Compare & Contrast: Kairo/Pulse

I want to try something a little different this week, something I’ve been thinking about trying for awhile. If a foreign horror movie does well, as often as not it’s going to get a U.S. remake. And these remakes range from almost shot-for-shot duplicates of the original film to ones where tattered scraps of the original film cling to something otherwise wildly different. I think these exist mostly because the film industry in the U.S. makes a regular habit of underestimating the intelligence of audiences. Reading subtitles isn’t difficult, and if you’ll avoid a film because you don’t like to read…well, you’re part of the problem.

But within that space, there’s some potential to make observations about the differences between them. What survives the transition, and what doesn’t, which details changed and which ones didn’t. These choices can be revealing about the assumptions made by either set of filmmakers, and what sort of cultural touchstones go into making horror films, and what those say about their respective cultures. So what I’d like to do in a compare and contrast post is look at the original film and the remake side-by-side, to see what worked, what didn’t, and what the choices made in each film might tell us about the societies that produced each film.

A lot of this, for me, begins with what was colloquially referred to as “J-horror,” a group of horror films made in Japan from the late 90s to early 00s. It does seem to be sort of a watershed moment that marked increasing interest in horror films made outside of the U.S., and at a point where streaming hadn’t yet made access to films from all over the world easier. So along came remakes of the higher-profile J-horror films. So that’s where I’d like to start with this. My last post was on the film Kairo (Pulse), which is a (rightly) well-regarded example of the form. A bleak, chilly meditation on loneliness and urban isolation, it received a remake, titled Pulse, in the U.S.. The two films share a few similarities, but they are by far more different than similar, and I’ll likely be spoiling details of both films, so if you haven’t seen Kairo, maybe come back once you have - it’s pretty good. Overlong, but pretty good. The remake? Well, not so much.

AHOY! SPOILERS AHEAD! 

To start, both films share the same basic premise: Some kind of mysterious signal is transmitting itself over the internet, people who are exposed to it start committing suicide, and ghosts are starting to appear wherever these suicides occur. After that, things really diverge narratively and cinematically. In Kairo, the film followed two parallel storylines, that of Michi, an employee at a plant nursery, and Ryosuke, an economics student, as they separately discover this strange phenomenon. Pulse replaces the two parallel storylines with one, that of a young college student named Mattie and her friend group. This doesn’t really help or hurt the film, but the characters are so stock that it’s kind of annoying. It’s often difficult for me to pick up on character nuances in subtitled films, but in the remake it’s clear that these are two-dimensional college-kid caricatures, more concerned with partying and getting laid than anything else. Worse, the addition of a model-handsome miscreant who goes from “dude who bought a stolen computer” to Mattie’s love interest in rapid order is so fucking tiresome. He’s literally just some dude who purchased stolen property and maybe twenty minutes later he’s her biggest confidante, and by the end they’re making out. It isn’t necessary, it does nothing for the story or the characters, it just gives the filmmakers a chance to shove a dude with razor-sharp cheekbones and impeccably groomed beard stubble into the whole thing. That’s what a lot of horror movies in the U.S. were back in the 00s - impossibly good-looking people getting bumped off for reasons. Neither film was ever going to be a character study, but it’s really difficult to see this as anything but ticking boxes on some kind of focus-grouped checklist.

The changes to the film itself - the art direction, the specific story choices, the narrative details - are much bigger and really work to make the original and remake into two sharply different films. Kairo relied a lot on mood and atmosphere - it was a quiet, relatively empty movie, somber and melancholy. It took place in a drab, overcast part of Japan, full of rain-stained brutalist apartment buildings, and its important moments were simple- a silent figure in the corner of the room, mysterious black stains on the wall, people sitting still in barely-lit rooms, pale figures that bent and twisted as they walked. The result was eerie and full of dread, with the inexplicable horror of a nightmare. Pulse is not a quiet, empty movie. You’ve got your nightclub scene, you’ve got your bustling college campus, you’ve got evil cyber-ghosts who are all glitch and stutter and visual noise, a riot of special effects who make weird growling noises and suck people’s souls out of their faces. Do they come through electronic devices? Yes, except when they just pop out of washing machines for no apparent reason. They suck your life force out through the magic of special effects, then you lose the will to live, and then you just…vanish? Maybe we’re supposed to assume that they kill themselves, but this is a film that’s far more squeamish about the idea of suicide than the original was, even though it was sort of central to the original’s thesis. Sometimes they get these creepy black growths spreading all over their body and then they turn into ashes in yet another display of digital effects. And then more screaming, more jump scares, and an ending that sheds all of the quiet sadness of the original for an unnecessary monologue that just restates what we’re seeing with our own eyes. There’s no mood or atmosphere here, just a lot of yelling and musical stings to let us know when to be scared and pale, hairless figures screaming at people before doing special effects at them. It’s borderline-incoherent in the degree to which it just sort of seems like a bunch of cliches pulled out of a bag. Psychology gets some mostly-irrelevant lip service, there’s this weirdly antagonistic shrink who just sort of appears out of nowhere and harangues the protagonist, there’s a professor who talks about stalking and then isn’t seen again for most of the movie…until he gets killed, and there’s a lot of cyber-gibberish (“but I shut down the system!” “It doesn’t matter! THEY ARE THE SYSTEM!”). Pulse doesn’t feel like anything except a pointless racket.

Pulse is also a much more literal film than the original. In Kairo, computers weren’t really the point. It was a film about loneliness and alienation, and computers just facilitated that, a window into other lonely lives. Sure, there was some stuff about spirits spilling through into our world because their realm was full (a nice nod to “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth”), but like everything else in the film, it was never really fleshed out. It was cryptic and opaque, but there was enough internal consistency that it felt like nightmare logic, like there was a sense to be made if only we looked hard enough. In Pulse, computers are the entire point. Technology is slathered all over every frame, everyone constantly checking their cell phones (not even smartphones), “cyber”-this and “cyber”-that, hackers, every single bad internet cliché of the early 2000s jammed into the movie, and eventually, after a lot of wandering around getting scared (and the occasional borderline-pointless nightmare sequence shot in a style I can only describe as “aggressively desaturated”), it turns out that some telecom engineers delved too greedily and too deep and unleashed some kind of malevolent presence on our world. So no, it’s not the malaise of modern life, it’s these evil creatures that want to feed on our will to live. This is explained at length in a third-act infodump, though it’s far from the only time that we get told stuff that was already apparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. Symbolism’s for the other guy, we’re going to make this as simple as possible because we have no faith in the intelligence of our audience.

Where Kairo was quiet, Pulse is loud. Obvious, hamfisted, devoid of mood or atmosphere, made up of a few segments lifted from Kairo absent any real context surrounded by 2000s-era mass-market horror film cliches. The original made sense as a piece of Japanese film. The loneliness of modern urban life, increasing isolation, black stains on the wall evoking the shadows of Hiroshima, restless spirits. All of these make sense in the context of Japanese history and culture. The remake grabs bits here and there, but disregards any of that context, and the results, besides being noisy and overwrought, also verge on nonsensical in places, mostly because they seem thrown into a different, more generic horror movie without regard for why they’re there. Really, the more I think about it, the more this seems like it was originally an unrelated movie about evil websites or evil cellphones or something, and they lifted two or three bits from Kairo to rebuild the movie around. It’s got almost nothing to do with the original, it’s not even in conversation with the original, it’s just a butchering of a much-better film.

IMDB entry for Kairo
IMDB entry for Pulse

Kairo on Amazon
Pulse on Tubi
Pulse on Amazon

Kairo: Alone In The Dark

I have a pretty ecumenical take on horror. I don’t want to limit it to specific forms or subject matter, because that’s boring and if you want that, there are plenty of professional critics happy to pigeonhole horror films as films that provide shocks and jump scares and gore and nothing else. Like I said, boring. I find jump scares and gore, by themselves, boring. At their best, horror films are just as capable of grappling with questions of human nature and experience as any drama, they just paint those questions with a broader palette, and one that tends toward shadows. Some critics want to call those films “elevated horror,” mostly because they can’t bring themselves to admit that horror films can be art too. But that’s an artificial distinction. Horror is just horror. Some of it (a lot of it) is derivative, pandering dreck, but at its best, it examines the human condition.

Kairo (Pulse) is a great example of this. It’s a glacially paced story about the loneliness and alienation of the modern world and the role that technology plays in it, and though over-long, it proceeds with the chilly inevitability of a nightmare.

The film follows two different storylines in parallel. In one, Michi - an employee at a plant nursery - is tasked with tracking down her coworker Taguchi, who has been working on a program that would allow them to track their sales more efficiently. He hasn’t shown up for work in several days. Elsewhere, university student Ryosuke is trying to set up internet access from an ISP installer disk. Once he’s done, his web browser navigates to a page on its own - a page displaying image after image of people sitting alone in dark rooms, barely moving or speaking. One of the figures looks up at him. Spooked, Ryosuke turns off his computer and unplugs it. Elsewhere, Michi finds Taguchi at his apartment. He’s acting distant, moving and speaking slowly, and doesn’t seem to respond when Michi asks him for the disk he was supposed to have. Left to her own devices, Michi goes searching through his stuff, eventually finding the disk.

When she turns around, Taguchi has hung himself. He appears to have been dead for some time.

At Ryosuke’s place, in the middle of the night, his computer turns itself back on, displaying the same site as before. Shadows, sitting in the dark.

The beginning of the internet as we know it today was attended by any number of movies that tried to capitalize on the novelty of this new form of communication, and it’s so easy to make hokey, shitty movies about evil websites or demons that live in the computer. This is not one of those movies. Technology is central to the film’s conceit, but it feels less like another iteration on the haunted house or cursed object, and more like a vector for some kind of spiritual contagion. Modern living already facilitates isolation, technology that allows remote, anonymous communication exacerbates it, and the result, this film says, is people who dwindle away to ghosts, to nothing, to shadows. There’s a more conventionally supernatural explanation in the story, but that’s what it is - it's the story of a lonely world that’s only growing lonelier.

This film is part of the late 90s-early 2000s run of Japanese horror films that have come to be known collectively as “J-horror,” and it’s got very much the same aesthetic as other films from this period. It takes place in a gray, overcast Japan, in concrete apartment buildings permanently stained by rain. There’s very little music (just the occasional tasteful sting to punctuate startling moments) and even less background noise, making this an uneasily quiet film. This works to its advantage as a film about isolation, and along with pacing that could generously be described as deliberate, the result is somehow both dreamy and nightmarish. It’s a languid, chilly story full of eerie, obliquely creepy moments that proceed from a visual vocabulary with an internal logic, like any nightmare where you aren’t sure exactly what’s happening, but you know that whatever it is, it is evil and wrong and coming for you with a mindless implacability. It’s cryptic, but not so cryptic that you can’t follow what’s going on. The film has atmosphere in spades, it doesn’t yank your attention toward the scary bits, instead trusting you to follow what’s going on. It doesn’t need to make a lot of noise because the silence is even worse, and the result is very effective at keeping the audience uncomfortable and priming them for the big moments.

But this approach comes with some problems - the film’s just shy of two hours long, and you feel every second of it. I don’t mind slow movies, especially ones so committed to building a sense of inescapable dread, but this really could have had about 15 minutes or so trimmed without, I think, harming the overall result. There were points where I felt my attention starting to wander because the silence and stillness was tipping over into stasis. Any film that relies on the existence of the internet to drive its premise is going to risk looking dated, and though it’s mostly relegated to the background once things really get going, there’s still something that feels dated in how unfamiliar most of the characters are with how computers work in even the most basic way. Ryosuke bears the brunt of this as a young college student who manages to know almost nothing about consumer-grade computers or software. And sure, this film was made during a period when not everyone knew much about computers (and long before haptic devices like smartphones or tablets), but to modern eyes, he just looks…kinda dumb, in a way that I don’t think was intentional. I appreciate that not everything is explained into the ground (the next person who tells me that they’re going to explore the “lore” of some antagonist from a horror film is getting a very metaphorical foot up their ass), but if you look at what’s supposed to be happening a little too closely, it does seem kind of shapeless and hand-wavey. But this is a pretty minor complaint for a film that sets a tone, commits to it, and ends in impressively bleak fashion.

This is also one of a number of Japanese horror films that got American remakes, and I think I’m going to start doing some compare-and-contrasts, because I think there’s some space between the culturally specific concerns of films like this and the way they get translated for audiences in the U.S. that’s worth talking about. But I suspect any remake is going to have a hard time replicating this film’s monolithic sense of depression and isolation, as much as I’d like to see someone try.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Three Short Films By Curry Barker: Between Life And Death

Last month, I watched a short film called Milk & Serial, and it was good enough to get me rethinking my general dismissiveness toward YouTube as a source of original horror filmmaking. It was a sharp, vicious little piece of found-footage horror featuring some surprisingly strong performances, and it looks like a lot of it was the work of a young man named Curry Barker, who wrote, directed, edited, and co-starred in it. My interest was piqued, and since watching it I’d been meaning to check out some of his other work. He does sketch comedy, but he’s made a few other short films as well, so I thought I’d take a look at three of them this week. Some of them are stronger than others, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen.

There are a few elements that tie these three films - Enigma, Warnings, and The Chair - together. They’re all about the space between life and death, and a vein of deadpan absurdity runs through all of them to one degree or another, as all three feature protagonists who are having difficulty grappling with some element of adult life. Whether it’s responsibility, or the need for human contact, or the need to be fully present in a relationship, all of these films have at their center men whose world is unraveling around them, and who face their circumstances with varying levels of exasperation. They’re less terrified and more puzzled and annoyed, but not to a degree that’s overtly comic. There are definite moments of wry black humor, but I don’t know that I’d call any of these comedies. These are ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and none of them are what you’d call heroic.

They’re all small productions, and two of them are very much just Barker and some of his regular collaborators shooting in one or two locations, but there’s a real sense of restraint and a willingness to build tension through small moments, carefully composed shots and impressionistic editing. There’s a refreshing lack of jump-scares or the usual premises, and it’s clear that Barker knows if you set things up correctly, then even a little detail - like a note, or a blurry figure in the background - can go a long way toward setting the mood.

Enigma

This film opens on squalor. A young man is kneeled over his toilet, vomiting, while empty bottles, fast-food wrappers, and other garbage lies scattered all over the place. This is Adam, and he’s having trouble being a functional adult. He doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to, orders food in a lot, and is falling out of touch with his friends and family. He has regrets, he wonders where his life went wrong, and all the while he’s scrolling through his phone, looking at all of his friends on social media as they party and figure out how they’re going to kill themselves before the world ends, in slightly less than a week.

This is a melancholy story, told from the point of view of a sad guy for whom even the end of the world isn’t enough motivation to get out and live. Adam sort of wanders through the last days on Earth, making excuses for why he can’t go out, remaining a prisoner of his own self-doubt and guilt. It strikes a good balance between the enormity of what’s coming (a countdown to the end is cleverly inserted as bits of background scenery) and the way life goes on regardless – people keep delivering pizzas, people keep working behind a register, while others get out and make the best of what’s left. Some think it’s more of the same catastrophizing that’s been with us for decades, some think it’s a hoax to cull the population and make purveyors of assisted suicide rich, others are just vibing, whatever comes will come. As is often the case with stories like these, the end of the world is an opportunity to examine how we live and the importance of human connection. So in that sense there isn’t anything really all that unusual here, and it’s the least scary of the three, but there are nice moments of deadpan humor alongside pathos that serve the story well and keep us empathetic. I wouldn’t call it a black comedy…more of a dark gray comedy?

Warnings

It’s a late night at the end of what was probably a pretty wild Halloween party, and Sean’s walking out to his car, discussing how he almost got hit in the street by another car. When he reaches his car, he notices a note stuck to the window above the driver’s side door handle…

“I am begging you to stop.”

Needless to say, Sean gets freaked out and tries to ask his friends Kendal and Regan what’s happening, but they have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s a little confused, a little disoriented, and when he goes back out to his car, he finds another note, this time on the inside of his car. And he’s starting to hear voices.

This one is a creepy little psychological horror film centering on Sean’s attempts to understand what’s going on as the world around him gets stranger and stranger. It does a lot with very little, relying on the conceit of the notes and the way that everything becomes increasingly more disjointed the more Sean tries to understand what’s happening.  There’s nicely paced uneasiness throughout, combined with little bits of visual wit that creates this nicely discordant note – it’s funny and strange at the same time, and the aftertaste from the strange lingers a little longer than the funny does. There are some nightmare sequences (or are they?) that give everything a little bite as well, and the filmmakers do a good job of keeping us guessing about where it’s all going. It’s maybe a little slight, but definitely falls in horror territory and has its share of unsettling moments.

The Chair

Reese is out running some errands - getting dinner and flowers for his girlfriend Julie to celebrate their six-month anniversary - when he notices a chair sitting on the sidewalk. It looks to be in good shape, so he decides to grab it and take it home with him. As soon as Julie sees it, she hates it. It doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. It’s creepy. It makes her nervous. It feels evil, and she wants Reese to get it out of the house. So, in a fit of pique, Reese stubbornly sits down in the chair…

..and the next thing he knows, he’s back on the street where he picked up the chair in the moments before he puts it in the car. And somehow an entire week has gone by.

This one is more ambitious than the other two, and also the most effective as a horror film. It’s a bigger production with a cast outside of the usual ensemble, shot in a wider aspect ratio than the others. It’s a disorienting story that starts off being about a diffusely creepy chair, but soon reveals itself as a story about the unreliability of memory and what it must be like when it starts to fail. Abrupt, fragmented editing keeps us as off-balance as the protagonist, and real events wind around hallucinatory reverie, offering a few different explanations for what’s going on, but to its credit, the film doesn’t commit to one explanation over the other. There’s a cohesive visual vocabulary, which suggests there is some underlying logic to what’s happening, but it’s ultimately elusive. We know enough to know something is going on, but not enough to see it clearly, which is a wonderfully unsettling feeling. There’s also some really nice use of composition alongside the editing, it’s probably the least humorous of the bunch, and even though the end sort of fell flat for me, it was an enjoyably uneasy experience and probably makes the clearest argument yet for Barker having the sort of filmmaking chops that you’d like to see get more of a budget and wider distribution.

I have to admit, as much as I know intellectually that filmmaking technology has gotten better and more affordable over time, it’s been tough for me to take the leap to recognizing that there’s some really good work being made by young (don’t say it) auteurs (oh dammit, you said it) on a platform that I’m used to thinking of as sort of a video junk drawer. The Philippou brothers made the move from YouTube to the big screen, and I think if there’s any justice in the world, filmmakers like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker will be next, because they’re sure as hell making stuff that’s fresher and scarier than yet another Conjuring sequel.

Enigma: IMDB | YouTube
Warnings: IMDB | YouTube
The Chair: IMDB | YouTube

Honeydew: Very Little Meat And A Whole Lot Of Filler

Horror is, in my opinion, a genre that benefits strongly from the short story. It certainly isn’t impossible to do long-form horror well, but the longer the story the bigger the risk that you’re going to overexplain or bog it down. Short stories get in, set up a situation, and then take it to some fucked-up place, getting out while the shock still lingers. And I notice something similar in film - one of the most common weaknesses of horror films that I’ve observed over the many years I’ve been flinging my opinion out into the void is a tendency to drag in the middle or to whiff the ending, and I think that’s in part because sustaining feelings of tension or dread or unease or whatever for that long is tough. And for my part, I haven’t spent nearly as much time watching short films as I could be. I’m going to try and rectify that, though it’s tough since they rarely appear on streaming services.

But Honeydew is a great example of this exact problem. It starts off pretty strong, but then it drags into an absolute crawl at the end. It’s the poster child for full-length horror films that would have been better off as a short.

It opens on still shots of woodlands, a lone barn, sprawling wheat fields, steam rising from the ground. There’s an old woman grinding seed into flour. There’s a loaf of bread in an oven. A young woman eats, and scratchy religious music plays on an old tape recorder. It’s nicely cryptic. Then there is a funeral, a few mourners gathered around a simple wooden cross. It all creates a burgeoning sense of rural unease. A poacher skins an animal, wanders into a nearby barn, and discovers something he shouldn’t have.

And now we’re watching an informational film about sordico, a fungal infestation of wheat. It’s being watched by a botany student named Rylie, She and her boyfriend Sam are driving through the country, headed for some kind of getaway. And as is often the case, they make a wrong turn. And as is often also the case, they lose cell reception and their GPS stops working. So they camp for the night, only to be woken up by someone who says they’re on his land. He gives them directions to get where they’re going and tells them he’ll be back in awhile to make sure they’re gone. So they pack up and head out again and what do you know, they happen across a farmhouse! Do we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next? Is that farmhouse going to hide a terrible secret?

Yes we do, and of course it will.

I know, I sound dismissive, but I think it’s because the opening of the film showed a bit of restraint - it created a sense of unease without spelling everything out in the first ten minutes, using just isolated images juxtaposed against each other. And it’s mostly good about showing instead of telling. Sam and Rylie have a somewhat strained relationship, but it’s communicated through small things. The farmhouse is home to the old woman we saw earlier making flour. And she’s nice enough, but she’s also pretty strange right off the rip. There’s maybe a little too much silence between the things she says, an oddness. There’s her very strange son who communicates only in grunts, and his face is bandaged for some reason. He really enjoys old Popeye cartoons. We know that there’s something not right here (if only because we know we’re watching a horror movie), but exactly how it’s all going to go down isn’t immediately obvious. Should they stay? Of course not. Do they stay? Of course they do. So, dumb protagonist behavior aside, it’s a strong opening.

But after that, it starts to go downhill.  It’s hurt most by an almost complete lack of tension, because it’s only got one pace – slow. Which, at first, is fine. The evocative opening and the unhurried pace initially give the film time to build some atmosphere, but then it never tightens up or takes off. It just keeps going at that same slow, methodical pace, and so even though the setting’s good and the performances are suitably restrained and everything gradually unfolds into something that gets stranger and stranger, it starts to feel lethargic and aimless. It is never a good sign when I doze off in the middle of a film and let me tell you, that is exactly what I did. It feels like someone took a short film and stretched it out to almost two hours without actually adding anything, and pretty much the entire second act feels like the film is waiting around until it hits a certain running time before it moves on to something like a climax. And when it does reach a climax, it…continues to sort of plod along and then the whole thing just sort of stops. There’s no tension, no stakes, just a bunch of things happening with entirely too much time in between each thing, and then the third act explains what’s going on and the film ends.

And it’s too bad, because I think the filmmakers have some chops. The cinematography is suitably moody – rural vistas, dimly lit basements, shabby country squalor – and the soundtrack is mostly spooky minimalism, all thumps and clatters and wordless chanting. The editing is a standout, it’s almost percussive in a way and makes use of split-screen to mostly good effect.  I really think all the best bits could have been compressed into no more than an hour, and probably less and it would have worked a lot better. It would have gotten in, set up a situation, dropped in the protagonists and snapped the trap shut before they had time to realize what was going on. As it is, there good things about it, there are a number of good moments, but overall the whole thing just feels inert.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on YouTube 

Chernobyl: Palatable Fictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon