maybe doesn’t make for the most engaging movie all by itself.

So the default is how the existence of zombies affects the living, and it’s very easy for that to turn into all of the ways that humanity can be bad. I’m not saying that isn’t a legitimate thing to explore (it’s a big part of horror, really) but…I dunno. It’s so easy for it to turn into relentless miserabilism. And that’s dull in its own way.

And this is a big part of why it took me so long to get around to watching Busanhaeng (Train To Busan). No matter how much praise I heard, all I could think was “ugh, another zombie movie.” But I’m really glad I came around. It’s an intense, kinetic story about survival and the things we sacrifice for it. And yeah, that’s what a lot of zombie movies end up being about, but what this film does right is ground the story in sympathetic characters whose plight makes the point in ways that feel personal, rather than setting up a grim situation and preaching.

It’s just another day in South Korea, as a truck driver encounters a roadblock where his truck is inspected and disinfected before he can continue on. There’s been some kind of leak at the biotech research facility nearby and they’re here making sure nothing spreads. Just another hassle trying to get his cargo to its destination, and no sooner does he get through the roadblock than dammit, he hits a deer. Terrific. Now he’s going to have to clean off the front of the truck and he’s already late and so, grumbling, he drives off.

And then the deer stands back up.

Meanwhile, back in the big city, fund manager Seok-woo is having his own hassles. Some recent news reports about mysterious mass animal deaths have him concerned about one of the companies in which his fund holds stock, and he tells his assistant to sell it all off. This is a big deal and stakeholders aren’t going to be happy, and neither are his bosses. But it’s his call to make and his static to deal with. On top of that. he’s divorced from his wife, and they share custody of their daughter, Soo-an. And she wants to spend her birthday with her mother instead of him, and she’s prepared to take the train all the way to Busan to see her, all by herself. She’s all of eight or nine years old. Seok-woo really can’t take the time off work - this decision, however sure of it he is, is going to mean a lot of reports and a lot of meetings on top of all of the reports and meetings he already has just because he works in finance. But he loves her, and he’s acutely aware that even though he has to spend so much time at work to provide her with a good life, it means that he’s not actually around to watch her live it. And she feels it too. So he finds the time to take the train with her from Seoul to Busan, where she will stay with her mother. They board and get seated, and Seok-woo, unable to stop following the news, sees reports of outbreaks of violence all over the south.

Outbreaks of violence, and some mysterious illness.

So in short, we have a train full of people hurtling through a country that is rapidly falling apart due to what is, pretty obviously, a zombie outbreak. Communications are patchy, people can’t get through to their loved ones, and the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And like so many disaster movies, this becomes how everyone’s true character gets revealed, who these people are in a crisis. There’s nobility and selfishness, cooperation and craven opportunism, the best and worst humanity has to offer. Bur it’s not a turgid exercise in moralizing, it’s a crisp, knife-sharp exercise in relentless tension and momentum. Because it’s mostly set on a train, there’s a lot happening in a very enclosed space, one strictly demarcated by doors between cars, which focuses most of the action on a moment-to-moment, foot-by-foot struggle for survival. This alternates with interludes in larger, open public spaces, which allow for grander moments highlighting the scope of what’s happening. And part of why both work so well is that this film takes the same approach to zombies as films like [REC], 28 Days Later, and World War Z  - they’re like an insensate force of nature, falling and spilling over each other in waves and piles, a flood and encroaching plant species and predator all at once. Transformations are marked by slightly over-cranked camera work, which makes them feel even more frenetic, lurching and hissing and hurtling forward with headlong momentum. Everything and everyone in this film is in motion.

And it doesn’t spend too much time on the zombies themselves - encounters are mostly quick and nasty, with just as much of the tension coming from gradual, understated reveals of a nation falling into chaos. The way the news footage on the train goes from isolated instants of violence to mass panic, all played out with equanimity on little screens, pulling into a station only to find it utterly deserted, save for smears of blood and abandoned riot equipment, far-off cities that have erupted in flames. It’s either at a remove or hideously immediate, with not a lot in-between, and it’s very effective in that regard. We’re not in the middle of the cities as they collapse, we’re coming along in the aftermath. It’s a story told equally in small, understated reveals and claustrophobic, oppressive action sequences, and there’s not a lot of room to breathe. The pressure is sharp and constant, as much about how these people relate to each other and the decisions that they make as the insensate corpses flailing toward them. There’s definitely an element of “who will survive, and what will be left of them?’ to it -  everyone’s put to the test, and not everyone passes. There’s not a ton of depth to the characters, but they’re distinct and relatable, and at the center of it is Seok-woo, torn between the ruthless calculation that serves him so well at work, and kind, sensitive Soo-an. Who is he going to be in this situation? It’s a story about the people on this train.

That said, there is a pretty clear through-line here about social class, and one that definitely hits different in a post-COVID-19 world. You’ve got the people in coach and the people in first class, and while everyone else is following directions, hurriedly moving from one place to another, hoping to remain safe, men in suits with smartphones are arranging private escape routes, leveraging insider information, making exceptions of themselves and sacrificing anyone and everyone for their own self-preservation. I was immediately reminded of a photo I saw on Instagram during lockdown of some tech bro who’d amassed cases and cases and cases of toilet paper, showing off his hoard like it was something to be proud of. Neckties act important symbols of class and resulting inequality, at one point literally being used to bind doors shut to keep people out. It’s not an especially subtle allegory, but no less effective for it.

And this is what I think makes it such a strong film - it’s not just spectacle, not just gooey gore effects and wallowing in violence, and it’s not just another “humans bad” reduction either. There are elements of that, but it’s clearly grounded in human frailty, weakness, cowardice and venality. There are clear heroes and clear villains, but also a lot of people who fall somewhere between those two poles, in the messy, complicated place between, and so it’s a journey of growth (or lack thereof) as much as anything else. And on top of that, it’s supremely tense, harrowing, and full of striking visual moments. It’s also a journey of escape, of flight away from a danger that is everywhere and the increasing impossibility of safety. Brains (braaaaiiiiiiiiiiins) and brawn alike.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Tubi 

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

Available on Amazon

À L’intérieur: What's Black And White And Red All Over?

I’ve talked before about how the once-vaunted New French Extremity ended up being more hype than substance (not to mention nebulous as all get-out - the Wikipedia entry includes a whole lot of films that aren’t even French), but for every Frontiere(s), which wouldn’t know subtlety if it walked up and smacked it in the face with a lead pipe, there’s a Martyrs, which has a thesis, actual narrative craft, and a willingness to let some things remain ambiguous. What these two ends of the continuum have in common, and seems to be broadly characteristic of the movement (to the extent it actually exists) is a confrontationally graphic use of violence and a tendency toward nihilism. When it’s done well, it makes for a singular experience that is by no means for everyone. And when it’s not done well, you get Frontiere(s). 

À L’intérieur (Inside) is definitely done well, and what it lacks in narrative sophistication it makes up for in atmosphere, tension, and a use of violence that blows right past glib and titillating and lands smack dab in the middle of outright grueling. I can’t remember the last time a film made me exclaim “that is fucked up” out loud so many times before it was over. It's an unrelentingly intense, disturbingly intimate siege film marred only by one totally unnecessary stylistic choice.

The totally unnecessary stylistic choice makes itself known immediately, with what is pretty clearly a computer-generated animation of a child in the womb, floating peacefully. It’s fake, it’s clearly fake, and it’s faintly ridiculous. There’s an opening voiceover as a woman talks about how her child is safe and nobody’s going to be able to take it away from her now. Which is maybe a little intense, but then there’s a screeching of metal, a shattering of glass, and a cutaway to a visibly pregnant woman sitting in the wreckage of a car, dazed and bloodied, a man slumped over dead in the seat next to her.

The woman is Sarah, a photojournalist, and the man was her husband. She lost him in the crash, but her baby is still alive and healthy. Flash forward a few months, and it’s Christmas Eve. She’s going to deliver on Christmas Day. What does she care? The man she loves is dead, she has no interest in seeing her extended family, no interest in celebrating anything. So she makes plans for her editor to drive her to the hospital tomorrow morning, and settles in for the evening, all alone in a house that’s a little too big now. And then there’s a knock on the door. There’s a woman outside, asking to come in and use her phone. Sarah’s understandably skittish, being all alone in the middle of the night, so she begs off, suggesting the woman go to a house down the street, it’s Christmas Eve, there will be plenty of people home elsewhere.  But the woman persists, so Sarah says that her husband’s just gotten home from his shift and is asleep. The woman promises to be quiet, but Sarah isn’t giving in.

And then the woman says “your husband isn’t home, Sarah. He’s dead.”

There are at least a couple of general reasons to watch horror. One is entertainment - the adrenaline thrill that comes from being startled, from tension and release. It’s the ability to experience scary situations vicariously. Horror as thrill ride. The other is art, in the sense of experiencing a creative work for the sake of the experience it evokes, the way it makes you feel. This can be more complicated than thrills, and can prod at our boundaries, maybe take us beyond them. When you go past your limits, everything is new. Inside is most definitely not entertainment. As is the case with Martyrs, people who watch horror films to see teenagers get skewered by a masked maniac are not going to like this film, because the violence in it has consequences. It’s not the punchline to a joke. There’s visible suffering, it’s up close and it’s damage and pain, people don’t die right away and it’s messy. It’s upsetting because it’s supposed to be. You’re not supposed to enjoy it. 

But even by those standards, fuck this is a violent film. Blood is everywhere, right from the opening scene and impressionistic opening credits that turn it into something textural. The majority of the film takes place inside Sarah’s house and by the end it is absolutely painted red, as is Sarah.. Blood sprays, spurts, spills, smears all over the place. You can’t get away from it. Harm is quick and brutal, except when it’s prolonged and agonizing. Whatever sharp object someone can find, it’s getting used in as graphic a fashion as possible. It’s not a complicated story, Sarah’s being put through a wringer and she has no idea why, and by extension so are we. That’s the point - the absolute senselessness of it, the way this horror finds its way in in the form of The Woman (she is never named). This is happening, regardless of how you feel about it. It’s an intimate film, mostly two people in a single location, and a lot of it happens up close. The violent moments, sure, but also conversations, examinations of faces exhausted, in agony or fear or rage. Apart from a blackly funny sequence toward the start featuring a nurse who absolutely cannot read the room, there's pretty much no humor either. It’s not a film with a lot of opportunity for distance.

But there are films like this that are just endurance tests without a lot of value otherwise, and a big part of what separates this from grosser, more exploitative stuff - still looking at you, Frontiere(s) - is that it’s clearly made with skill. This is a film that uses lighting really, really well - shadowy interiors, backlit figures like darkness cut out of the world, remorseless fluorescents, complemented by a grain to a lot of shots that gives it a rough and immediate texture without looking cheap or like an attempt at pastiche. The pacing is efficient, accomplished largely by interrupting action with sudden, shocking cutaways that keep the audience on the back foot. This isn’t a film that strictly adheres to the rhythms of a scene, anything can happen at any time, and so once it gets going, it always feels tense. There isn’t a lot of exposition - it doesn’t need it, like I said, it’s a pretty straightforward story - but there’s enough ambiguity that you’re sort of left wondering exactly what has happened, little throwaway lines that make you say “wait, what?” and are never followed up, so there’s this faint air of mystery to it all that lingers once it’s over. Performances are believable all around, with The Woman especially standing out - she’s calm, feral, and piteous by turns and the energy is always palpable. Sarah spends most of the film in shock, literally or figuratively. This is a woman who’s already grief-stricken, thrust into something so much worse. And the whole thing is scored using minimal, pulsing synthesizer, some strings and white noise, it’s effective all the way through without ever being intrusive, coloring scenes without upstaging them.

That said, there are some moments that beggar belief - one group of police officers makes a baffling choice regarding someone they already have in custody, people who by all rights should be dead aren’t, but just as often it adds to the surreally nightmarish feel of the whole thing, where not everything is explained neatly and so you sort of wonder how much of this is or isn’t actually happening. The film never commits either way. More egregious is the repeated use the dodgy CG effects of a child in the womb, as if the baby is reacting to everything going on around it. It’s hokey, the effects look cheesy, and it adds nothing to the film. You could cut out those interludes (of which there are more than a few) and it would only help the film. But despite that corny nonsense, the film gets over because everywhere else it’s utterly sharp and ruthless, unsparing and implacable. This was one that had me feeling wrung out afterwards. It’s a hell of a thing, and maybe the only other film apart from Martyrs that justifies New French Extremity in horror. 

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Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da: Fucked Around And Found Out

Last week I expressed a certain amount of disappointment with Cerdita for taking a pretty sharp riff on a specific type of revenge film and ending it in the most obvious and cliched way possible. And now this week I find myself with another type of revenge film that has very, very few surprises to it, start to finish, but executes what it does so well that I honestly don’t mind all that much. And I think the difference lies in restraint, or the lack thereof. Cerdita kept a lot of its violence off-screen, which I think was the right choice for that film, but Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da (I Saw The Devil) puts everything right up front, and there’s something about its relentlessness and unwillingness to look away that takes a pretty by-the-numbers story and gives it a fair amount of heft.

It's a cold, snowy night, and a bus, empty but for its driver, heads down the highway, soon encountering a young woman stranded by the side of the road. She has a flat tire, and so the driver stops to offer her help. She declines, saying she’s already called a tow truck. It doesn’t matter. Things turn ugly, and soon enough she is dragged off to a dismal garage someplace and butchered. The driver dumps her remains into a stream, where they’re discovered the next day in what can only be called a shitshow of a search. She was Joo-yeon, the daughter of the local police chief, and her fiancée, Soo-hyeon, is an agent with the National Intelligence Service.

Sure, there’s going to be an official investigation, but they’re going to have to outrun Soo-hyeon, who only has one thing on his mind.

So this is the setup. Soo-hyeon is a man with a particular set of skills, who has lost someone dear to him and knows some people in the police department. This could easily be something similar to a Korean take on Taken, but it isn’t. First of all, it’s not dour monologuing broken up by explosions, slick and glossy in its mayhem. It’s something grubbier, more raw and tough to watch than that. It depicts Kyung-chul - a school bus driver who satisfies his hatred of women through kidnapping, torture, and murder - as crude and angry, something oafish and not especially clever. And Soo-hyeon doesn’t waste a lot of time on angst. He’s a professional, used to tracking people down and setting his feelings aside until the job is done. And we know this not because he tells us, but because he shows us through his utter calm, his impassive face, all while he’s doing terrible things to the man who murdered his fiancée, things to which he displayed grief and horror before he decided to make it his mission. Because he isn’t just content to track him down and make a big speech and shoot him. No, this is catch-and-release, where Soo-hyeon finds Kyung-chul, takes something away from him, and then lets him go, all to wonder when he’s going to pop up next. Soo-hyeon doesn’t just want Kyung-chul to die, he wants him to suffer.

The result is an excruciatingly violent film, simultaneously graphic and dispassionate. It doesn’t feel gratuitous - as much happens off-camera as on - nor does it feel like the camera is leering at violent spectacle. It hurts to watch what’s happening to people, even the ones we don’t like, because it’s unflinching and there’s visible suffering. Women are constantly, routinely victimized in places and ways that suggest that Kyung-chul isn’t some kind of criminal mastermind, but rather some barely controlled id, heedless of getting caught, so intent is he on satisfying his appetites how and when he wants to. Scenes where he hurts others and ones where he is the one being hurt play out exactly the same, which suggests that violence is violence, no matter the justification or context. There’s more than a whiff of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer around it in that respect - everything around Kyung-chul seems to happen in sort of a shadow world of petty criminals and criminals with bigger, stranger appetites, a world that comes out late at night, where everyone is a predator as bad or worse than him. It feels like the violence he brings into Soo-hyeon’s life is not an aberration, but just what lies out there in the dark, once everyone else has gone home. It’s what lies behind closed doors in remote areas, on the streets, in cabs and buses. It’s been there the whole time, now he’s just aware of it.

It's a long film, and it feels long, though it doesn’t drag much. The length makes itself known in shots that stretch out just a little longer than you expect, pacing that takes its time (until it doesn’t - this is a film where not much happens until all kinds of horrible shit happens all at once). It does feel a little padded in places, but not too much, and in its climax it sews everything up tight, bringing it full circle back to a dark road at night and a lonely ramshackle building out in the middle of nowhere, paying off early details. There are long stretches of silence - music only makes itself known at the height of especially intense moments, otherwise the rest of the film, stylishly shot for the most part, just lets things play out, however long that takes, so even scenes that just require someone to respond to a question develop a certain feeling of tension. It’s a film where we’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Subtitles mean a couple of moments come off more humorous than I think was intended, though there is some effective black comedy as well. Settings are generally squalid - garages, abandoned hotels, apartments as filthy as they are tiny, and a lot of the film takes place at night, in the dark. Again, until it doesn’t and everything is laid bare by the light of day. In that sense it reminds me of Se7en, a film that feels more lightless than it actually is, one where having the antagonist show up in broad daylight feels a little obscene.

There’s definitely a formula to revenge films - how far is too far, don’t fight monsters unless you want to become a monster, revenge carries a terrible cost, etc. And this film definitely hews to the formula, though it saves the most on-the-nose stuff for the third act. But it also doesn’t descend completely into cliché. It never really felt to me like Soo-hyeon’s humanity was ever in question, and Kyung-chul wasn’t really redeemable in any way. Repellent, sadistic and utterly unapologetic, it’s difficult even at the film’s worst, when he is brought lowest, to say that maybe this is too much. His humanity is never in doubt, he's just someone for whom only his own life has value and everyone else exists to sate his appetites. And the end, as fitting (and in some ways typical) an end to a revenge film as you could ask for, also highlights the cost Soo-hyeon has paid, as the feelings he’s been burying to focus on the mission finally crash down on him all at once. You get the sense that Kyung-chul learned nothing, and Soo-hyeon learned too much. Either way, they both got involved with something much bigger than they expected. They fucked around and found out.

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The Outwaters: Too Much Of A Good Thing

If there’s one thing I’ve never ever said about a found-footage film, it’s that it does too good of a job at what it’s trying to accomplish. There are definitely some good found-footage films out there, but there’s also a lot of hackneyed trash, so I’m just happy when one is actually good, never mind too good at what it’s trying to do. But as it turns out, that’s entirely possible. The Outwaters is a found-footage film that does a lot of things right, but in its pursuit of verisimilitude, it ends up being so realistic that it sacrifices pacing and a strong buildup toward its climax. There’s still a lot to recommend it, but it’s not exactly a slam-dunk.

The film opens tersely, with the audio from a 911 call playing over still images of four people. Something awful is happening in the background, screams and crying all garbled and distorted, snatches of speech coming through almost at random. The four people - Robbie Zagorac, his brother Scott, Michelle August, and Ange Bocuzzi, all went missing in August of 2013. There’s a click, and we’re presented with a title card introducing footage taken from three memory cards, presented in chronological order, discovered in 2017. That’s it, no overheated “this is the only record of the horrible events of that night” or shit like that. Minimal and dispassionate. What we’re going to see is an account of these four people who went missing. That’s it. So we’re off to a good start.

And the footage that opens up the first card is all very slice-of-life - Robbie giving Scott a backpack as a birthday gift and some of the sort of elliptical conversation people who actually know each other share. We can gather that their father is dead, Scott writes short stories, and that Scott has a strained relationship with their mother. There’s little rhyme or reason to it, it’s just snatches of the sort of stuff you record to capture important moments, but bit by bit a picture develops. Scott and Robbie are helping their friend Michelle make a music video. She’s a singer-songwriter in sort of a retro 70s Southern California mode (appropriate, since the three of them live in Los Angeles) and they’re going to go out into the Mojave Desert, camp overnight and shoot for a day or two. Scott and Robbie enlist Ange - I’m not clear if she’s their sister or just a childhood friend, but she flies out from the East Coast to help with hair and makeup and costuming. The trip out into the desert is uneventful, they get good footage, and then Robbie notices something odd - a strange charge in the air, like an oncoming storm. Then there are loud peals of thunder. At night, a strange light in the distance.

And then it all goes wrong.

In terms of what I look for in found-footage horror, this does a lot right - the dialogue and performances are naturalistic in their awkwardness and mundanity. It doesn’t feel contrived, it feels like the kind of stuff you’d find on some random person’s video camera, and it tells a story in the edges without being artificially expository about it. We get a sense of everyone’s relationship to each other without having it spelled out for us. The premise isn’t contrived either - they’re going out into the desert to shoot a music video, hence the camera and sound equipment. None of this “we’re making a documentary about this totally everyday thing for reasons” nonsense. Shots in the first couple of acts are often artful without feeling outside of the ability of a reasonably talented camera operator. My one gripe here would be that the music, although diegetic, often doesn’t seem to be sourced within the scene, but rather dropped into the audio mix in post-production, so it seems more like found-footage with a soundtrack at points than strictly recovered footage. But overall it feels convincing as recovered footage.

And this holds once they get out to the desert and - more importantly  once things start going wrong. Shots aren’t perfect, in fact, most of the second half of the movie consists of Robbie running around in the dark scared (or worse) out of his fucking mind and as a result, plenty of footage is of a camera being held at his side, pointing at nothing in particular or even shooting the landscape upside-down, which adds a nightmare vertiginousness to the proceedings. And the limited subjectivity pays off a lot - out imagination does a lot of the work here, aided by brief glimpses of awful, blood-smeared things in the darkness as everything, including a sense of time and space, starts to break down. Sound design makes good use of space, with far-off wails and immediate booms of thunder and strange cries and feedback. It’s as if we’re caught in a storm that tears reality away like flesh from a face, revealing the bloody nightmares underneath.

The problem, then, is twofold. First, the film’s a little too long at almost two hours. The first half of the film moves at a pretty languid pace, and though it’s less bothersome here, since it’s intended to establish these people, I did start to feel twinges of “get on with it” after a little bit. But it’s really in the second half where it really starts to show, as there’s really only so long you can sustain a constant barrage of (admittedly) horrifying imagery before it starts to become sort of numbing and lose its impact. It threatens to go from “get on with it” to “wrap it up.”

This isn’t helped by the second problem, which is a definite lack of structure. Again, this works perfectly well in the first half, but as it starts to set up the beginnings of the idea that something isn’t right, the second half suddenly slams into high gear out of nowhere and then doesn’t let off the gas until the end. Now from the perspective of verisimilitude this makes total sense -  you find yourself in a waking nightmare, nobody’s going to stop and explain it, shit’s going to get weirder and more horrifying regardless of your ability to comprehend it. But it really does come out of nowhere and goes on long enough that it starts to feel samey, just more horrible shit being stuffed into our eyeballs. In isolation it’s all very well-executed, but there’s so much of it without any sort of narrative arc or much opportunity for us to even infer things that it all starts to feel shapeless. There are some hints early on that something isn’t right, and they’re paid off well in the final act, but they don’t have the space they need to breathe among all the chaos.

I think if they’d spend more of the second half of the film slowly building up the feeling of wrongness and really turned it up for the final act, it would have worked a lot better. As it is, it doesn’t respect neatly packaged narrative and that’s as it should be for the kind of film it is, but it also ends up working against it. I think it goes to show, once again, just how much of a tricky balancing act found-footage films are. Most of the time, you get people who just can’t commit to shooting something that doesn’t look like a conventional film and so what’s supposed to be raw footage shot by amateurs just looks like something made by film students on the (very) cheap. Here, I think we’re sort of dealing with the other end of the continuum - it’s so committed to realism in all of its awkward, messy imperfection that the momentum we need gets sacrificed. But to the extent it works, it really, really works, enough that I’m willing to put up with it being a little too good at what it’s trying to do.

IMDB entry
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