Late Night With The Devil: Illusionists

Not that anyone (I don’t think) actually believes that television and film are actually magic, but they get described in those terms often enough. And I get it, you’re talking about signals sent through the air (or as pulses down cables) that captivate us, make us laugh and cry and scream. Film and television show us the impossible from thin air. How is that not magic?

But of course it’s not. It’s technology, it’s editing, it’s special effects. It’s the illusion of continuity and motion, of images reproduced from little blobs or blocks of color, of meaning created through camera angles and lighting and music and more besides. The whole point of illusion is to show us things that aren’t there, or that aren’t what they appear to be.

Late Night With The Devil is, for the most part, a well-crafted story about illusion; it’s a story about what seems to be versus what is, and the price paid for success.

It’s 1977, and Jack Delroy is one of the most successful late-night talk show hosts on the air. Every night, his show “Night Owls” brings viewers the mix of sketch comedy, banter, and celebrity interviews one would expect from the genre, consistently at the top of the ratings without ever quite managing to dethrone late-night powerhouse Johnny Carson. But Delroy’s suffered a number of setbacks of late, including the untimely death of his wife Madeleine from cancer. Ratings are slipping, and forays into more sensationalistic waters haven’t really turned things around. His contract is up for renewal, and so Jack Delroy has one last chance to keep his show on the air. It’s Halloween night, and he has a very special line-up of guests ready to go. There’s the celebrated spirit medium Christou, a former magician-turned-skeptic named Carmichael Haig, and a young psychologist named June Ross-Mitchell. Dr. Ross-Mitchell has written a book about her work with a young girl named Lilly, who seems to suffer all of the symptoms of demonic possession.

It's Halloween night, 1977, and Jack Delroy is hoping for an audience with the devil.

What we’re watching is ostensibly the unedited master tape of the night’s broadcast, which in a way really sets up this idea that what we’re watching is a carefully crafted illusion. Delroy’s talk show is a television show that presents an appearance of bonhomie onstage while behind the scenes is carefully controlled chaos, naked ambition, people letting down their masks to reveal the cowardice, venality and desperation underneath. The smiles snap back into place once they come back from commercial. And the guests on the show itself are a conversation between reality and illusion. For all of his theatrics, Christou is really just cold-reading and being fed information by his assistant, Haig points out the ways that showmanship masquerades as the supernatural at every turn (in as pompous a fashion as you’d expect), culminating in a sequence about hypnosis that draws a sharp line between what is experienced and what is reality while suggesting that television itself might be a form of hypnosis. It’s not really a film where you can’t be certain of what you’re seeing (it’s pretty clear-cut on what’s going on), but it plays with these ideas of perception and artifice well.

In terms of artifice, period pieces are always risky, but this film does a nice job of capturing the 70s zeitgeist – the clothes, the color palette, the corny jokes, the cultural references, the sexism – and brings together a number of historical and pop cultural moments in a pleasing way. You’ve got the emergent religious cult weirdness of the late 60s/early 70s with allusions to  the Bohemian Grove, the Church of Satan, the Process Church, and anachronistically a little bit of the Branch Davidians. On top of that you’ve got the nascent interest in demonic possession sparked both by films like The Exorcist and interest in parapsychology, both of which set the stage for the recovered-memory Satanic panic of the 1980s. The film opens with lots of footage from riots and protests and sensational crimes like the Manson murders, setting the stage as a U.S. in turmoil, feeling like everything is falling apart. Delroy’s show is the kind of place people come to for pleasant refuge in a world where maybe…just maybe…the devil is real. This film has a very good idea of what its sandbox is, and it’s patient about building its world, laying detail in carefully, and (with one annoying exception) does a good job of not overexplaining things, leaving the audience to piece things together as everything comes to a head. The performances are a little on the stagey side, and although that makes sense for television, it’s the case even in the moments that are supposed to be behind the scenes; the exception to this being the actress playing Lilly, who is just fantastic – extremely unnerving but with a lot more restraint that I usually see from someone asked to play her role.

And this speaks to the film’s biggest problem, and it’s an appropriate one – verisimilitude. The conceit is that we’re watching the master tape of a live television broadcast that ended horribly, and when the focus is on the television show, it works really well. But there are these interstitial moments that are supposed to be what’s going on while they’re on commercial break, and they’re shot as fairly clean black-and-white handheld footage. What television network would have cameramen roaming around backstage filming confidential conversations? It doesn’t need the found-footage conceit to work, and it just ends up getting in the way. Worse, it dispels the illusion, and for a story where willingness to believe leads all kinds of bad places, it’s an irritating misstep in an otherwise well-made film.

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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.

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Freaks: The Nature Of Monstrosity

Horror films are, largely, about monstrosity. That could be a literal monster, some kind of thing that should not be, but it can also be some aspect of humanity grown warped and wrong. That could be the mind, the body, or character grossly distorted into something that is unsettling precisely because enough humanity remains for us to connect to it. The more we see ourselves in it, the more disturbed we become. Conversely, there are also the stories where the monsters aren’t the monsters, because either they possess human qualities like empathy and nurturing, or because the humans are real horrible fuckers.

And honestly, I’ve gotten to the point where “man is the real monster” movies feel sort of facile to me. Yes, people are capable of terrible things. I don’t know that that by itself, is an especially profound statement, and most films along those lines that I’ve seen handle it with the subtlety of a brick. After seeing Freaks, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the final word on the subject. And that was a film made in 1932.

It opens on a carnival sideshow, with a barker walking a curious crowd through the exhibits, pausing at one who is apparently especially gruesome. It is said that she was at one time a woman of exceptional beauty, now reduced to some kind of travesty upon whom it is difficult to look. We don’t see her, but one patron faints at the sight of her.

This film is the story of how this freak became what she is today.

Jumping back in time, we’re introduced to Hans and Frieda. They are two dwarves in this carnival’s sideshow, and they’re engaged to be married. But Hans has his eye on Cleopatra, an aerialist of typical size. He insists there’s nothing going on, but he’s clearly smitten. He isn’t shy about lavishing her with gifts, and Cleopatra isn’t shy about accepting them. She’s also not shy about accepting the affections of Hercules, the carnival strongman, when Hans isn’t around. They both eye Hans and Frieda’s people, the freaks of the carnival sideshow, with contempt. The fortune Hans is reputed to have, however, that has their attention.

None of this is subtle. This is your basic 1930s morality play, at its heart intended for the edification and moral uplift of the viewer. But that’s not what makes this film noteworthy, nor where its power lies. The sideshow freaks in this film are all people who were working as sideshow freaks when the film was made. These are people with any number of different deformities - microcephaly, congenital missing limbs, conjoined twins, dwarfism, and more - and it lends the movie an unnerving power because these aren’t effects or makeup or costumes. There’s no distance here, that comforting reassurance that it’s just a movie doesn’t quite land the same. Even to modern sensibilities this is still a pretty confrontational film in that regard, and it sets up a conversation about the nature of monstrosity. In this film, the freaks are a family, caring for and protective of each other. They don’t prey on others, and seem to be content with the same things that anyone would be - a roof over their heads, food in their belly, and warm sunshine on their face. The “normal” people aren’t all villainous - Cleopatra and Hercules actively scheme, some others are insensitive jerks, but many of their fellow carnival workers are friendly and as at ease with the freaks as anyone else. People are monsters, monsters are people.

As I said above, there’s not a lot of nuance here - this film has a moral and it’s going to give it to you - but I think what continues to make it so confrontational, so potentially uncomfortable, is that in watching it, we have to deal with our own feelings about what we’re seeing. The putative monsters are ultimately just people with feelings and hopes and insecurities, who differ from us only in terms of their biology. If we’re uncomfortable with them, that’s on us and not them. The antagonists aren’t exaggerated in their own monstrosity, they’re just your garden-variety cruel, insensitive, avaricious criminals who’d think nothing of bumping someone off for a fortune. But in their callousness, we’re moved to sympathize with the freaks. 

And I think that discomfort is why this film not only ended up being a lasting part of the cinematic canon, but also why its development and release were so turbulent. It pretty much got made in spite of the studio funding it, the director sank into reclusion after its release, and while it was being filmed, the cast had to eat separately from the other cast and crew at the studio because so many people couldn’t bear the sight of them. Actors approached about starring in the film refused because they didn’t want to be in the same room as the freaks. It was originally about thirty minutes longer but a lot of footage was lost when it was cut for being “too graphic.” Maybe it was really graphic, maybe it was just the freaks daring to be people, it’s hard to say. Some of the pushback was likely the mores of the time, but I think some of it was because the “monsters” weren’t actually the monsters - they were portrayed as sympathetic and kind, and I suspect that was more than a lot of people could handle. One of the hardest things to face is your own shortcomings; it’s easier to be disgusted by the flaws of another than to admit to your own.

These people lived lives, fell in love, married, had kids, all while being far enough away from what we consider “normal” that their primary means of support was exhibiting themselves to crowds of gawking onlookers. Were they all angels in real life? No, but none of us are. They were human, and in that regard, we’re left wondering exactly what separates us from monsters.

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Near Dark: Families Of Blood And Choice

If it isn’t clear from previous posts, I am extremely picky about vampire movies. Mostly because I feel like they’ve been done to (ha-ha) death, and if I’m being honest, the Twilight series both made serious bank and sort of ruined the concept for awhile. I’m not really a fan of the vampire as romantic figure, like you get with Interview With The Vampire or the Twilight series. The whole “oh woe is me for I live forever and must watch all beautiful things wither and die” schtick? Miss me with that. Films like 30 Days Of Night are more my speed. I like it when they’re threatening.

Needless to say. Near Dark has been on my radar for some time as a highly-praised hidden gem of the genre. But it wasn’t easily accessed on streaming until recently, and so when I saw it was available, I jumped on it immediately. And now having seen it, I definitely understand its cult-classic status; it’s a sharp, gritty Western about the nature of family that deals in blood in a couple senses of the word.

It’s a lazy night in rural Oklahoma, the mosquitos are out, and three good ol’ boys are scuffling and shit-talking like you do when you live someplace where that’s all there is to do. They spy a pretty young lady enjoying an ice cream cone, and one of the three - a strapping young man named Caleb - decides to shoot his shot with her. Her name is Mae and it goes fairly well, but she’s awfully concerned about getting home before sun-up. Caleb thinks she’s got a strict daddy and he’ll just charm her out of trouble, but there’s something vehement, almost desperate about it. So Caleb decides that he’s going to blackmail her. He’ll get her home before sunrise, but she has to kiss him. And Mae kisses him, and then bites him. Hard. Hard enough to draw blood, and hard enough for her to drink. Which she does before leaving a dazed Caleb on his own to recover. And when Caleb finally comes to, he feels like shit - sick, woozy, gagging.

When he stumbles out into the sunlight, he starts to burn.

Along comes a Winnebago, its windows lined with foil, and Caleb gets snatched up by the occupants. There’s Jesse, Diamondback, Severen, Homer…and Mae. Whatever it is they do, they don’t like to leave witnesses, and Severen cheerfully explains that he’s going to cut Caleb’s head off. Mae points out that she bit him but didn’t bleed him out. So now Mae has made him everybody’s problem. They have to explain to him what he is now, and what it’s going to take for him to survive. They’re going to see if he’s got the stomach for it. Meanwhile, back at the family homestead, Caleb’s father and little sister are worried because Caleb’s gone missing. Local law enforcement doesn’t seem too bothered - young man like that, he’s probably just off with a girl or something and he’ll come home soon enough. But they know Caleb better than that. So we have Caleb, and two families. There’s his father and little sister, and then this motley band of…well, nobody’s saying the “v” word, but they drink blood and can’t go outside during the day. It’s not much of a leap.

There’s nothing romantic about these vampires; theirs is a life of one stolen vehicle after another, hiding in barns and garages, sleeping under tarps and never staying in one place for too long. Very few of the usual cliches apply – sunlight’s lethal but they don’t give a shit about crosses or running water or garlic. They don’t even have fangs, but they kill and they drink and they live through almost everything else. The violence is quick and brutal – practiced killers who have learned that this is what they need to do to survive. And some of them, especially Homer and Severen, seem to really, really enjoy it with the glee that comes from realizing that rules are just constructs and there’s nothing stopping you from refusing them. But there’s a raw desperation to them akin to any group of people on the run - they’re just one step ahead of getting caught, they can’t ever settle down in one place, and at the end of the day, what they have is survival and really not much else. Mae seems to see some beauty and wonder in the idea of being alive long enough to be around when the light of distant stars finally reaches Earth, but none of the others seem to find joy in anything other than respite and murder.

Vampire movies with a family subtext are nothing new at all – the idea of one vampire siring another makes it a pretty short leap. But there are a bunch of ways to do it, as The Lost Boys, Twilight, Interview With The Vampire, and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To can attest. This film pits biological family (the blood part of blood being thicker than water) against a potential family of choice (that, well, drinks blood). Jesse and his brood are very much in the margins, and it could be argued that there’s not a lot of choice involved, but they’re a bunch of people bound by sharing the thing that makes them different from the norm. So there’s some subversion going on here. Usually it’s the biological family who are the terrible assholes and the family of choice who are welcoming and kind, but here, it’s tenuous. Caleb wants nothing more than to return home, but doesn’t think he can, and the family of choice, usually the safe haven for outsiders, is accepting him begrudgingly at best. Either way, it comes down to blood.

This film also came out in the same year as The Lost Boys, but where that film was closer to slick, glossy teen dramas of the time, with a definite comic streak (and a butchering of one of my favorite songs), this is deadly serious, gritty and raw the way exploitation films of the period were; it’s easy to see the influence of this film in the nomadic True Knot of Doctor Sleep and the ultraviolent road trip of The Devil’s Rejects. It takes full of advantage of the sprawling landscape of the Southwest, the long stretches of road only sparsely dotted by gas stations and roadhouses and the sort of dark that swallows people up. Jesse’s brood are apex predators, practiced at existing in the margins where people aren’t likely to be missed.

And for a lower-budget film, it definitely has some moments of visual flair – there’s a shootout in a small bungalow that makes light more dangerous than the bullets flying, and there’s lots of fiery sunrises and sunsets, long lonely vistas scorched by the sun. The soundtrack is lush synthesizer and stabs of action-movie guitar, which serves to both ground it in the 1980s and heighten the exploitation-film feeling. The protagonists are pretty uniformly decent and The Good Guys, a father who wants his son back, the adorable younger sister, and a good ol’ boy in way over his head. But the antagonists have some flavor to them – Severen, the gleefully unapologetic killer, Jesse the dour patriarch who, with Diamondback (very much the mother figure) is just trying to keep their little family alive and off the radar, Mae is sort of a nonentity, mostly defined by her affection and protectiveness toward Caleb, and Homer, who might be the most interesting one – he’s someone who has been a little kid for a very, very, very, very long time, and the resentment and loneliness are palpable.

So there’s a lot to recommend this, and probably my only complaints are that the tension between one family and the other isn’t really as fully developed as it could be. Caleb’s not really running from anything, and the story can’t seem to settle on this new existence being either alluring in its freedom from morality and consequences or a desperate fight for survival that he’s been thrust into. There are elements of both, but they’re never really fleshed out, and I found the ending a little pat and free of meaningful consequences. But apart from that, it’s a hell of a ride and that rare vampire film that I actually like.

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Lovely, Dark, And Deep: Nature Abhors A Vacuum

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

- Robert Frost

One of the most common taxonomies of narrative conflict divides it into three: Man against man, man against nature, and man against self. And in my experience writing this thing, man against nature definitely earns its keep. The wilderness is scary – beautiful and utterly impassive, indifferent to the fates of the creatures that inhabit it, including humans. The Blair Witch Project knows it, In The Earth knows it, Yellowbrickroad knows it, even lesser films like Gaia and The Ritual know it. The wilderness is full of things that may very well mean you harm, and it’s easy to lose yourself.

Lovely, Dark, And Deep knows it too. It’s an eerie, deliberately (possibly too deliberately) paced story about the burdens we carry and the mysteries of nature.

We’re introduced to a sprawling expanse of forest known simply as “the backcountry,” and the rangers who patrol it from tiny cabins, on their own for months. It’s the start of the day and everyone’s sounding off by radio to indicate that they’re okay. It passes around to Ranger Varney, and we see him outside his cabin, shouldering a pack, closing up the cabin and ignoring his radio. He’s repeatedly asked to sound off, but he goes about his business. The requests turn to pleas, and Varney tapes a piece of paper over the “The Ranger Is In” sign outside the cabin.

It says “I owe this land a body.”

Sometime later, the backcountry rangers are gathering for the start of a new season. Lennon is a ranger new to the detail, someone who’s worked her way up the ladder to this assignment. It’s what she’s always wanted to do, but the other rangers seem awkward around her. She’s prickly and distant, but she knows how she’s seen by the others. There’s a backstory there and rumors get around. It’s a tough gig working in the backcountry - you’re out in the middle of nowhere, reachable only by helicopter, for months in monastic living conditions. A lot of weird shit happens out there, and people go missing all the time, with only a fraction ever found. As it turns out, one of those people was Lennon’s sister Jenny. It was a long time ago, and Lennon has become a ranger specifically to take this assignment, to patrol the woods where her sister vanished, and do her best to pick up a trail that went cold decades ago. She’s a woman on a mission and she’s used to being seen as crazy or obsessed. And maybe she is, given the distance she’s gone to try and solve her sister’s disappearance. But she’s a competent ranger, if not always good at following orders.

What follows is Lennon moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness, dealing with another missing hiker case (people go missing in the wilderness, but an unusual number go missing out here), clashing with her superiors and realizing that there’s something else out there. It’s not an especially histrionic film, performances and dialogue are believable and low-key, the somber reserve of people who have a difficult job to do. Everyone seems believable and even Lennon, in her rash decisions and tendency to disobey orders, comes across as someone deeply driven by guilt and grief, possibly to the point of obsession. But no scenery gets chewed, there aren’t really any jump scares. It’s very quiet and meditative with brief but effective moments that communicate the sinister strangeness underneath the beauty. This film lets things happen in the background (which I’ve always found more unnerving than showing something in my face and yelling BOO!), and it has an excellent sense of wrongness without going overboard. It’s not overexplained, and it doesn’t need to be because the visuals do a lot of the work, cryptic but evocative.

That said, I do think that the deliberate pace is, in this case, a bit of a double-edged sword. I like it when a film has the confidence to slow down and build a mood, and the pace and relative quiet communicate what it’d be like to spend months by yourself in the actual middle of nowhere. But the deliberate pace also means that the film drags at points, spinning its wheels a little. More escalation wouldn’t have been out of place, but the overall effect is that of gradually sinking into a dream, where reality, grief, and something outside of our understanding gradually come together and it works pretty well on that front.

The end does let it down a little as well. It builds to a climax, but that climax could have used more tension instead of continuing the very even, gradual pace of the previous acts, and the ultimate reveal is maybe a little on-the-nose and over-exposited. The film is very good about showing instead of telling everywhere else, so I think they could have carried that a little more into the end, but otherwise it carries some of the same narrative and tonal DNA as Absentia and Censor, however different the settings, resulting in a nicely creepy meditation on grief, guilt, and letting go.

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Splinter: Mostly Killer, No Filler

I have a hard time with monster movies, because suspension of disbelief is really important for me to get into a horror film, and believable monsters (like, creature-monsters) are tough to pull off on the sort of budget most horror movies get. Cheap effects look cheap, and the cheaper they look the harder it is to suspend disbelief. There are, of course, exceptions - The Thing still gets to me today even though the effects work is dated, and the mediocre prequel - which used reasonably good digital effects - seems bloodless by comparison.

Splinter, then, is very much an exception to the rule. It’s not especially rich thematically, but it IS a crisp, tense siege film with some really smart effects work.

We begin in the expanse of Texas, all scrubland, oil wells and long lonely roads. A gas station attendant tries to stave off the boredom by investigating some noises he hears behind the building. What he finds appears to be a dead dog covered in some kind of spiny growth.

Elsewhere, we get introduced to two couples. Seth, a biology grad student, and his girlfriend Polly are planning to do some camping as a romantic getaway. Except Seth is absolutely the stereotypical brainiac and manages to bungle setting up the tent badly enough that it becomes unusable. There’s some bickering before they agree to get back on the road and find a place to sleep for the night. Dennis and Lacey are on the run from…something, it’s not clear, though it’s probably the cops. Lacey doesn’t look too good. She’s fidgety and strung-out. They’re trying to get to Mexico, but their car (well, the car they’re driving) breaks down and Lacey starts to panic. And along come Seth and Polly. One hitchhiking ruse and armed takeover of the car later, Dennis and Lacey and Seth and Polly are Mexico-bound. Lacey’s mad that Seth isn’t the kind of doctor that can write prescriptions, and Seth and Polly are mad that they’ve been hijacked by armed fugitives.

I don’t know what makes characters in horror movies so prone to hitting animals in the middle of the road, but that’s sure enough what happens and when Dennis gets out to inspect the damage, he notices that the roadkill has some weird spiny growth coming out of it. The car’s undamaged, but they need to gas up, so they stop at the next gas station they find. Oddly, it seems unattended.

And then they find the attendant. Well, what’s left of him, covered in that same spiny growth.

And, as it turns out, there’s something outside as well. So our four protagonists end up barricading themselves in the gas station, while god-knows-what roams around outside, It’s a fairly straightforward setup - there’s the tension of the threat outside, and the tension between the four characters. They can’t leave the gas station, they can’t call for help because Dennis doesn’t want the cops involved, and they can’t stay there forever. So, like any good siege movie, the prime mover here is the need to escape without getting killed. It’s a pretty lean film  - the performances are economic, with each character largely defined by a single characteristic. Seth is nerdy and ineffectual (until the third act), Polly is feisty, Dennis is a criminal, and Lacey is dopesick. That’s sort of it. The dialogue is fine, nothing too caricatured, but none of it is especially nuanced either.

But it doesn’t really pull you out of it either, because the filmmakers handle the classic problem of the monster movie well. Monster movies are tough because you have to show the monster eventually, and when you do, it’s going to be pretty difficult to make it plausible unless you’ve got the best effects houses in the business on the job, and they’re generally not doing horror films. So it’s a balancing act – show it enough to make it a threat, but not so much that the seams show. On that front, this film works admirably, with a mix of makeup, practical effects, sound design, quick cuts, blurry close-ups and tight shots working to both create a plausible, unsettling monster and keep the pace quick and sharp. It’s aware of the limitations but also not especially constrained by them, and the actor(s) playing the monster move with a twitching, jerking physicality that really captures a feeling of a host hijacked by an organism. And just as the makeup alone isn’t doing all the work, to make the creature convincing, the camera tells the story as least as much as the performances and script do. There are a lot of tight and close shots, creating a sense of confinement inside the gas station, and the filmmakers know when to linger on a shot and when to cut away quickly. It’s a very bloody film - splashes and streaks and pools of the stuff - but not an especially gory one. The worst violence happens offscreen and reactions tell us what we need to know. There is the gas station, lit by cold, sickly fluorescents and outside, nothing but yawning dark. To its further credit, it makes very little attempt to explain the threat - there’s a nod to some kind of petrochemical research shenanigans, but just a nod. It’s less important to know how it got here than it is to deal with it being here, and I appreciate that.

There are some pacing issues - it doesn’t waste time (it’s not even an hour and a half long), but even so, the first act feels a little slack compared to the third, when everything comes to a head. It feels like once the four protagonists are brought together, there’s too much time spent on them in the car. That could work, if we were being lead to think this was a hostage film and have the horror elements sprung on us in the second act. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go, but we know right off the bat that there’s a monster out there, so when the other shoe drops in the second act, it feels a little like a foregone conclusion. But it’s a pretty minor quibble.

On balance, this is a really good example of a low-budget horror film that not only doesn’t overstep its limits, but actually makes sort of a strength out of them. It uses its single location well, it’s lean and efficient and has some interesting turns, and the threat never feels implausible or silly. It’s a little slight, but I would really like to see what the filmmakers could so with a richer, more expansive story, because this film convinces me they’ve got the chops for it.

IMDB entry
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