Demonic: As Generic As Its Title

Honestly, I don’t know which is worse - an actively bad horror movie or a mediocre one. I have definitely seen my share of both over the last nine-ish years or so, and it seems like the obvious answer would be actively bad ones. You know, because they’re bad. Wooden acting, lousy writing, effects that fall apart under the merest glance, plot twists you can see coming a mile away, you name it, it’s out there. But then I get to thinking: I’ve seen some truly terrible movies that at least had some kind of energy to them, however misbegotten. Some kind of earnestness, however misplaced. Mediocre films are often in their mediocrity highly calculated, films that know which buttons to push and maybe even have some idea why, but don’t do anything beyond that. And I think I find those exercises in button-pushing somehow more offensive, because they display a contempt for their audience that offends me. Again, I realize that film - especially genre film - is a commercial exercise to one degree or another, but it’s possible to make a film with profit in mind and still come away with something interesting. 

I recall an interview I read with the late Herschell Gordon Lewis regarding the making of Blood Feast, and he basically said that Blood Feast was an attempt to crank something as sensational as possible out for the late night drive-in crowd, and to do so as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible to maximize return on investment. Lewis’ other big business was direct-mail marketing. The man was not an auteur, But Blood Feast is a fucking berserk fever dream of a film. After as certain point, intent matters less than the final product. Art can come from mercenary motives, just as the noblest of intentions can result in insufferable, stultifying bullshit. And at least either of those will leave an impression. But mediocrity - the wedding of technical competence and cynical calculation to a lack of imagination - that doesn’t yield anything that makes any contribution at all.

And that brings us to Demonic, a slick exercise in mediocrity, as characterless and generic as its title.

The opening credits and title happen over a barrage of newspaper articles and television news clips about a tragic murder-suicide at a home in rural Louisiana. A young woman attempted to conduct a séance and ended up murdering everyone there before hanging herself. There were some intimations that the séance was an attempt not to contact the dead, but to raise something…DEMONIC. End credits.

In the present day, an older man goes peeking around an abandoned house in the woods - the one from the opening credits. The chain holding the door closed has been cut, and he cautiously makes his way inside. He discovers blood on the floor and immediately bails to call the cops. So, you know, points there for handling it like that. The cop who gets the call is Detective Mark Lewis, who is busy buying a bottle of wine for the date he’s about to have to call off. He’s the closest officer and duty calls. Detective Lewis pushes a little further into the house, discovers four bodies throughout the house…and one of them is still alive. He locks the scene down and calls his erstwhile date, criminal psychologist Elizabeth Klein. There are three dead people, two missing, and only one who can explain what happened. Lewis needs Klein to find out what the survivor - a young man named John- can tell them. Cut to “One Week Earlier.”

One week earlier, John and his girlfriend Michelle are getting interviewed by a guy named Sam, who is part of a team of amateur ghost hunters convinced that this house, the site of these murders, is haunted. John has troubling visions, dreams where his mother is inside the house, telling him to let go. He has some kind of connection to the house, and so Sam, along with audiovisual tech Donny, occult expert Jules, and mastermind Bryan, want John and Michelle to come with them to investigate the house and record some potential paranormal shenanigans. Oh, also, Bryan is Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, and he’s an absolute dick. They’re going to try a séance, to communicate with whatever spirits dwell in this house where five people died after…conducting a séance.

What could go wrong?

The film is structured quite a bit like Temple, another recent disappointment: Start with the police discovering something bad has happened, then spend the rest of the film bouncing back and forth between the investigation in the present day, and the events in the past that led up to the bad thing. To its credit, it’s much more coherent than Temple was, and the characters more believable as people for the most part. And just as it jumps back and forth between the past and present, it jumps between third and first-person perspectives, courtesy of the cameras the ghost hunters had on them at the time and does so reasonably well. The recovered footage mostly looks like recovered footage and is well-integrated into the story. But this narrative structure does serve to kill what little momentum the film might have, though, and though it doesn’t break believability, it also doesn’t add much.

What it does add mostly is a tendency toward the obvious. It’s the story of this detective and this psychologist trying to put together what happened, relying on one person’s testimony. So you sort of know that there’s going to be some kind of shocking twist or revelation at the very end, either the detective or the psychologist will discover something that means the other is in danger as everything we’ve assumed is upended by this new discovery. And yeah, that’s exactly what happens - you might not be able to anticipate the particulars, but it’s not hard to see the broad strokes coming. You kind of land on the expectation that it’s going one of two or maybe three possible outcomes at most pretty early on, and it doesn’t really do anything unexpected. When it does finally resolve, it cheats by using a really blunt unreliable narrator device that sort of comes down to “we showed you things happening this way but ah-ha, it actually happened this way the whole time!” It’s sort of overstuffed at its climax, hurrying to cram a bunch of details into the third act. The result doesn’t feel scary, it feels like a plot being resolved. An observant viewer has seen this sort of story before, and there’s always the hope that maybe it’s going to get switched up or subverted somehow, but it doesn’t. A bunch of people went into a house with a dark past and tried to hold a ritual that would put them in touch with the spirit world and whaddaya know, shit goes south in a hurry.

So narratively, there are no surprises here. It’s put together with a solid amount of skill, however. It’s reasonably well-acted (with a couple of lead actors who are definitely working below their pay grade here), made up of mostly believable characters, some more sympathetic than others. Lewis is definitely the macho results-oriented detective, but he’s competent and professional and not without charm. Klein doesn’t fall too far into forensic psychologist cliché and gets believably freaked out when stuff gets weird. The ill-fated Scooby Gang aren’t especially fleshed-out as people but they are distinct without being reduced to caricature. The friction between John and Bryan is definitely there but never devolves into macho posturing to the degree it could, and Bryan shows just enough humanity to leaven his otherwise relentless assholishness a little. It’s like there are actual characters there, just under the surface, but we’ll never get to see them because this isn’t the kind of movie that does character study, like, at all. The cinematography is good as well, the house mostly looks like an abandoned property and not a set, though on reflection it’s probably too clean for a house that’s been abandoned for twenty years in Louisiana - there should be a lot more rot and decay given the temperature and humidity. Which feels like an oddly specific thing to notice, even to me, but as I was thinking about it afterward I kept coming back to how well-preserved everything was for a house spitting distance from a bayou. It looked like it had been abandoned for a couple of months, not a couple of decades, and that stuck with me. 

So this is a film that is not in any way inept. What it is, however, is obvious. It leans too much into its music - there’s not a scene that it doesn’t score ominously, and every scare is punctuated with shrieking strings or loud, hollow booms. It’s not at all content to just let things happen in the background, everything is underscored for the viewer as if we won’t know something is scary unless the film shoves THIS IS SCARY right in our faces. And it lacks imagination on that front as well. There’s no real atmosphere to this film - the abandoned house is an abandoned house, but it doesn’t feel especially foreboding. It doesn’t do any work in the details or in the background, instead resorting pretty much exclusively to jump scares to create any tension at all. They’re mostly well-timed, but that doesn’t make them any less obvious or manipulative. I couldn’t help but compare this film to Hell House LLC at times, because even though that film had its problems, what it had going for it was a really skillful use of recurring motifs and strange things happening in the background and slowly escalating dread built out of those little details. This film’s never really scary, just startling. There’s more to horror than just grabbing someone from behind and yelling BOO! in their ear, but this film doesn’t seem to know that.

And so that’s kind of the film’s whole deal - it’s cleanly executed on a technical level, but at every point, the parts are clearly visible. There’s no real mood or vibe or atmosphere, just an assemblage of clichés - you’ve got the abandoned house, the remains of a creepy ritual, a room with a bunch of dolls in it for some reason, a music box that starts playing by itself, objects moving by themselves, lights and cameras that stop working at opportune moments, and what little tension it manages is due entirely to jump scares. The protagonists are a little better than cannon fodder, but only a little, and because the whole thing is so obviously calculated and formulaic from the get-go, the end evokes little more than “ah, I bet this is so they can make a sequel.” There’s no heart to it, no real sense of tension, unease, horror, peril, anxiety, anything. It is deeply mechanical.

Once I’m done watching something, I’ll look it up on IMDB for details, trivia, etc. And one bit of trivia for this film leaps out at me, regarding a scene where Klein is reading something out of a book discovered in the house. A freeze-frame reveals the following text in the book: 

“The Seal of the Left Hand Path is an occult symbol that means all sorts of plot relevant things, soon to be revealed to the audience in dialog, because God knods [sic], this screenshot won't play for long enough for anyone to read it. Unless they pause. But let's hope they don't..." 

That’s the film in a nutshell. It’s an empty, calculated series of clichés that knows the details don’t matter, because the audience won’t pay very careful attention. They’ll be startled by the jump scares and call it good. It’s product, start to finish, as generic as its title, and supremely contemptuous of its audience. Fuck this mediocre nonsense.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

The Blair Witch Project (Or: How To Make A Good Found-Footage Horror Film)

When found-footage is good, it’s really good, because it deprives us of distance. Distance is, in my opinion, the enemy of horror films. The more we can distance ourselves from what we’re watching, the less effective it is. Unsympathetic protagonists create distance. Highly implausible behavior and contrived situations distance us. Bad special effects distance us. Self-reference distances us (and this is why The Cabin In The Woods is not a horror film, but instead a film about horror films). Basically, everything that discourages emotional investment and reminds us that we’re watching a movie distances us, and the more distant we are from the film, the less power it has to move us, really affect us. And I think some people like it that way - what they’re looking for isn’t horror, it’s violent entertainment. 

But I’m not one of them. I like it when a film sticks with me, haunts me, makes me feel things. For me, that’s kind of the point. And writing about scary movies on a (mostly) weekly basis for the last several years makes it harder for that to happen. It’s hard not to have a critical eye over time, and so I really value the films that pull me out of that critical distance, that sort of force me to experience them. And the thing about found-footage (and mockumentaries, to a degree) is that by not using conventional cinematic language, by presenting what purports to be raw footage, we’re denied the distance of a typical movie-watching experience. If we buy into it, then this isn’t a movie - it’s a document. We’re no longer an audience - we’re witnesses to something unfolding. And even though that’s not really true, the easier it is to forget that, the easier it is to get pulled in. It’s not just films, either - I’m a sucker for stories told this way in almost any medium. I like stories presented as recovered correspondence, as oral histories, as collections of official documentation…I really like that feeling of witnessing or unearthing something. It’s another layer to that feeling of discovery that can make a story feel powerful.

And so this is why I have such a love-hate relationship to found-footage horror films. As a style of filmmaking, it has so much potential, and I love that. But that potential is so often squandered, and I hate that. They’re films that are very easy to make, but very difficult to make well, and they really do have to be made well for me to get invested in them, because the instant you present something as a document, anything that reminds me it’s a movie is going yank me out of the illusion faster and harder than the same sort of slip-up in something that doesn’t pretend to be other than a movie. Too much contrivance in a film is distracting and can make its quality suffer, but any whiff of contrivance in a found-footage film immediately puts me off. And most films - even legitimate documentaries - are contrivances to one degree or another. They’re put together according to a design. Hiding that design to preserve the idea that this was unintentional footage is tough. Paradoxically, it takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless, and it requires, I think, a very different way of approaching filmmaking from conventional cinematic technique. Not just in how the film is shot, but also what is shot, how the story is told, how you approach the idea of acting, and the degree to which you need to consider point of view. And in found-footage, you are much more constrained than you are in conventional film narrative. You don’t have your whole toolkit and arsenal of cheats to fall back on. And so lots of found-footage films reveal the limitations of their filmmakers in the degree to which they fall back on these tools in ways that end up breaking the illusion.

And so after watching a whole bunch of found-footage horror films of wildly varying quality, I want to talk about the genre by looking at The Blair Witch Project, the film that arguably kicked off its proliferation. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror film (that was arguably Cannibal Holocaust, a film I have no desire to watch), but it was the one that really highlighted how effective, successful, and -let’s be realistic - profitable they can be. I think it may be the best example of the genre there is, it’s one of my all-time favorite horror films, and so I want to talk not just about it as a film, but what it gets right about found-footage that a lot of other films get wrong.

The film opens with no music, just the title, white on a black screen, and a title card that says:

“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary.

A year later their footage was found.”

That’s it. No “the horrible and bizarre events of that day” or anything like that. Just, these three people disappeared, and here’s the recordings of their last known days. Simple, straightforward. The first time I saw that title card, I got chills. Whatever I’m about to see, the three people involved vanished afterward. It immediately gives everything to follow a sheen of dread because you know however it ends, it isn’t going to be good. This is one thing a lot of found-footage films get wrong…they tip their hand too early by telling us what we’re going to see is because of something awful and evil and horrifying and it’s just trying too hard to get us on board. Going this minimal and matter-of-fact reduces any feeling of contrivance. This just tells us that what we’re about to see is recovered footage from three filmmakers who disappeared a year before. It set up the premise, foreshadows something bad, then gets out of the way.

(It also establishes that this footage has been recovered somehow. I’ve seen more than a few found-footage films that end on a really ominous note, but as a result leave hanging the question of how we’re seeing any of this in the first place. Even when the ending is good, that tends to leave me with a bad taste in my mouth.)

Everything after this title card is sourced from one of two cameras - a color camcorder and a 16mm film camera. The footage was apparently degraded in post-production to look more period-appropriate, but they did a really good job of it, because none of it looks like anything other than raw footage to me. There’s no corny camcorder overlay with battery indicators or recording lights (which wouldn’t show up on the recorded footage, just in the viewfinder), just either color video or black and white film. The camcorder has a built-in mic, and the 16mm has no sound source of its own - for that they have a boom mic and a DAT recorder for film audio. That’s it. Everything we see in the film is from one of those two sources, and having a film source independent of its sound source allows for things like voiceover in a way that makes narrative sense, and there are moments in this film where seeing one thing and hearing another (or having the sound source further away than the film source) creates feelings of tension and disconnection without stepping outside what’s possible in the situation.

If you’re going to present something as raw, recovered footage, that’s what it needs to look like. It can’t be obviously pro-grade footage with a camcorder viewfinder overlay, you can’t have montages or Steadicam shots. Things like that immediately communicate that this is a movie pretending to be raw footage and breaks the illusion. There are all kinds of similar techniques that directors employ to tell a story, but making a convincing found-footage film means forsaking those things and just telling a story using either one or two cameras as here, or being willing to cobble together something from a whole bunch of separate sources that vary wildly in quality and perspective. The addition of things like GoPro cameras and camera drones open things up a little, but it’s still a very limited palette by necessity. Here the filmmakers have to tell the entire story using only two cameras, and so then the burden falls to the acting and editing to tell the story, because the camera’s vocabulary is so limited.

And so this footage tells us about the last days of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. They’re film students making a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch, the ghost of a woman burned for being, well,  a witch in the 1800s.They’re going to Burkittsville, MD (formerly Blair), they’re going to interview some of the locals, and then head into the woods that she’s purported to haunt. Heather and Josh know each other already, and Mike is someone Josh brought in. Heather directs and narrates, Josh runs the 16mm camera, and Mike does sound. They pack up their stuff, do some grocery shopping, and head to Burkittsville. Sure enough, they find locals with all kinds of stories - after Elly Kedward was burned on suspicion of witchcraft in the 1800s, a little girl reported seeing a woman whose feet didn’t touch the ground out in the woods. A hunting party was found ritualistically dismembered at a site known as Coffin Rock. In the modern day, the Blair Witch is a bogeyman parents use to get their kids to go to bed, people hear strange noises and see mysterious vapors in the woods, and a man named Rustin Parr murdered a number of children, claiming to be under the influence of the Blair Witch.

Of course, these are all just local legends. As they move into the woods, it starts to become apparent pretty quickly that none of them are really outdoorspeople. Heather’s leading the expedition, but even though she insists that she be the one to read the map and compass, everything takes longer than she says it will. A 90-minute hike to a cemetery takes hours. The hike from the cemetery to Coffin Rock also takes hours. They get maybe three segments done on their first day before making camp, exhausted from entirely more hiking than anyone planned, and it isn’t clear that Heather knows how to get back to their car. Meanwhile, Heather insists she has everything under control.

And then the mysterious noises start.

It’s a short film - not even quite 90 minutes - but it’s very well-paced. It all begins with strange noises at night, escalates to mysterious objects, and then worse, then much, much worse. None of that is especially unusual for films about people in the woods when and where they shouldn’t be. But the tension starts early. Part of that is the premise - we know these three people disappear, never to be found, so there’s already a sense of impending doom. But another part of it is the friction between the three characters. Heather is driven and ambitious, a little intense, and it starts to become abrasive soon enough. Mike doesn’t know her well, so he gets annoyed pretty quickly. Josh does know her, but you sort of get the sense that he’s maybe getting a little fed up with her, like he’s tired of dealing with her when she gets like this. And she does have an obsessive quality to her - she records all kinds of stuff with the camcorder, like she’s making the behind-the-scenes featurette for their documentary as they go, and constantly having a camera in their faces makes Josh and Mike really, really irritable. Her insistence that she knows what she’s doing even as they get more and more lost makes things even worse. This film is as much about the psychological disintegration of these three young people as they get increasingly more tired, hungry, and lost as it is anything else. 

But then…there’s those mysterious noises. And for that matter, how is it that they’re following their compass and ending up right back where they started? It’s like the forest is conspiring against them. The annoyance and frustration of being lost turns into real fear - they’re due back at work, they have to get the production equipment back, they have family and friends and loved ones that are going to start worrying. The fear then turns into terror as they realize that if they can’t get out of the woods, they are going to die there. And all the strange noises, the mysterious rock cairns outside their tent, all of it…well, the only logical explanation is that they’re not just hopelessly lost, they’re hopelessly lost and some malevolent locals are messing with them. Because they certainly don’t believe in ghosts. 

So if you can’t really create tension and fear with camerawork and lots of fancy effects, you’re going to have to rely on your actors to sell the story, and this is another place a lot of found-footage films fall down. Even if the footage looks real, if the people in it don’t act like real people, again, the illusion falls apart. What is supposed to be documentation of actual people going through something incomprehensible ends up looking like a conventional film made very much on the cheap. A lot of cruddy found-footage horror films fall prey to the same problem as cruddy conventional horror films - their characters aren’t people so much as archetypes or caricatures, walking embodiments of a single personality trait. And that might not just be the acting, that could very well be the writing instead or as well. It’s one thing to write dialogue, and it’s another to write dialogue that sounds like actual, spontaneous conversation instead of performed exposition. And this was another place where the filmmakers made a really smart choice - the dialogue in this film is improvised. They cast people with improvisational experience, those people developed characters, and then they were given a daily outline for what had to happen on any given day of shooting, but how they got there was up to them. As a result, the dialogue sounds like actual conversation, because it basically is actual conversation. The interactions between them feel believable, because they’re happening naturally and spontaneously. As a result, it really does seem like we’re watching actual footage of actual people actually losing their shit, and once things really start rolling, it’s really raw and intense. It carries the tension that can’t be captured in the cinematography and then some. Too many found-footage horror films are scripted and acted like conventional films, and feel off as a result. If you’re going to make your story believable as a discovered document, then how people talk and act can’t be too polished or stagey, because that’s perfectly okay for movies, but it’s not how actual people talk and act. Likewise, the filmmaking has to be believable. The protagonists are film students, so they have some skill with their equipment, but the camerawork is believably shaky when they’re distressed, and it’s rarely if ever neatly placed to conveniently capture anything scary. It’s frenzied, blurred, pointed at the ground because the person holding the camera is running for their fucking life. There aren’t a lot of conventional scares in this film, and hardly any effects. It’s all in mood and details and more mood. A lot of things happen in pitch black, with only sound from a camcorder mic to capture it. The end result feels raw and messy, exactly like it would if it were real footage.

As the film moves on, their increasing instability, the threat of exposure and starvation, and the really weird things happening to them all converge, sharpen to a point. They’re all at each other’s throats and on the verge of complete breakdown, there are things happening to them every night that defy any comfortable explanation, and they’re exhausted, hungry, lost, and terrified that nobody will ever see them again. No matter how hard they try, they keep going around in circles, and there’s something out there watching them. It all comes to a conclusion, a terrified crawl through an abandoned house in the middle of the woods, lit only by the lights on their cameras, leading to an end both enigmatic and awful. We’re denied any tidy explanation, just cameras left running, pointing where they fell. I saw this film in theaters maybe 7 or 8 times (I got a little obsessed myself), and the end didn’t get less powerful over time, it got more powerful. It was some edge-of-the-seat, suck-your-breath out shit.  And I think it worked because the actors sold it. They were identifiable, relatable people, so even if you didn’t especially like them, you could empathize with them, connect with their easily apparent humanity. And by the end, they’re in rough shape. This, again, goes back to how the film was made. 

This film was shot in eight days, with all (or at least the overwhelming majority of) footage being recorded by the cast members themselves, using the cameras they were carrying in the film. They shot the film themselves, and just as the dialogue was improvised, so was the day’s action. The filmmakers used a lot of techniques I’d expect to see in live-action role-playing, a form of collaborative theater where the participants tell a story sketched out to varying degrees ahead of time through improvisation, often on location, with rules established ahead of time to govern the flow of action and the outcomes of conflict. It’s a form of theater where the actors are the audience, telling the story to themselves, for themselves, capturing the energy and spontaneity of live performance within a loose narrative framework. The filmmakers provided the cast with GPS units that would lead them from location to location (as well as escape routes out of the woods, in case they got lost, which they apparently did on three separate occasions), and once they arrived at location, they’d find a milk crate with supplies and instructions waiting for them. They’d drop off the film they’d shot the day before and pick up what they needed for the day, including an outline of the day’s story beats. The cast had agreed upon procedures in the event that they needed to break character (including safe words), and as long as they got where the GPS and outline for the day wanted them to go, how they got there was largely up to them. The production crew was out of sight, but never too far away.

This was also by design, both for safety concerns and because the production crew created the atmosphere to put the cast in the right head space. They invented an entire mythology for the Blair Witch and convinced the cast that it was a real local legend. When the cast filmed talking-head segments in town, the producers planted ringers among the townspeople to feed them stories about the Blair Witch, so the line between fiction and reality would blur. And that blurring extended to the remainder of the shoot. As filming went on, the production crew gave the cast less and less food and water in their supply drops, so all the discomfort on film was genuine. The cast wasn’t told what was going to happen to them on any given night, and the production crew would come into their camp while they slept to plant mysterious objects, disrupt their gear, and even shake the tent while they slept, and so all of those reactions of shock and fear that end up on film were real. The cast members used their own names to make it easier to stay in the moment (and to contrive their “disappearance” for a publicity campaign), they got more and more tired and hungry as the shoot went on, their tempers frayed from exhaustion and constant fear of what awaited them at night or the next day. They really were at each other’s throats. The more the line between fiction and reality blurred, the more believable everything that ended up on the screen seemed. When you inhabit these characters, immerse yourself in them, in a situation that isn’t on a soundstage, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next, everything comes much more from a place of real feeling, and it shows. You can tell a good story using conventional cinematic techniques in ways that allow for either artificiality or verisimilitude, but if your whole conceit is that this is recovered film footage, shot by relative amateurs, of something that happened to them, they’re going to need to be believable as real people going through real terrifying experiences, and in that way you really DO need something more like theater than film, because otherwise it’s too easy to spot the acting. 

It’s not perfect. Few films are. Watching it again for the first time in about 10 years or so, a couple of things leap out at me, It’s supposed to be raw footage, but some of the talking-head segments at the beginning switch between video and film in a way that suggested it was edited somewhat in post-production, giving the game away a little, and the end, as striking as it is, relies a little heavily on the audience remembering one relatively small piece of information from the beginning of the film, and contextualizing it correctly, which a lot of people didn’t know to do. Apparently, multiple endings were shot (so it looks like I’m gonna need to get the Blu-Ray at some point to see them), some more conventionally sensationalistic than others, and I wonder how they’d hold up. The ending we get is a little confusing, but still a supremely creepy image nonetheless. There was originally a whole newscast-style framing device covering the discovery of the footage, but it was omitted for feeling too contrived. I think this was a good instinct on the part of the filmmakers - you don’t want to overexplain (though the detail that the footage was discovered embedded in the middle of an otherwise-undisturbed foundation of a house from the 1800s would have been a nice touch - it’s unsettling without being too specific) and a lot of found-footage films make this mistake, and just like it’s hard to nail the mundanity of actual behavior, it’s hard to nail the mundanity of local news coverage as well (a lesson that The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Hell House LLC failed to learn). But even though there are flaws, this film, in my opinion, more than gets over on both its willingness to let the footage tell the story without overexplaining or spelling too much out for us, and in the strength of performances that are as much authentic anger and distress as performance. If you’re going to make a horror film that purports to be the last recorded document of a bunch of people who met a terrible end at the hands of something potentially unexplainable, then you can’t just make a regular movie and slap some viewfinder graphics on it. You have to be willing to immerse your cast in the experience and let them document it, and be willing and able to tell a story with messy, flawed, imperfect footage. You have to be willing to abandon as much distance as possible. Anything less risks being just another gimmick. That's the reason so many films have tried to capture the lightning in a bottle that this one did, and the reason so many have failed.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

I’m Just Fucking With You: Committing To The Bit

There’s something cruel about pranks at their heart. Whether they’re framed as a challenge to society’s conventions or as a bit of fun, at the end of the day they’re about lying to people in order to make them upset or confused, because making people upset or confused gives the prankster pleasure. It’s sadism, bullying without physical violence. Sure, some are less harmful than others, but the constant is getting a laugh at someone else’s expense, from their discomfort and the humiliation once the prank is revealed. Pranks are fucking mean.

Which makes them, in theory at least, great fodder for a horror film. Not even just the idea of a prank gone too far (which certainly shows up on and off, especially in second and third-tier slasher films), but a film about someone who plays pranks that start off mostly harmless, but don’t stop, and just keep escalating, that relentless denial of any safe psychological ground, like the way tickling goes from amusing to straight-up painful when the tickler just won’t stop. I could see a really good film coming out of that approach. 

I’m Just Fucking With You is not that film. It’s mean-spirited and nihilistic in a way that, I guess metatextually shares the nastiness of a prank, but it’s also poorly paced, surprisingly obvious for a film about pranks, and tonally confused. 

We open on Larry Adams. He’s talking to someone on the phone (his sister, it turns out) as he’s driving out of town to attend a wedding. He’s not super-happy about going for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but he does talk his sister into getting a room at whatever sleazy little motel he’s picked out so they can hang out. And then once he’s done talking to her, he starts posting irredeemably nasty things on the bride’s Facebook page under the name “ProgrammingFlaw.” As it turns out, Larry is your standard troll. In real life he’s a quiet milquetoast of a man, but put him in front of a keyboard and he turns into a torrent of raging id, wishing death on total strangers, mocking anyone and everyone, spewing every last drop of bile from the safe distance of geography and anonymity. This, then, is our protagonist.

Larry gets to the motel - the Pink Motel and Lounge - and goes to check in. He finds nobody at the desk, nobody responds to the bell, and so he makes his way behind the desk, through the attached restaurant’s kitchen, and comes out in the lounge, where two men are sitting having a laugh. Gerald is a biker, having a beer, and Chester is behind the bar, making the drinks. They’re the only two in the place. Larry asks to check in, Chester tells him that if he pays in cash, he doesn’t have to charge him tax, so Larry forks over the 75 bucks in cash. 

After a beer or two (and some tension when Larry demurs the offer of a drink), Gerald leaves, and Chester asks Larry for his credit card and a photo ID. But Larry already paid him cash for the room! Chester says he doesn’t know what Larry’s talking about - no way is he going to turn over the keys without a credit card and photo ID, just who does Larry think he is? 

Chester’s face splits in a grin. “Relax, man - I’m just fucking with you.”

Chester loves his little jokes. He’s running the motel while the proprietors - an older couple - are away. He’s just your basic good-time guy. Likes to have a few laughs, likes to stir up some shit. And as it turns out, he knows Larry’s sister is named Rachel even though Larry hasn’t mentioned it.

So what I think we’re supposed to be taking away from this is the idea that Larry is trapped at this motel with someone whose constant joking masks something nastier. And that’s a good setup as far as it goes, but the film is rife with problems from the start. Larry is a thoroughly unsympathetic protagonist - he’s a mild-mannered germophobe (why a germophobe? I think it’s meant to make him more unlikable) who takes out his many resentments and frustrations on the world via the Internet, peppering any site or app possessing a comment function with verbal abuse, insults, and slander. The grievance that defines his life is getting dumped by a woman and being unable to handle the idea that she’s getting married. Which is painful, sure, but to be unable to move past it over time is the sign of someone just as stunted as Larry appears to be. So already this isn’t positioned as a film about putting people in danger as much as it is about some asshole getting a comeuppance wildly disproportionate to his sins. Which is less horror and more just sort of feeding people to the lions for our amusement. 

It also purports to be a film about someone being subjected to increasingly more and more extreme pranks over the course of a night and handled right that could be a really good film, but it sort of abandons that premise halfway through. Pranks require a certain amount of deception, and we’re sort of lead to believe that this is going to be a film where at first Chester lies about small things, then larger things, and larger things, leading to some kind of reveal about what sort of danger Larry is really in. But, after the first act, there’s little to no deception to speak of - everyone is who they appear to be, and what appears to be going on is exactly what’s going on. I kept waiting for a big reveal or reversal that everything we’ve seen has been orchestrated as some grand theatrical lesson for Larry to get over himself, but it never comes. Oh sure, Chester’s dangerously unbalanced and eventually things lead to violence, but it’s all pretty predictable, which seems criminal for a film predicated on the idea of escalating deception. Thematically, then, this film forgets what it is pretty quickly.

Narratively, as well. There’s some promise at the beginning in the exchange between Chester, Larry, and Gerald that goes nicely from joking to menacing in a heartbeat, landing on exactly that kind of bared-teeth grin that sums up a typical prank - it’s funny on the surface, but entirely mean underneath, and more of that throughout would have developed the tension more successfully, tightening the screws more and more and more as the violence underneath became less and less hidden, but for a film with a narrative conceit that is supposed to have us questioning everything that’s going on, some of the big beats are really, really predictable, and behavior that at first seems like it’s because people are in on some larger joke turns out to just be poor writing. Chester is very much the antagonist, but if you’re going to make a film about someone who takes practical joking way too far, it makes better sense to have that character a constant fountain of laughs and bonhomie until the moment the façade cracks, until the laughter turns hysteric or gives way to screams, and that’s not the case here. Sometimes he’s joking, sometimes he’s not, but it’s only fitfully menacing, and when the turn comes, it feels more like a foregone conclusion than anything else.

This lack of a through-line extends to the design of the film as well. It’s lit throughout with the garish neon of the motel lounge (and contrasted nicely with the dated dinginess of the rooms), which makes sense for the film’s ostensible thesis - it reminds me of how The Loved Ones similarly used bright colors to communicate the bright, happy façade over the antagonist’s violence, and there that discordance really worked. Here it could work, but at the same time it’s also undermined by some puzzling choices for the musical score, which sound more appropriate to a comedy than to a horror film. The end result means the film is more easily read as a comic piece about this asshole Larry getting his wacky comeuppance (or uptight sad-sack Larry learning how to loosen up) in what could be a Twilight-Zone morality play than it is a horror film, at least until the last act, when shit gets really dark, and then it just feels confusing, like we’ve been watching two different movies. At one point, a drug-fueled interlude even adds a Looney Toons vibe to it, and it’s too silly to take it seriously, but the context is just nasty enough that you sort of have to. It muddles the experience considerably. Like, I think I see what they were going for, but it doesn’t land right, and it’s in the service of a pretty pointlessly unpleasant conclusion as well.

So we begin with a somewhat promising setup (albeit with a protagonist who is telegraphed as a punching bag early on), a muddled, inchoate middle that can’t develop the narrative gradually, and a final act that does bring some menace back into the picture, only to abandon it for a cut-rate approximation of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas-style drug hijinks that sort of come out of nowhere and land the ending of the film on a contrived, pointlessly ugly note. It starts off promising that nothing is as it seems, before showing us that everything is indeed exactly how it seems, and then tries to cheat its way out of that by making the protagonist an even bigger monster than the antagonist. It wastes a really interesting, neon-garish mise-en-scene, set in a tacky tiki-themed motel, on a story that doesn’t surprise as much as confuse and doesn’t frighten so much as appall, overlaying the final credits with screen captures from social media that make it seem like the filmmakers also tried to shoehorn in some moral about trolls and online culture in general, but none of it feels earned. Maybe it’s ironic, but a horror film about pranks needs to commit to that premise consistently - you could even say sincerely - to work, and this film doesn’t commit, and doesn’t work as a result.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Evidence: Well, That Happened

(Just as a heads-up, this one’s going to get a little spoilery.)

Well, just when I think I should maybe be a little more generous in my assessment of found-footage films, after last week’s exemplary Gonjiam, along comes something that reminds me of just how crummy they can be. Evidence was recommended to me by a friend who described it as “not very good, but it really gets batshit as it goes along.” I appreciated the caveat going in, and my friend wasn’t wrong. This is a film that starts off in conventional territory and, as it goes along, just piles more and more and more shit on until the end is sort of a barrage of images, though the cumulative effect is more annoying than anything else. Like, if we were to talk about film in terms of having a cinematic “voice,” this movie would be a lot of incoherent yelling. I mean, it kind of is, literally, but also metaphorically.

This is the story of two couples - Ryan and Abi, and Brett and Ashley. Ryan fancies himself a filmmaker, and he plans on making a “documentary” out of an upcoming camping trip the four of them are taking. It’s not entirely clear what kind of documentary Ryan intends to make, since his entire thesis seems to be “let’s watch Brett - who hates camping - as he suffers through a weekend of camping.” You sort of get the idea that Ryan thinks owning a camcorder makes him a filmmaker, the same way that owning a notebook makes you a poet. Ryan and Brett are friends, but they have that sort of low-key antagonistic fratboy kind of friendship that seems to be mostly based on ball-busting. They’re not loathsome, at least not to start, just your garden-variety white male assholes. Abi and Ashley’s distinguishing traits are that Ashley likes musicals, and Abi is blonde.

So these are our protagonists, and they head off into the woods in an RV (which they won’t be sleeping in, but Ryan needs it to…charge his camera’s battery packs? No, it didn’t make sense to me either) for a weekend of reluctant outdoorsmanship, drinking, and filming not much of anything interesting. This is the kind of film it is: Ryan talks Abi and Ashley into making out for the camera, and they do so contingent on Ryan and Brett doing the same. We see Abi and Ashley’s kiss in lingering detail, but the camera cuts off before we can see Ryan and Brett kiss. There’s even some gratuitous, like entirely gratuitous, T&A right up front. Like other found-footage films, everyone uses their real first names for verisimilitude, and certainly the cinematic choices made by Ryan the film’s writer echo those made by the character of Ryan that he plays in the film. I have to assume they are - being actors and all - playing characters, but moments like that give me pause.

But anyway, drinking and Brett being grumpy and Ryan being a dick and Abi and Ashley sort of put up with all of it, and then comes the strange, misshapen figure they spot in a ravine.

And the feral shrieks from the deep woods, late into the night.

So yes, we have four campers being menaced by mysterious creatures in the woods around them. That’s not the totality of the film, but it does describe the most coherent part. The best way I can describe this film is perfunctory - it hits story beats because it needs or is expected to, but doesn’t really develop or contextualize them. This is one of those movies where stuff just happens, and keeps happening. Ryan takes Brett, Ashley, and Abi camping, even though Brett hates the idea of camping. Why? Because he wants to make a documentary. Why? Well, then otherwise, the filmmakers seem to think, you wouldn’t have any reason for there to be a camera out in the middle of the woods. It’s narratively flimsy. Why did they bring an RV? The RV is there so they can get trapped in it during a siege sequence. This is one of those movies where everything happens because the movie needs it to happen, not as a consequence of people’s behavior or the environment, and there’s very little attempt to make any of it plausible. 

The first half isn’t all that eventful - Brett gets annoyed at Ryan repeatedly, Abi and Ashley get annoyed at Ryan, Ryan is annoying, and then things start prowling around in the woods, at which point Ryan instantly morphs out of absolutely nowhere into someone maniacally obsessed with filming everything, against all sense or reason, regardless of his friends’ well-being or safety. This film has a serious, serious problem with finding reasons for people to keep filming. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem for the filmmakers, since they solve it with Ryan (and subsequent characters) just sort of grabbing the camera and filming, whether it makes sense in the moment or not. This film reaches the point where its characters should say “fuck filming any of this, let’s get out of here” and blows by it without even slowing down. Doesn’t even attempt to give a reason.

But, to be fair to it, it does a pretty good job of using its limited resources (this is not a film with a large budget) pretty effectively. We don’t really ever get a good look at the creatures stalking the protagonists, and that’s good because we see just enough to know that a closer look would reveal them as cheap gorilla costumes. The illusion isn’t broken, but you never forget that they’re, like, an inch away from that point at all times. We get glimpses of people who’ve been gutted and torn apart, but just glimpses, and it’s effective, but again, you also sort of know that lingering shots would have betrayed the cheapness of the practical effects. A lot of the edits in this film revolve around someone turning the camera off or pointing it away from the action when the action would be too expensive to show, and I think that’s okay - it’s realistic that average people wouldn’t hold a shot on something terrible happening, and the awkwardness and choppiness of the camerawork throughout feels appropriate. 

So the filmmakers evinced some awareness of how to use what they had to work with, at least on that level. But I wonder why they didn’t pick a better premise - why not just have them camping and have someone bring a camera along? Why did it have to be a documentary? Why does Ryan go from zero to obsessed? It’s like the filmmakers saw other found-footage films and decided there were certain things they had to do, whether they made sense or not. A sketchy-looking guy with a gun comes by the campsite, looking for his dog, gets kind of tense with Ryan, and then leaves. Why? No reason, apparently. It never comes up again. For some reason, movies about people camping really like the “stranger drops by the campsite and acts menacing” thing. Again, it’s not part of a larger, organic story, just one more thing that feels like the filmmakers included it because that’s what you do in movies like this.

But then, unsatisfied with just making a film about a group of campers hunted by mysterious creatures, the second half of the film shifts focus as Abi and Ashley stumble on what is meant to be some kind of secret research facility (but is clearly just a horse farm), and the rest of the film morphs into one long sustained bout of running and yelling and bleeding as all hell breaks loose at this “facility”, and somehow the camera keeps rolling through all of it. The tension ramps up considerably at this point, driven mostly by all of the running and yelling, but whatever semblance of believability it has goes right out the window. Once military special ops types get involved, the dialogue goes from nothing special but believable to cringingly bad (to quote: “die, die, die!”) and everything sort of goes into a blender as our remaining protagonists run through one building and hallway after another as more of the creatures, and then rabid-seeming human beings acting like “fast” zombies join the party. It’s all clearly done entirely on the cheap, with realistically shaky camerawork covering the majority of sins, but it all feels pointless. We don’t have any investment in these people, there’s no tension and release, everything kind of goes by in a blur of blood and snarling faces and “Alpha team, move out!” style jargon, without any sense of revelation or discovery. It’s just a wall of images flung at us, a lot of running and yelling and more running and more yelling. And that’s…sort of it. It kind of reminds me of a store-brand take on Cloverfield, similar beats but without any attention to the characters and a tiny fraction of the budget.

Honestly, I sort of expected it to get weirder. Maybe it’s because I’ve put films like Possession and Mandy into my eyeballs lately, and I’m not sure what specifically I expected. Maybe some fourth-wall breaking, or time travel, The tagline is “but did it happen?” and that made me think that at some point this was going to be revealed as all being a film in progress, only for the threat to be terribly real or something. I dunno, but “they were camping near a top-secret research facility that’s just experienced an outbreak” doesn’t exactly strain the imagination. It does read like the kind of thing someone like Ryan would think strains the imagination, though.

There was potential here: Get rid of the documentary angle, make the threat something a little more minimal - ghostly people, perhaps, something visually striking in the dark without being too expensive to set up, and focus the footage more on a mix of the innocuous and the unsettling, shifting the proportions as the film moves on, and then pick one set of interiors (preferably not a horse farm, maybe even just a clearing somewhere that can be set-dressed to look like the site of a ritual) to source as the center of the threat, and save the majority of your effects budget for one really freaky-looking thing to be the big reveal. You could do something pretty damn good with that. But that’s not what they did. This film reads like it was made by someone very much like Ryan, who probably wrote it by saying “you know what else would be cool? If there were zombies too!” Oh wait, that’s right - the guy who played Ryan wrote the film. It all makes so much more sense now.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Gonjiam: Facing The Unknown

I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my tastes in scary movies. I definitely have a type, and I definitely have things I tend to avoid. But every now and then something will surprise me. And I’m starting to think that maybe I need to revise my stance on found-footage horror films shot in abandoned hospitals. Sure, a lot of found-footage films are hackneyed trash, and too many horror films set in abandoned hospitals seem to think that the setting should do all of the heavy lifting. But I took a chance on Grave Encounters, and it was a pleasant surprise, demonstrating to me the value of keeping my mind open. 

And I’m glad I did, because it lead me to take a chance on Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, which is another found-footage film shot in an abandoned hospital (well, sort of - more on that in a bit). And like Grave Encounters, it’s actually pretty good. It does fall victim to a couple of found-footage clichés, and I get the feeling the translation of the dialogue isn’t as good as it could be, but once it picks up steam it’s easy to look past these shortcomings. It’s a well-paced haunted-house story that doesn’t get in its own way and tightens the screws to striking effect.

The film starts off with a phone-camera prologue of two kids trying to open a locked door in the hospital and mysteriously disappearing, but this is really just to set up our protagonists, who run a YouTube channel called Horror Time. It’s sort of a paranormal investigation channel, run by Ha-Joon, and his partners, dependable Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook, and bumbling, hapless Je-Yoon. They’re planning an expedition of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital (which is a real place, and supposedly one of the most haunted sites in Korea, though the film wasn’t actually shot there. The government wouldn’t give them access, so they subbed in an abandoned high school in a different town). Even better, they’re going to livestream it - a first for their channel. Ha-Joon recruits three young women to come along - Ji-Hyun will do some additional camera and tech work, Charlotte’s visiting from the U.S. with her dance crew (and brags about having visited three other sites on CNN’s list of freakiest places in the world, which is an actual thing) and Ah-Yeon is a shy, naïve nursing student to whom Je-Yoon takes an almost instant dislike for reasons that are never really made clear. The six of them, then, dub themselves the Horror Time Terror Squad, and it’s just as corny as it sounds.

The whole film starts off a little corny, really, with the six of them trading stories about all of the stuff that supposedly happened at the hospital, and it’s all kind of over the top. Supposedly all kinds of horrible torture and strange experiments happened there, it might have been built on a secret wartime grave to hide its existence, and supposedly the hospital director hung herself in the shower room. Just absolutely stock “hospital with a dark past” stuff, though it’s hard to tell how much of it is diegetically true and how much is the crew hyping it up for the people they’ve brought in and for the sake of clicks. They lay out a plan to sneak into the hospital grounds under the cover of night, and the Horror Time Terror Squad are nothing if not a very modern take on the found-footage protagonist. Their exploration will be livestreamed (or so they say) via YouTube, and everyone will have GoPro cameras strapped to them, which allow them to capture both their point of view and their own faces. This is in addition to the various surveillance cameras that Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook will have installed in different hot spots around the hospital, in an initial foray before they all head in together. Ha-Joon will then stay behind at base camp, monitoring their viewership…and switching from feed to feed in real time, which enables him to add in some post-production freeze-frames and replays, and gives Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook, unbeknownst to the others, time to set up some fake scares in order to spice up the proceedings.

This is something I’ve noticed in a lot of the found-footage stuff I have ended up watching for this thing - to one degree or another, they deal with the divide between reality and artifice. Butterfly Kisses is probably the most obvious about it (to its detriment), but Hell House LLC is about a group of people who devise haunted houses for a living, and Grave Encounters is about a similar paranormal investigation show, whose creators are equally comfortable with fabricating scares. The less said about The Houses October Built, the better, because it was garbage. But in each case, you have a group of people who are in the process of fabricating an experience (with some degree of assumption that of course the supernatural isn’t real) only to have it get away from them.

And boy howdy, does it ever get away from the Horror Time Terror Squad.

The first half of the film is largely table-setting - getting everyone together, some wacky hijinks as they travel to the hospital, setting up cameras around the hospital, stuff like that. But once it gets rolling, the back half is pretty intense throughout - this film does a good job of slowly and gradually ramping things up, starting with little things that seem strange or off (and are faked, for all we know), and escalating and escalating until the last fourth of the film is just non-stop tension. It takes a little while to get there, but I think it’s to the good. When the other “we didn’t plan this part” shoe drops, the film just goes for it. And to its credit, the setting does do a lot of work in terms of establishing a mood. It’s an honest-to-goodness urban ruin, grimy and shitty and full of wreckage, no lighting except what the crew has, and so even before anything goes amiss, there’ a lot of people cutting just the thinnest slice out of the darkness that surrounds and threatens to overwhelm them. We can’t see what’s waiting for them in the dark, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s just…right…there.

On paper, the story isn’t anything especially new - a bunch of teens go into a haunted building and try to gin up some scares for publicity and end up getting far more than they bargained for - but a couple of things set this film apart from its nearest found-footage cousins. First, the use of GoPros for the majority of the footage gives the film an even more claustrophobic feel than the usual limited perspective of found-footage films. We spend a lot of time in close-up on people’s faces under different conditions, and the combination of focus on their facial expressions and inability to see what’s going on around them lends everything a real immediacy. You don’t really realize just how intense it is to just look at someone’s face in close-up for extended lengths of time until you have to - it’s almost like someone decided to make a film that was approximately 65% Heather’s tearful confession scene from The Blair Witch Project, one of the most iconic sequences in modern horror film. And when shit really pops off, the sudden shifts from one close-up to another and the lack of visual information beyond their immediate personal space makes for some of the most effective moments in the film. When something is present in the room with them, you often don’t know until it’s much too late, and it’s startling without it being a cheap jump scare. It really is just evil shit materializing from out of the darkness, and it works.

Second, the filmmakers do a good job of not overexplaining or mythologizing. This film’s nearest comparison is probably Grave Encounters, in terms of not just the premise and location, but even some of the routes it takes through the narrative. I don’t think one plagiarizes the other, I just think that if you’re telling a story about a haunted psychiatric hospital, there are some places the story will tend to naturally go. But Grave Encounters, as solid as it was, had as one of its biggest weaknesses the tendency to explain too much, to overmythologize, and this film doesn’t. It alludes to some stuff at the beginning, and establishes a few setpieces along the way, but doesn’t worry overmuch about making it all make sense, because it wouldn't make sense. Weird, horrible shit happens to the people in this film, and neither they nor we are provided a neat and tidy history that explains why it’s happening. There’s no mythology, there’s no exposition, it’s just happening, and you won’t be alive much longer anyway. Its use of effects is also less artificial and more restrained than similar films (no ghosts with weirdly elongated face here), so the experience is less “this is a fancy digital effect” and more “oh shit.”

It’s also not afraid to take its time with a given scene. There are a couple of points where something bad happens, but instead of it being a sudden, sharp reveal and smash cut to something else, it draws it out, really lets the tension and the weirdness sink in, and I’ve been missing that in films like this. This film makes moving your hand far enough to turn a doorknob into an agonizingly long, life-or-death process, and it’s great. Finally, at no point did I really feel the artificiality of the found-footage conceit. There’s a narrative reason for things like freeze-frames and replays (and even a tiny bit of music) since Ha-Joon is, contrary to the purported live nature of the expedition, managing and curating the feed on the fly. And by the end, there’s even some suggestion that we aren’t always seeing footage they captured, which isn’t explored as much as it could be, but it’s nicely chilling. The GoPros mean that we don’t really have to ask why someone’s still holding a camera while they’re running for their life, because the cameras are winched on - they’re with them at all times. It largely makes narrative sense, and so I didn’t really find myself being yanked out of the experience, as is so often the case for me with found-footage films.

There are some problems. It does run afoul of the “we have to keep filming” cliché to a certain degree- Ha-Joon is obviously invested in capturing a large audience, and a certain amount of denial in the face of the unexplainable is understandable, but he kind of goes from aspiring Internet celebrity to obsessed monomaniac a little too quickly for plausibility, and there are some points in the film where it’s too dark or the camerawork too shaky (or both) for us to really get a handle on what’s supposed to be scaring us at points. It’s sort of ironic, but the commitment to verisimilitude (of course the camerawork and lighting won’t be perfect) sometimes detracts a little from the overall effect. And as I said up front, the translation to English isn’t always great, and so some of the characters may end up being painted with a broader brush than would otherwise be the case. But none of these were major distractions for me. Once things start to escalate, it’s a pretty damn scary ride to the finish, and I really really hope nobody ever makes a sequel to it.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

The Other Lamb: Don’t Tell By Showing

 One of the clumsiest things I think a film can do is rely on exposition to give the audience information, rather than having that information revealed naturally through character action. If you want to establish that two people have a difficult relationship, convey that through their body language, how they say things, and what goes unsaid. Don’t open their dialogue with “well, you know we have a difficult relationship” apropos of nothing. Nobody talks like that. It’s stagey, artificial. This is where the phrase “show, don’t tell” comes from. It’s conventional wisdom that it’s better to build character through action and feeling than just telling us stuff outright. And I tend to agree.

But on that score, The Other Lamb is a really weird beast. It’s a really stylish film that manages to be both oblique, relying a lot on showing over telling, but also obvious in ways that telling usually is. 

We open on two young women - Selah and Tamar - sitting in front of a waterfall. They’re wearing matching blue dresses, their hair in identical braids. Selah tries to scare Tamar, and they laugh. When they return home, it’s to a small encampment of trailers and cabins in the woods. The community keeps waterfowl - geese or ducks - and sheep. They build fires, dye their own clothes. The two young women gather with the rest of the community for dinner. It’s maybe nine or ten women, ranging from middle age to little girls, and one man, whom they call “The Shepherd.” He refers to them as his “flock,” as his “wives” and “daughters.” 

They thank him for “his grace.” They wait for his permission to eat. 

Daughters wear blue, wives wear red.

This film is Selah’s story. Her mother was part of “the flock,” and apparently died giving birth to Selah. Selah was born into this life, among the wives and daughters, watched over by The Shepherd, he and he alone who has given them grace. He who brings women, “broken and searching,” into the fold and gives them shelter. He who chooses wives from among the daughters. And Selah’s getting to that age where she’s starting to question the ways of the flock. The newest wife, Eloise, is Selah’s age and just joined the flock. Why was she chosen over Selah? Why are some wives sequestered from the flock in a tiny windowless cabin, fed on leftover scraps? She’s feeling a complicated mix of uncertainty and inchoate resentment. This is all she’s ever known, but it’s starting to make less sense.

And that’s…well, that’s kind of the movie, right there. The IMDB blurb is “A girl born into an all-female cult led by a man in their compound begins to question his teachings and her own reality.” And…yeah. That’s it. This film does exactly what it says on the tin, and that’s sort of the problem - that’s really all there is to it, and there aren’t really any surprises. Not that I wanted or expected a Shyamalan-esque “twist” or anything, but it also doesn’t really have a lot of depth to it. It’s not a bad story to tell, but almost everything plays out in the most obvious way possible, at least in terms of what’s happening and why it’s happening. The strange tension I experienced when I watched this film was between the triteness of the story and the manner in which it’s told.

To its credit, the film mostly stays away from straight exposition. Much of the story is told using discrete images, alternating between the action in the present day and more expressionistic inserts that communicate Selah’s internal emotional state without being tethered in reality. Which is certainly fine and can be an effective narrative tool, but the imagery feels obvious to the point of cliché - of course they keep sheep, because sheep symbolize unquestioning followers, routinely slaughtered as a matter of utility. Of course Selah imagines herself screaming silently, because that’s how you know someone’s real feelings are being suppressed. Of course Selah imagines herself a typical teenager in a station wagon, because that’s how you know she’s wondering what her life would be like outside of this cult. And of course the Shepherd is the shepherd and refers to his followers as his flock, because they’re sheep - GET IT? 

Symbolic imagery works by using images that directly evoke emotion, they don’t have to be literal. Here a lot of it is just one step away from literal. Like, if Selah had just imagined herself walking away from the flock, that wouldn’t be out of place here. And few of the characters have much of an inner life, but it doesn’t seem like it’s because they’re denied one by The Shepherd, they just…kind of exist to the extent they need to to tell the story. Selah asks one of the shunned wives why she doesn’t just leave the flock if she feels so unhappy, and all the shunned wife can say in return is “maybe…I am…afraid.” Well, NO SHIT. That’s all we get. That’s our character development. A woman who has spent the better part of her life in an abusive cult doesn’t want to leave because she’s afraid. That’s a fleeting glimpse into the obvious. The specifics of the cult aren’t anything especially nuanced or insightful either - just lots of throwing around ideas of “impurity” and “grace” and “rebirth,” stock ideas you can find in any story about any cult based on Christianity. The Shepherd himself isn’t really developed beyond “manipulative dude who likes having a bunch of women to use as he sees fit.” There’s not much depth to the dynamic between him and his followers in either direction - no real sense of what brought these women to him (other than the offhand description of them being “broken and searching” toward the beginning) or what about him keeps them there. 

It also doesn’t help that the acting tends toward wooden - no, that’s not fair. I don’t think it’s the acting per se so much as the dialogue, which is mannered to the point that it feels like outtakes from The VVitch, even though this takes place in the modern day (broadly defined, it could be anytime between the 90s and now from the couple of glimpses of cars that we get). Selah is pretty well-portrayed, at least at the outset, as someone whose feelings are in conflict - this is the only life she’s ever known, and there are things she hates and resents about it even though she can’t put words to it, and that’s pretty well-conveyed. The Shepherd isn’t overplayed, and as the film goes on you can see the layers of paternalistic benevolence eroding to expose the capricious cruelty and need for total control underneath, and there are some bits here and there where the need and desperation for approval that his followers feel are communicated vividly, but the dialogue is on some “we must not have these thoughts, for they are forbidden” and “we are fasting because we are impure” shit like you’d get from, I dunno, a Criminal Minds episode about exactly this kind of cult. Like, I’ve watched my share of documentaries about people in cults, and people in cults only talk like this on television or in movies. It’s cartoonish, and deeply at odds with evident filmmaking skill in other areas.

Because yeah, on a technical level, this is a really well-made film. It’s gorgeously composed - contrasting the color of the women’s dresses against largely drab forests and heaths, the way a single figure or person will be placed in medium to close shots at the center of the frame most of the time to draw our attention, then pitting that kind of close composition against broad rural vistas, but doesn’t do a lot with that visual skill. It’s paced incredibly slowly - it’s only a little over 90 minutes but feels at least half again that, and that can work if it builds up to something, but slow burns work because there’s a burn at all, and this film is so detached for most of its running time that by the time there is some sort of escalation or revelation or payoff, the impact is largely dulled by how long it took to get there and how little happened along the way. There’s a difference between telling a story and revealing things through small gestures that signify something larger and just having everything be small gestures. 

This isn’t as much a horror film as a dark character study, but I think for that to work, you need a couple of things that aren’t really in sufficient supply here - first, you need the darkness to be palpable. You need an atmosphere that feels oppressive, you need to feel the grip the Shepherd has on his “flock,” and this film occasionally falls prey to telling over showing on that front when it moves away from Selah’s direct experience, and the slow pacing and emotional remoteness dull that feeling of oppressiveness. It’s not totally absent, and certainly the opening of the film does a really good job of introducing us to this world and these people in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable without being overly expository, but it doesn’t hold onto that as the film goes on. 

Second, you need to have an idea of the character of whom this is a study. If this is a story about Selah coming to question her upbringing and trying to break free of it, then I think the film would be better served by spending more time with Selah as she actually is and letting that conflict through more and more gradually, rather than leaning on symbolic cutaways to tell us “Selah is having doubts” and “Selah is very angry.” It’s employed more judiciously than, say, nightmare sequences in the average horror film, but it still takes us away from her as a person and makes it all more of an abstraction, which a lot of the women in this film are already close to being. Which is itself a legitimate choice for this kind of story, insofar as the “wives” and “daughters” are functionally interchangeable to the Shepherd, but it also makes it harder for us to get invested, and as a film largely absent of the kind of spectacle you get in horror films, you need something to invest your audience. The result is lovely to look at, but lacks nuance or fresh insight. It shows us a lot, but none of it tells us anything new.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

The Ghoul: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

There’s a particular type of psychological horror film that revolves around issues of identity. It’s an especially abstract type of horror, because it’s less about threats to the body and more about threats to our sense of self, and films of this type tend to focus on how precarious and constructed our sense of self really is, as well as how precarious our sense of the world around us is, how fickle perception can be. Films like this are thematic neighbors to crime films about cops who spend so long in deep cover that their sense of who they really are starts to disintegrate. And so today we have The Ghoul, which is a smart, moody intersection of both types of films.

We open with some shots of someone driving, watching road signs for the London M1 pass overhead, which cuts to two police officers, Chris and Jim, investigating the site of a particularly puzzling double murder. A couple were shot in their home, but as near as the forensics can suggest, it appears that even though both of them were shot multiple times in the chest and face, it took some time before they fell and bled out. In other words, both people were shot by a single intruder, and just kept walking. After being hit once, twice, three times, they just kept walking forward, and eventually the intruder fled. It’s not easy to stay upright after getting shot multiple times.

In the course of the investigation, Chris and Jim run across the property manager - a man named Coulson - who only started managing the building shortly after the murder. Something about this seems suspicious to them, and so they toss his apartment looking for clues. It’s the home of someone who seems really unbalanced, with a wall covered with notes and cryptic drawings, names and news articles and random scribblings. Coulson is seeing a psychotherapist named Helen Fisher, and Chris gets the idea - aided and abetted by his forensic psychologist friend Kathleen - to pose as a patient seeking treatment from Fisher to get access to her notes about Coulson’s sessions. If this seems howlingly unethical, if not straight-up illegal (it certainly would be in the U.S. and I can’t imagine the U.K. is much different in this regard), well, it is. Nevertheless, Chris puts together a history suggesting dysthymia and makes an appointment.

He tells Helen that his name is Chris, and that Jim is a friend who does beverage sales, and Kathleen is a girl he fancied in college but never dated. 

To cope with his depression, Chris likes to fantasize that he’s a police officer in deep cover.

The central conflict here would seem to be who Chris really is - is he really a cop who’s gone so far undercover that he’s forgetting who he really is, or is he really a deeply depressed, fragile man who fantasizes that he’s a cop in order to feel better about his life? And that runs the risk of being really clichéd, but it’s not played as obviously as that story often is. Typically in a story like this, there’s a reveal, a gotcha moment where we find out that we thought he was one of these thing all along, but was actually the other. But this film really doesn’t tip its hand much at all, even at the climax it’s not crystal clear who the “real” Chris is, but the further he (and we) go down the rabbit hole, the less it seems to matter. Things start to get very weird for Chris as Fisher introduces him to another therapist, one who eschews traditional therapeutic techniques for ones involving magic and ritual. And suddenly those scribblings on Coulson’s wall start to make a kind of sense. 

This film keeps a lot of balls in the air - who Chris really is, who the other people in his life really are, what’s reality and what’s fantasy, whose viewpoint can be trusted and whose cannot - and it manages it successfully because it treats all of the possibilities with a fair amount of equanimity. It’s isn’t really clear what is delusion and what isn’t. Part of how it accomplishes this is by telling the story in discrete scenes and exchanges broken up by blurry, hazy, repeated motifs, like we’re witnessing fitful lucidity, and so there’s no real emphasis on one narrative over the other for most of its running time. Issues of mental health, of depression and delusion, are treated realistically - it’s not really a violent film at all, but watching the depressed version of Chris can be really uncomfortable because his pain is so plainly evident, and it’s hard to accept that the confident police detective version of Chris might be a fantasy. But because we see the detective version of Chris and the depressed version of Chris with equal weight, without any tricky “clues” that tell us which world is real and which is delusion, the ambiguity is as disorienting as it must be to live his lives. And right alongside this narrative of uncertain, shaky identity, there’s something going on involving these two therapists, and there’s the murder from the beginning of the film. Whoever Chris really is or is not, something happened to those two people.

In addition to avoiding cliché and easy answers, this film works because it’s made with skill at every level. The acting is consistently strong and played to a human scale, largely devoid of histrionics. These are real people, with real human flaws and failings. The editing is elliptical, terse exchanges broken up by lots of shots of London at night, the London of seedy flats and graffiti-scrawled back alleys, lit fitfully by streetlamps, often blurred into washes of color. Music is largely minimal and somber, with a couple of exceptions that feel claustrophobic instead. When the action moves out into the countryside, it feels freeing, a literal and metaphorical breath of fresh air. It feels of a piece with some other English films I’ve written about here - The Canal, Possum, and Kill List, with whom it shares some personnel and stylistic DNA. It’s not as relentlessly grim as Possum or as horrifying as The Canal, in a lot of ways it reminds me of Kill List - a man way out of his depth, only realizing the extent of it when it’s far too late.

Whoever that man might be. To its credit, the film won’t tell us one way or the other throughout. There’s no reversal or reveal here, we’re told everything up front, and so the uncertainty lies with the audience, with what we decide is most likely to be true or not. Shots that at first seem like they’re intended to convey mood or atmosphere help bring things together in the final act, and offhand comments throughout take on greater significance. Nobody is who they seem to be, in ways both small and terrifyingly large - the people we’re most inclined to dismiss may very well be right, and smiling faces can hide a lot. As Sigmund Freud was reputed to have said, even the paranoid has his enemies.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon