Profondo Rosso: What Did I Just See?

For as long as I’ve been writing this thing (holy shit it’s been ten years), there are still gaps in my horror film education, and every now and then I try to fill those gaps as best as I can. A couple of weeks back I noted that even though I could tell A Classic Horror Story drew from a tradition of Italian horror, I hadn’t actually seen many examples of the style. So, with Italian horror on my mind, I decided to take a look at Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), directed by genre mainstay Dario Argento, whose Suspiria I covered here some time back.

Let me tell you, this film was a ride, for reasons both good and bad, equal parts fascinating, strange, tiresome, and frustrating.

The film opens on the silhouette of someone stabbing someone else to death, overlaid with a child singing, so you know we’re in for the weird shit. We cut from this to a talk being given by a psychic about her abilities, interrupted by her near-hysteric reaction that someone in the audience has killed and will kill again. We cut from that to the psychic in her apartment, finishing a phone call, only to be stabbed to death by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves.

Meanwhile, jazz pianist Marcus Daly and his friend Carlo are having a drunken, spirited discussion about their approaches to music as they stumble toward Marcus’ apartment building. where it just so happens the psychic is his upstairs neighbor. They get there just in time to see her get murdered and pushed out the window onto the pavement.

What follows is - well, loosely - Marcus, along with reporter Gianna Brezzi, trying to solve this strange murder, only to find every lead they chase ending in another murder. This film is best described as jarring. It’s not as visually riotous as Suspiria, but the soundtrack is heavily dominated by the kind of rock music you might associate more with 70s cop shows than horror films, all keyboards and percussion and guitar. Sometimes it undermines the tension of the scene, but then others it lends a real strangeness that gets under your skin. There’s just something so odd about chase-scene music applied to someone creeping through an apartment that your brain doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

This extends to the editing and direction as well. Transitions between scenes are abrupt, sometimes mid-conversation, and even the most straightforward scenes are punctuated with close-ups on otherwise innocuous things like running faucets, squawking birds, open doorways, and random strangers in the street, rapidly cutting back and forth in a way that gives those scenes a real sense of anxiety. If that’s not enough, the action is periodically interrupted by close-ups on baby dolls and lingering, almost fetishistic shots of the black leather gloves worn by the killer. No context is provided for these interludes, they just sort of happen. And sometimes it’s almost played for comedy, as in a phone exchange made difficult by a noisy cafe and uncomfortably close espresso machine.

A lot of this film is outside of cinematic convention, and I think that both helps and harms it. On the one hand, the relentless strangeness and tonal whiplash makes it an uneasy watch, simply because you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. It’s one of those films where it feels like all bets are off. But on the other, it’s extremely hard to follow (and there’s a reason for that, more on that in a bit) and individual scenes really seem to take place in a vacuum, causally disconnected from what came before or what comes after, It plays at times less like a single narrative and more like a series of loosely related vignettes. It was also made in 1975, and its takes on gender and sexual orientation are very much of that time period, which is to say they’re pretty gross by modern standards. The sexism isn’t great, but it’s more eye-rolling than anything else, but the homophobia is pretty unpleasant in depiction and how it plays into the narrative. Sensitivities to this sort of thing vary, and I’m usually pretty able to look past stuff based on cultural context, but this left a bad taste in my mouth.

All of that said, I’m not sure all of the film’s problems were its fault. The sexism and homophobia, sure, but the version I watched (one I’d…ahem….obtained…some time ago) was clearly a transfer from VHS (detectable in the tracking errors that popped up toward the end of the film), and so it was pretty murky and fuzzy, which didn’t help matters. Also, after doing a little research on IMDB, I was able to determine that it was a heavily edited version released in the U.S., with about 20 minutes of its run time excised. This apparently took out a lot of graphic violence (some of the cuts being obvious in the print I saw) along with a couple of subplots, and what appeared to be most of the actual interaction between Marcus and Gianna. Truth be told, the editing on the version I saw seemed like such a hack job that I can only imagine that at least some of the disorienting abruptness wasn’t intentional. Still, the film’s basic vision shines through, and it’s a deeply weird one. It doesn’t look like the unedited version is available on streaming services, and I’m not sure I liked it enough to purchase a Blu-Ray of it, but this one seems like it’s going to need some kind of revisit at some point.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

How I Would Have Done It: The Dead Center

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

I haven’t done one of these in quite awhile, and though I have a number of films tagged as potential candidates for this kind of revisit, I think The Dead Center really moved me to do another one because it got so close to being really really good, and the areas that I think held it back were so clearly defined to me that I basically wrote up the notes for this post at the same time I wrote up my original look at the film. It has a lot to recommend it - believable, relatable characters, a sense of dread that doesn’t rely on flashy or expensive effects that would threaten to distance us from the story, and confident, understated cinematography and scoring. In a lot of ways it exemplifies a lot of what I see as virtues in low-budget indie horror. But what this means is that the places where I feel it falls down stick out even more.

I even discussed these shortcomings to a certain degree in the original post, but I don’t like spoiling movies when I write about them, at least when I think they’re really good and I hope that people are going to check them out. If I think they suck, I’m much more likely just to get into it, but I had to be pretty oblique about a couple of things in particular, and so here I can get into more specifics. Because here it really does come down to some very specific choices that I think would improve the movie considerably, without really changing things all that drastically. Needless to say, I’m going to spoil some important stuff, and if you’re at all interested in the movie, I’d recommend watching it before clicking through, also because I’m going to be talking about the movie assuming a basic familiarity with the plot.

A Classic Horror Story: Avoiding The Obvious “Generic Title” Joke

Self-reflexivity in horror movies, in my opinion, usually doesn’t land well. If you’re trying to scare people, reminding them that this is all just a movie is going to more often than not foster the kind of distance that discourages engagement with the film. If you’re going to go that route, you probably need to make sure you play it as straight and serious (or balls-to-the-wall weird) as you can to get people to forget that fact. The Cabin In The Woods gets lumped in with horror movies, but it’s so distanced and so self-reflexive that I think it’s better described as a movie about horror movies, and it’s constantly reminding the audience that it’s smarter than the material, and by extension the audience is smarter than the material, so it’s not really scary. It’s an examination of genre, not an example or expression of it.

So when you title your film A Classic Horror Story, this is exactly the sort of thing that comes to mind for me. It’s one of those films that I think is better appreciated as a cinematic exercise than really experienced or engaged with, and on top of that, it’s kind of a mixed bag. I see what it’s trying to do, but it doesn’t quite get there.

It opens strong, on the interior of some kind of farmhouse. There’s a young woman, smeared with blood and shackled to an equally bloodstained table. Hooded figures enter, one carrying a huge mallet. Cut to someone staring through a hole in the wall as the hammer comes down off-screen. Whatever’s going on here, it isn’t good.

Cut to the title, and an RV driving down a country road in southern Italy. There are five people inside, and it seems that they’re strangers who are carpooling out into the country for various reasons. There’s Fabrizio, the host and driver. He’s a film student who’s making a travel vlog, so he interviews everyone else along for the ride. There’s Mark, an obnoxious Englishman, and Sofia, his Russian girlfriend. There’s Elisa, who has some kind of initially unspecified health condition and an overbearing mother who pesters her about an upcoming medical procedure over the phone, and then there’s Riccardo, a doctor who seems to be in the middle of a failing marriage. Elisa’s on vacation, Mark and Sofia are headed to a wedding, and Riccardo is evasive. There’s some light getting-to-know-you stuff, the day turns to night, and Mark insists on taking the wheel because they’re not getting where he needs to go fast enough for his liking, and because he’s had a couple of beers. Sure enough, Mark nods off at the wheel and nearly hits an animal in the middle of the road. Fabrizio grabs the wheel and swerves at the last minute, sending the RV careening into a tree. Smash to black.

When they wake up the next morning, they’re nowhere near the road. They’re in a field, and Mark’s leg was badly broken in the crash. Riccardo splints it up, but Mark is going to need a hospital. So they head for a nearby building. What looks like, well, some kind of farmhouse.

Closer investigation reveals some suitably red flags - yes, it’s the farmhouse from the opening, festooned with animal heads and both paintings and photographs of people in creepy masks. There’s some kind of shrine out back, decorated with freshly severed pig’s heads, and Fabrizio identifies it as a shrine to a local legend about three knightly brothers from “another realm” who saved a village’s population from famine…at a terrible, eternal price. So our five protagonists are out in the woods, past the reception range of any cellphone towers, and night is starting to fall.

This film is not really a character study - you’ve got five people carpooling out into the southern Italian countryside, and none of them are much more than a single defining trait. They’re basically your typical motley crew of characters trapped together in the woods and rubbing each other the wrong way - the conflict starts pretty much immediately, not helped by Mark being an obnoxious prick, and it becomes clear quickly that the creepy farmhouse-turned-church is still very much in use.  If all of this sounds like stuff we’ve all seen before, well, let me just refer you to the film’s title. One thing I will give it is that it seems to be drawing primarily from a uniquely Italian horror tradition, from the kind of films made by directors like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Ruggero Deodato. My experience with Italian horror is very, very limited, but I’ve read enough synopses to see the connections. It’s not shot as a period piece, it’s very contemporary, but still feels connected with the tradition on which it’s drawing. There’s a lot of emphasis on vengeful spirits, cannibalism, quasi-medieval torture and graphic violence consistent with their work, though this film doesn’t linger so much in that last regard - most of it is presented either briefly, off-camera, or from a distance with a couple of suitably gruesome exceptions, and it isn’t a film afraid to highlight the suffering that the victims of this violence are going through.

This lends it some visceral (ha-ha) moments, but “travelers menaced by creepy backwoods folk” is hardly the most original conceit, and there aren’t too many big surprises for the majority of the film.. It’s well-shot, using fog-shrouded woods, shadowy interiors and stark, dramatic lighting to good effect, and though the protagonists are all archetypes, they don’t quite descent into caricature. There are some interesting, better-than-expected moments, some striking imagery and creative composition, but the best moments tend to exist in isolation from each other. The action plays out in pretty desultory ways - first they’re over here, and now they’re over there, with not a lot of narrative flow, so it doesn’t really build up tension or momentum for most of its runtime. The whole doesn’t really cohere until fairly late, which hurts it some - there are narrative reasons for this, but it doesn’t help engagement much. Even if it makes sense, if it means my attention’s going to flag, that’s a problem. The third act remedies a lot of this, while at the same time shifting tonally in a pretty big way, but…

…this is where it gets difficult to talk about this movie, because there ARE narrative reasons for its shortcomings, and there are some interesting things to say about the third act, but this is a film best gone into as blind as possible, so I’ll put the rest of this write-up under a spoiler block.

Last Shift: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Looks can be deceiving, never judge a book by its cover, etc. Trite, yes, but also true. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve passed up a film because the thumbnail art or blurb seemed too cliched or too obvious. And I’m probably missing out on some good sleeper hits because of that, but I run across enough mediocre, disappointing movies writing this thing as it is, if I can avoid another one I’m going to. It’s a gamble, so I sometimes rely on the opinions of a few people I know, and if they like something, whatever its initial impression, I’ll give it a chance.

I’ve flipped past Last Shift any number of times - generic Saw-ish artwork, a pentagram featured heavily, something about an “unspeakable evil.” Pretty generic as these things go. But it’s also one of those films that keep coming up when people whose opinion I trust talk about good, solid horror films, so I gave it a shot, and damned if it isn’t just that. It’s creepy and intense, very well paced, and a lot of why it works is the way it plays with appearances.

Officer Jessica Loren is a rookie police officer in Sanford, Florida. She’s following in her father’s footsteps, much to her mother’s dismay, and the film opens with her mother pleading to her over the phone not to go into work that night. Her father died in the line of duty, so you can understand why her mother is worried for her. But Jessica’s intent on living up to her father’s legacy, even if that means drawing the short straw and getting the unenviable detail of being the lone officer on the last overnight shift at Sanford’s old police station, in the process of being shuttered in favor of a bigger, fancier building across town. It’s just going to be her, an empty building, and an evidence room that now houses only evidence classified as biohazardous. A disposal team will be by sometime between 4 and 7am, she just needs to sit tight to let them in and to make sure the building stays secure. And at first, it’s just boredom, boredom, a vagrant who manages to break in, and more boredom.

Then the strange noises start. Things moving on their own. Doors opening and closing. And calls from a young woman who claims she’s being held captive. 

Except all 911 calls have already been routed to the new station.

This film does a lot of things right, and the first is the setting. The film takes place entirely inside an actual abandoned police station, and it helps a great deal, as location shooting often does. First, it feels like an actual police station instead of someone’s approximation. In a lot of ways, it’s just another disused office building, blandly institutional, with the occasional detail like holding cells and interrogation rooms, and the space is believable - it has an actual geography, it’s clear it isn’t a series of sets. Likewise, it feels authentically abandoned, emptied out but for some forgotten office furniture, a single phone, litter dotting rooms and hallways. There’s a very particular spookiness that you get in office buildings in the middle of the night - it’s a place that is normally full and busy, and now it’s empty and quiet, so any sound or thing out of place becomes very unsettling. It doesn’t take much to freak you out when you’re supposed to be alone in the building, and the first act especially gets a lot of mileage out of those little things that suggest that maybe Jessica isn’t alone after all. The tension starts from the opening minutes as Jessica encounters the duty sergeant that she’s relieving, an empty hallway and silence interrupted by a string of profanities. It’s something that serves the opening of the film well - stretches of silence interrupted by sudden, unexpected sounds. It’s minimal, but it keeps you on edge.

So that’s the next strength of this film - the pacing is spot-on, across the film and from moment-to-moment. It starts quietly spooky right off the bat and then steady, gradually escalates and increases the tension as the film goes on. There are a number of different things in play at first - odd noises, things moving by themselves, the mysterious caller, and as the film progresses and we learn more about what happened in this station maybe a year or so before, and with these revelations more and more gets added to the mix, taking things from subtle, minimal expressions of tension to something more explicit, raising the stakes. A lot of the escalation works because the filmmakers are extremely good at shot composition, camera angles and camera movement to build tension and pay it off. There are some moments that could be classified as jump scares, but they don’t hew to the conventional rhythms of jump scares so they’re surprisingly effective.

Like, as long as I’m talking about this in terms of rhythm, the thing that occurred to me while I was watching this was that the filmmakers were really good at playing around the beat - instead of hitting moments exactly where you’d expect them, they come up a little earlier, or a little later, or from a different angle than the audience has come to expect. This film is really good at dodging predictability in the moment-to-moment action, and it escalates things gradually over its runtime, so we start at low-key unsettling and end up with something relentless and nightmarish by the third act. It’s a constant tightening of the screws, gathering steam pretty much from the first scene, and thought it relies on fairly conventional horror film techniques, these techniques are employed inventively enough that you don’t really become complacent.

The cinematography makes really good use not just of camera angles and movement but also lighting - it’s an empty building in the middle of the night, so you’ve got fluorescent lighting in the hallways and then dark empty rooms in the doorways beyond, and the film does a lot with light and shadow, with the transition from light to shadow, what happens when you turn the lights on in dark rooms, and reveals in dark areas with stuttering, intermittent light sources. None of it is especially innovative but it’s executed really, really well - I almost want to say tastefully, but that’s not it - the filmmakers are really good about not using the same trick a whole bunch. They mix it up a lot, which helps maintain the tension because it’s tough to predict where the film’s going to go next in the moment-to-moment action. It’s not afraid to use different narrative techniques, employing flashbacks that sort of organically weave in and out of the story, getting the most of their single location.  The music is mostly tastefully minimal, with the very occasional sting here and there, but again, it works because it’s employed thoughtfully and not just slathered over every scene. 

Basically - and I think this is really important, and something that a lot of people who make horror films miss - this is a film that isn’t occupied with telling us when we should be scared, it just lets things play out and trusts that we’ll be paying sufficient attention to be scared by what we see, and it makes all the difference. The performances are serviceable, maybe a little on the stagy side in places, but not so much that it’s distracting, and the dialogue is kind of corny and affected in places, but again it’s rarely distracting. Though it’s clear this film didn’t have a very large budget, the filmmakers do a very good job for the most part at putting the money where it matters and coming up with striking imagery to really carry the important moments.

There are a couple of problems - there’s one bit of makeup work that doesn’t quite land as well as it could (though the camera’s not on it long enough to really make it a big problem) and there’s a big exposition dump at the beginning of the second act that feels really, really clumsy. To be fair, I’ve tried to think of ways it could have been handled better, and it’s tough to come up with a solution. Essentially we have to be clued in on a series of events that the protagonist already knows about (though the narrative sometimes wavers on things you’d think she would know but doesn’t) and I’m not sure if it’d land right if it were treated more obliquely. There’s going to have to be some suspension of disbelief around Jessica’s behavior - she doesn’t have a clearly described arc so much as she sort of wavers between behaving rationally and irrationally, though they do a good job of establishing reasons why she might not make the obvious choices, and supernatural fuckery puts paid to simple things like using phones or radios for communication or sometimes even making the rational choices.

None of this is remotely close to fatal to the movie though, because it has such strong momentum and verve that you just sort of get swept up in the nightmare. Some of the most effective moments in this film have to do with appearances, with what we see and how that will be suddenly reversed or subverted - you think you know what’s happening or about to happen, but you don’t, and that’s where a lot of the power of this film is, and I gotta say, that’s more than appropriate for a film I was willing to pass over because it looked like something more generic.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Perfume: The Scent Of A Woman

I talk a lot about “atmosphere” on this thing. Usually I’m talking about some kind of intersection of mood, tone, and aesthetic that evokes a particular feeling in the viewer. One of the interesting things about Perfume (subtitled The Story Of A Murderer), however, is the degree to which it’s about actual atmosphere, at least to start. It’s a striking and expansive film, but for a film so much concerned with atmosphere, it makes choices in the second act that threaten to undo what is a very strong start.

We open in 18th century France, and there’s a man shackled in irons in a prison cell. A mob outside is calling for blood and the authorities are trying to keep them from storming the prison. Finally, he is dragged to a balcony, where his sentence is read to the mob. He is to be hung upon a cross, his limbs broken with an iron bar, and then left to die. The mob seems satisfied with this, so we begin wondering who he is, and what he did to merit such a horrific end. 

The man is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born some years before to a poor fishmonger in Paris. 18th-century Paris, like many large cities at the time, stank. It stank of livestock and shit and effluent and rot and human grime. And nowhere did it stink more than its market, filled with meat and fish and produce slowly spoiling in the sun. Grenouille’s mother unceremoniously goes into labor in her market stall, and she squats long enough to push him out, cut the umbilical cord and shove him to the side, assuming like all the others (so many others) that he’s stillborn. She’s got fish to sell, she’ll get rid of the body later. 

And then Jean-Baptiste, amid the filth, begins to wail.

Funny thing about infancy - we aren’t born with all of our senses up and running. Before we can see clearly, we can smell. It’s how infants locate their mothers in a room full of people. And Jean-Baptiste has entered the world in a riot of smells, most of them awful, all of them oppressive. His mother shortly meets a bad end, and he is remanded to an orphanage. As he grows, it becomes clear that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has a superhuman sense of smell. All of his other senses seem to work fine, but it is through scent that he most acutely experiences the world. He grows up to work in a tannery, and one day while delivering some hides, he discovers the most intoxicating scent of all - that of a young woman selling plums in the street.

But it fades so quickly upon her death.

There’s a lot of promise in the setting and premise. France before the revolution was a time of supreme decadence and supreme squalor, of silks and brocades and mud and shit, of face powder covering weeping sores. It’s a time when the lives of the poor are cheap, and the wealthy are above laws. And the first act really captures that sense of oppressive, claustrophobic rot and the ruling class that floats above it all, in search of ever more exotic pleasures to sate their jaded palates. It evokes the case of Gilles de Rais about 300 years prior, and the decadent protagonist of J.K. Huysman’s Against Nature, suggesting a story about the uncaring rich using the poor like cattle in the pursuit of pleasure. The Paris of the first act verges on nightmarish, and there’s definitely a horror movie in here somewhere. In the first act you really get a sense of what could be, in that respect. A miasma hangs over Paris, a sense that death and decay are everywhere.

But then the second act takes a surprisingly conventional turn as Grenouille, now apprenticed to a perfumier, heads out into the countryside to study increasingly esoteric techniques of extracting and preserving scent, and I think the film suffers from its departure from the city. There’s less miasma - the fresh air and sunshine of the countryside rob the film of some of that oppressive power and the tone sort of shifts. It’s when the stakes should escalate, when the cost of Grenouille’s obsession should be most acutely felt, but it feels very compressed, as Grenouille somehow manages to pull off a string of fairly complicated murders under the nose of his employers in a fairly small town. It reduces the action to him murdering someone, the body being found, and outrage increasing, then repeat. There's a whole new subplot introduced about a young noblewoman who doesn't want to go through with an arranged marriage and I think it crowds out the parts that should be getting developed a little more gradually, as if now we're watching a movie inside the movie we're already watching. There are still some wonderfully staged scenes and the sense of how class determines the value of a life remains intact, but for me it lacked the oppressiveness of the first act, felt mechanical and beggared believability. It went from being this nightmare to Law & Order: Jane Austen. 

Which is too bad, because it’s a tremendously well-assembled film. It’s beautifully staged and shot, with light (and its absence) playing a strong role - interiors are lit and shot like paintings by the Old Masters, the streets of Paris are uniformly muddy brown and grey with harsh sunlight falling between the buildings, The countryside is all verdant color and warm candlelight, but wherever you are, terrible thing can happen in the shadows. Given that it’s set in France, it’s odd that everyone speaks with some variety of English accent, but the performances are fine if not especially nuanced, with the exception of Grenouille, who is spooky and feral and arrogant and detached by turns. It’s got the kind of budget that makes for a believable period setting, and it has a sense of scale most of the films I write about don’t get to have. Which again, that’s something horror film could use - imagine the story of a huge, overcrowded city, teeming with all kinds of life scrabbling to survive in the margins while royalty so divorced from the concerns of the masses that they might as well be a different species harvest the poor for sport. And imagine that brought to life in a way that feels real. I think it’d be something to see.

The final act recoups somewhat as we return to the beginning of the film, with Grenouille facing his execution. It goes some unexpected places in grand fashion, and the end feels fitting to the rest of the film, but it never really gets back to the cruel, sinister indifference of its beginning. This was never strictly a horror film, and maybe a whole 2 and a half hours of that would have been hard to take, as hard to stomach as breathing 18th century Paris air, but it left me with the impression of what this film could have been, as if I were granted a whiff of something different, only to have it snatched away. 

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Martyrs (2015): The Courage Of Our Convictions

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with remakes. They reek of creative bankruptcy, of filmmaking at its most mercenary. But it’s also rare that a remake is an absolute strict shot-for-shot duplicate of its original, and sometimes the changes highlight interesting cultural differences or assumptions about their intended audience. I can think of a few instances where I’ve held remakes in the same esteem as the original, or even found them better, but that’s pretty rare -at best, they’re often superfluous, just telling a story that’s already been told and not screwing it up. At worst, they miss the point of what made the original good in the first place.

Martyrs, released in 2008, was one of the few films to come out of the overhyped New French Extremity that was actually good, and it has a lot of what I look for in good horror movies - it doesn’t overexplain, it goes some unexpected places, and there’s a real thematic through-line to it. It’s also one of those rare horror films that I think makes a good case for its graphic violence as part of its narrative. It’s easily one of my favorite horror films. But it’s definitely not for everyone - it’s really intense and unsparing, and the final act is especially uncomfortable. It can be hard to watch. It’s not a commercial prospect.

And that’s what the 2015 remake of Martyrs is. It’s a commercial prospect. Like most remakes, at its best it’s unnecessary, at its worst it undoes much of what made the original so good.

The film opens with a little girl, chained to a chair in an otherwise-empty warehouse. She manages to slip her restraints, carefully creeping out of the building. Once she gets free of the building, she begins to run. She begins to scream.

Her name is Lucie, and she gets placed in an orphanage. She’s uncommunicative, scared, traumatized, and it’s only over time and the gentle persistence of another girl, named Anna, that she starts to come out of her shell. But there’s not much to tell - the authorities’ search of the warehouse turns up nothing, she doesn’t know why she was being kept prisoner. She was beaten, starved. She confides in Anna that she sees monsters. The monsters come in the night and cut her, hurt her.

Flash forward 10 years later, and we’re at a house way out on the fringes of suburbia, where your typical nuclear family - mother, father, older son, younger daughter - are getting their day started. There’s teasing, there’s harassing the son for not completing his chores, there’s the daughter gloating at her brother being in trouble. Pretty standard stuff, really, and then the doorbell rings…

…and there’s Lucie, all grown up, holding a shotgun.

It’s tough to talk much more about what happens, because so much of what made the original good was how it kept you guessing, how the story evolved and your assumptions changed as it went on. Anna promised Lucie when they were young that she’d always be there for her, and that’s an easy promise to make when you’re a kid, because you never think that it means you’ll find yourself driving out into the middle of nowhere, where your friend, covered with years and years of scars, has just done something horrible. This film asks us to reckon with the cost of devotion, the lengths to which it will make us go.

It’s clear immediately that the whole reason this remake exists is to try and tap into a market that doesn’t like subtitles. It’s relocated from France to the U.S., it’s all in English, and the cast is largely actors from the U.S.. It’s not like the original had anything fundamentally French about it, but almost everything about this film establishes it as a particular flavor of reasonably slick, not-especially-challenging mass-market horror film, exactly the stock in trade of Blumhouse, the production company that financed it. The cinematography is surprisingly stylish in places, but everything is sort of softly-lit in a way that places it somewhere between a film and a made-for-TV movie, and some of the outdoor shots betray its budget by looking very much like a soundstage. The music is your stock horror-film ominous ambient sound, but it’s not too intrusive, and the performances are believable where they need to be and the dialogue just hovers on the line between serviceable and stagy. So on first blush this reads very much like any number of slightly-better-than-mediocre horror films turned out by studios and filmmakers expertly calibrated for exactly that - something that will provide entertaining jolts without being too unsettling or uncomfortable. And that was my worst fear going into it - that this would be watered down into something unrecognizable, a glib and formulaic assortment of jumpscares.

But to its credit, for most of its runtime it isn’t that at all. It actually follows the beats of the original pretty closely, and that is very much to its benefit. It doesn’t look away from what Lucie has done, or from the thing that has been tormenting her as long as she can remember. The thing that I think made the original so powerful was that it wasn’t just about violence or pain - it was about suffering, specifically, which is something I think a lot of horror movies made in the U.S. are reluctant to really depict. That’s the point where it stops being entertaining and starts being a little too real for most folks. And this film, much to my surprise, doesn’t really downplay that. The dialogue is maybe a little on-the-nose in places, but I’m willing to chalk that up to me already knowing what’s going to happen going in. It’s also a little stagy, a little expository, but not so much so that it’s a constant distraction, and again it’s something typical to this type of mass-market horror film. They aren’t character studies.

So, to a degree, a lot of this film is superfluous - it isn’t much less graphically violent than the original and it’s surprisingly faithful to the original story, albeit told in a slightly (slightly) less artful fashion. But as slick, moderately stylish mass-market commercial horror goes, it’s better-told than the average. This is in part due to being based on a much stronger story than the average, but I’m willing to give the filmmakers credit for not screwing with a good thing for most of the film.

Emphasis on most. In my write up of the original, I pointed out how horror films made in the U.S. so often have these pat, good versus evil endings. The original doesn’t do that - its ending is bleak and a lot is left ambiguous. Well, this film pretty much undoes all of that in the third act, where it goes full mass-market horror film, removing almost all of the ambiguity and turning what was an emotionally grueling ordeal into your stock Final Girl climax, complete with villainous monologuing (so much monologuing), improbable escape, violent revenge, and “get away from her!” It drags on entirely too long, makes changes from the original that feel nonsensical, and underlines everything three or four times in a way that is, frankly, insulting to the viewer. It’s a climax that exists in a world absolutely devoid of nuance or inference, so utterly conventional and obvious that it pretty much erases all the goodwill that the first two-thirds of the movie earns.

For someone who’s never seen the original, someone expecting the usual, it’s probably going to be a lot heavier and more intense than they were expecting. But it still feels deeply watered-down to me. And it’s not a matter of it being less violent - it isn’t, not really - it’s a matter of how thoroughly it panders to expectations in the end. I’m sure the filmmakers were given a brief to turn this uncomfortable, confrontational foreign film into something palatable for a mass market. And for the most part they rode a line between that palatability and what made the original so good with a lot more skill than I was expecting. For most of its run this remake gives its audience something I don’t think they’d expect, but I guess that makes it all that much more important to ultimately give them what they want. They had an opportunity to really rise above the mediocrity, to give the audience something that would stay with them. But when it really mattered, when it came time to bring it all to a close, they chickened out and played it safe. One of the worst things I think you can say about a film centered on the cost of faith and devotion is that it lacks the courage of its convictions, but well, here we are.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Blair Witch: We Faked It Because It’s Real

 (This one’s probably going to be pretty spoilery for The Blair Witch Project, so if you haven’t seen that and are planning on it - and I would definitely recommend it, it’s really good - maybe hold off until you’ve seen that film.)

Some time back I wrote up one of my favorite horror films, The Blair Witch Project, which was striking (and profitable) enough to essentially kick-start found-footage as a narrative approach to horror film. It was lightning in a bottle - coming at just the right moment in the zeitgeist, using techniques more common to theater than film, and leveraging the still-developing Internet for a publicity campaign that profited from an audience’s credulousness to build up a lot of hype ahead of time. William Castle would have been proud. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror film, but it was certainly the highest-profile (and most profitable) one. Did I mention it was profitable? It was profitable. And the thing about profitable horror films is that studios invariably want to capitalize on them to keep the revenue stream going - sequels, prequels, reboots, franchises, whatever. Do it again, it worked the last time.

But here’s the thing - you can’t really capture lightning in a bottle twice, as demonstrated by Blair Witch, a 2016 sequel to The Blair Witch Project. This film attempts to recapitulate the original, but in doing so misses so much of what made the original film good. Instead, it manages to fall victim to all of the found-footage film cliches that emerged following the originals’ success and ends up being an inchoate, formulaic mess.

This film is about James Donahue - the younger brother of the original film’s Heather. He’s never really gotten over his sister’s mysterious disappearance 22 years ago, and he still holds out hope that she’s still alive somewhere. He’s even got Google alerts set up for things to do with her disappearance. Usually they don’t pay off, but then one day he gets an alert for a video uploaded to YouTube, taken from a cassette some people found in the Burkittsville woods. It’s grainy and shaky and degraded, but it appears to have been shot inside of a very old, very abandoned, very familiar house. Someone’s running through hallways, bolting doors behind them, and then there’s a quick glimpse of them in a mirror…and it looks like it could be Heather.

And that’s all it takes - James, his girlfriend Lisa, his best friend Peter, and Peter’s girlfriend Ashley gear up to head into the woods to look for her.

The footage we’re watching, we’re told, was recovered after the fact from DV cassettes and video capture cards found in the forest.

This is actually the second time someone’s taken a grab at the brass ring. The first sequel - Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 - wasn’t really a success either. There was apparently considerable studio interference with its production, and the end result is gimmicky and kind of incoherent. If you told me that it was an original screenplay retrofitted as a Blair Witch movie I’d have no trouble believing it. It did, however, make a couple of smart choices. First, it was shot as a conventional narrative, not as a found-footage film. Second, it didn’t attempt to re-tell the original story, instead being about a bunch of tourists (in a world where the movie The Blair Witch Project exists) who go camping in the Burkittsville woods, lose a bunch of time, and subsequently have to reconstruct what happened by reviewing footage they shot on their own consumer-grade video cameras. Not a bad conceit, really, and I think if it had been a stand-alone film it could have been really good.

(Now that I think about it, a film from the perspective of Heather, Mike, and Josh’s families, still haunted and traumatized by their children’s disappearances decades later, done in the style of a more explicitly supernatural Lake Mungo could be a really interesting sequel. Good luck getting that made, though.)

But those are smart choices. This film by and large does not make smart choices. This film, released 22 years later, attempts to hit many of the same beats as the original and do so in a found-footage format. What this means is that it ends up drawing less from the power of the original film and more from all of the cheap imitators that came after. A lot of the conceits and scenes that worked really well in the original mutated into cliché over time as producer after producer tried to replicate the originals’ magic, missing what made it good in the process.

To start, James and company all decide that they’re going to make a foray into those woods themselves and as it turns out, Lisa and Ashley are film students. Because of course they are. So Lisa’s going to make a documentary about it. And so here we have cliché #1 - there’s no reason this has to be a documentary, but that provides a pretext for the omnipresence of cameras to capture everything. It made sense in the first film because the whole story was “film students go into the woods and don’t come out.” The whole reason there was a film was that these people were in the woods to film things. But subsequent attempts at found-footage films try to take other stories and shoehorn in reasons for the protagonists to be recording everything, whether it makes sense or not. Next on the cliché list is the obligatory tech rundown, including a drone camera and miniature earpiece cameras with built-in GPS. This is another thing I see a lot in mediocre found-footage films - a lot of fuss and detail made over the big arsenal of recording equipment and multiple cameras the protagonists have.

This has never struck me as anything more than a cheat - the original film shot everything using two cameras and one mic and DAT recorder for sound. That’s it. The whole point is that our perspective is imperfect and incomplete, but a lot of films miss that point and instead do everything but find a reason for one of their characters to just happen to be wearing a Steadicam rig. And then on top of that, there’s a segment where they go out clubbing while wearing their earpiece cameras for…reasons? In The Blair Witch Project, there’s a brief segment where the three of them calibrate the cameras while they’re drinking in their motel room, but that seems to have mutated into a need to have a scene in every found-footage film where everyone’s out partying while recording and it almost never makes any sense at all. It consistently misses the point that those elements made sense in the context of the original film, and mistakes them for obligatory gestures.

Another problem with this film (common to found-footage films) is that at no point does it feel like anything but a movie. The first film worked so well - as a horror film and as an example of found-footage film - because it was naturalistic in the extreme. Dialogue was almost entirely (if not entirely) improvised, it was shot on location, the actors were only given a daily outline of what had to happen in the course of the day’s shooting. How they got there was up to them, and their environment was manipulated to make their discomfort and exhaustion real to a degree. The whole thing was closer to improvisational theater than to filmmaking. By contrast, this film was entirely scripted, and it shows. The dialogue isn’t especially wooden or anything, but it definitely sounds like dialogue and not naturally occurring conversation. The emotions don’t feel as real or as raw either, with some exceptions toward the very end, but even then it’s sort of too little, too late. It’s not impossible to write dialogue that sounds like actual conversation and it’s not impossible to get performances that feel extremely naturalistic, but it’s a lot tougher than just writing a script, and I think there’s a certain suspension of disbelief that we employ when we’re watching conventional narrative films where we don’t necessarily expect naturalistic performances and dialogue. There’s a tolerance level for a certain amount of staginess. But if what we’re watching is supposed to be raw footage pulled from an amateur’s camera? Any staginess sticks out like a sore thumb. At no point does the dialogue or the performances feel like anything but a movie.

Arguably, any given film should succeed or fail on its own merits, but not only is this film a sequel to another film and thus inviting comparison on that basis alone, it also goes out of its way to try and replicate beats and moments from the original. The pretext here is that we’re watching footage recovered from a bunch of DV tapes and video capture cards discovered out in the woods, just like in the original (and like the original, this information is communicated in stark white-on-black title cards that aren’t the only instances of homage, but they’re probably the least distracting). And just like in the original, once our protagonists get into the woods everything starts to go wrong. Some of it goes wrong in exactly the same way it did in the first film, which doesn’t really work because we’re expecting it. What’s startling the first time is anticipated the second. Some of it goes wrong in far less interesting ways than the original as well. The filmmakers don’t just stop at having unseen forces menace the protagonists, as the film goes on they also include briefly-glimpsed monsters and body horror, all slathered over with a thick layer of jump scares. A big part of why the original worked so well was because it established a mood first, and took its time doing so. As a result, even the slightest strange thing - mysterious cairns, stick figures hanging from the trees - carried with it a real sense of dread. Here, they’re just sort of set dressing, a way to say “hey, remember this?” and just in case that doesn’t do the trick, every other horror cliché you can think of gets chucked in as well. This is not a film that builds a mood so much as it just keeps turning up the volume louder and louder in an effort to scare us.

That’s yet another way in which it’s in strong contrast to the original. The Blair Witch Project was a relatively quiet film, low-key, with tension simmering gradually over its runtime so it wasn’t really until the last act that things started getting intense. It was relatively quiet visually as well - lots of long, quiet shots, shots held on people’s faces, footage of the forest itself. This is not a visually quiet film - the footage is constantly interrupted by glitches (except when it isn’t, and then it’s often shot from angles and with a steadiness that shouldn’t have been possible with the camera equipment they had, which is awfully convenient), scenes invariably end with a blast of interference, someone yelling at someone else to turn their camera off, or the camera crashing to black. Lots of the footage, especially in the third act, is shot on the run while people are bolting through the woods screaming at the top of their lungs. It ends up being more irritating and distracting than anything else, a barrage of imagery that never really coheres.

There are a couple of things it does do well, to be fair. James and company make contact with Lane and Talia, two sketchy locals who uploaded the footage in the first place, and they ask to join up as our protagonists head into the woods. There’s tension there - you’ve got four city kids who have no business being out in the woods and the two locals who take the legends about the woods very seriously. and it isn’t clear how trustworthy Lane and Talia are. The friction between the two groups works pretty well and adds some ambiguity in places that would have worked in a quieter film. .The most effective element of the film (one borrowed from the original) is the way time seems to slip out of joint the deeper they get into the woods - it’s a relatively minor element in the first film, and there was as likely to be down to increasing disorientation as anything else, but here they really lean into it in ways that work more often than they don’t. In those moments, it reminds me a little of an outdoorsy version of Grave Encounters at its best, though it also shares some climactic issues with that film as well. I think if they’d cut out some of the more blatant callbacks to the original and really made this a film about six people ending up someplace outside of time as we know it, really leaning into the desperation, isolation, and dread that come with that, then it might have worked. As it is, I think it just got included because it was in the first film (along with the cairns, the stick figures, someone who claimed to know where they were when they really didn’t, the abandoned house, all of it) and like everything else they just went bigger and louder and more obvious than the original.

At one point, a character says “we faked it because it’s real,” and I think that kind of sums up the problem. The original worked so well because its production methods emphasized realism to a degree that you don’t often find in film, and this film is very much fake in the sense of being artifice - it’s scripted, it lands on every found-footage film cliché you can think of, it leaves as little to suggestion as possible, and feels engineered from its first minutes. It’s a movie that treads the same ground that The Blair Witch Project did, but manages to forget everything that made that film so good in the first place. If it had been a conventional film narrative, well, I don’t know that it would have been good, but it would have had a fighting chance. As it is, it’s so clearly fake that it inspires nothing but annoyance.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon