The Monster: Not Mad, Just Disappointed

Monsters are a tough proposition to pull off in scary movies. I think this is mostly because it’s tough to make a convincing-looking monster on the sort of budgets most horror films are working with, and no matter how well you sort of tease the monster by giving the audience brief glimpses, at some point you’re going to have to reveal it, and even if you’ve done your job well (or maybe even especially if you’ve done your job well), the reveal is going to be disappointing compared to what the audience has imagined for themselves. You can’t not show the monster (well, you can, but that’s even harder to do well), but audiences are going to come up with things that would have never occurred to the filmmakers, and so what the filmmakers come up with tends to be a letdown by comparison.

And yeah, that’s pretty much what happens with The Monster, both in terms of the titular monster and in terms of where the story goes. Don’t get me wrong, this is generally a well-crafted movie, but I think the skill exhibited got me expecting more than it was able to deliver.

We start with kind of a trite speech about how we tell kids monsters aren’t real, but they are, but this shifts quickly to a day in the life of a young girl named Lizzy. Lizzy’s maybe 11 years old or so, and we meet her doing chores around a dim, musty house - washing a stack of dishes, emptying ashtrays, clearing all of the empty liquor bottles off the coffee table in the living room, all while her mother Kathy is passed out in bed. Lizzy goes in to wake Kathy up at 10am. She was supposed to be up at 9am to drive Lizzy to stay with her father. And now it’s 10. Lizzy’s already packed. Kathy is petulant, Lizzy firm and persistent, their roles thoroughly reversed. It’s immediately clear that Lizzy is used to being let down by her mother, that this has played out many times before. We next see Lizzy sitting on the couch in the living room, her mother coming in and halfheartedly apologizing for falling back asleep. The clock reads 3pm.

The car ride is, of course, strained. It isn’t made explicit, but you get the sense that Lizzy is going to stay with her father and that the relocation will be permanent. She’s sullen, wounded, and not at all receptive to her mother’s sporadic attempts to connect or show affection. She’s over it, grown up too quickly as a result of constant disappointment. And then, distracted, Kathy hits something in the road hard enough to send the car into a tailspin. When the car finally stops and they catch their breath, they see a badly injured wolf lying in the middle of the road. But when Kathy looks at the wolf, she sees injuries that wouldn’t have been made by a car. And their car took a lot more damage than it should have for something the size of a large dog.

It’s as if both the wolf and the car had tangled with something much, much bigger.

And so Lizzy and Kathy are stranded on a rural road, in the middle of the night, as rain pelts down. Nothing but woods on either side, and deserted road behind and ahead. And there is definitely something out there. The rest of the film makes use of flashbacks to bounces back and forth between the present and the past, showing us snatches from Kathy and Lizzy’s life together before this point, although I’m not sure how important or revelatory the flashbacks end up being. We see why Lizzy is so unhappy with her mother (Kathy veers between needy and absent and her boyfriend is an abusive prick), but it sort of feels disconnected from the story as a whole. We get just as good a sense of their dynamic from the opening scene of the film as we do from the flashbacks, and except for a specific exchange between the two that opens the movie, re-contextualized at the end, it’s hard to see exactly why all of the history between them is important for the story. Lizzy is very much the parent here, she’s had to grow up fast in order to take care of her mother, whose alcoholism makes her basically the child, but once the car crashes that dynamic recedes except for some very specific quirks of behavior that don’t really seem to affect anything. Mostly it’s handled well, although some of Lizzy’s dialogue is maybe a little too precocious, at times - there’s a difference between a child forced to take on the role of an adult and a child who sounds like an adult, and occasionally it tips too far into the latter. Although the mother/daughter dynamic is generally well-done and surprisingly unflinching, it generally seems more like a glimpse into a different movie than an integral part of the one we’re watching.

And the one we’re watching is, likewise, generally very well-made. This is a small-scale siege movie, similar in its most basic structure to something like Stephen King’s Cujo - they’re relatively safe in their car, but something’s out there in the dark that’s waiting for them, and though help is on the way, it isn’t here yet. And so for most of its run time,  the filmmakers do a good job of keeping things tense through gradual escalation, starting with small things and very quick glimpses of the titular monster, largely black, glistening, and indistinct, with things getting much worse as the film goes on. It’s hard not to see some of what’s coming - when the tow truck driver shows up, you know he’s going to get it, and when the ambulance shows up, you know that they're going to get it too, but it’s largely staged well and effectively, so even if you can anticipate a particular beat, it’s still startling when it comes. The violence done to the monster’s victims isn’t gratuitous or trivialized - it really does feel like these are real people meeting a very bad end. But again, the skill with which it’s presented was offset for me by it not going anywhere especially surprising, and the final confrontation is as stock as it gets. And yes, the longer the monster is onscreen, the less it holds up. Early in, when it’s just something big, black, and glistening, it works. But you have to show the monster, and in the final act, its artificiality is clear.

I don’t know, maybe watching some really berserk shit like Ari Aster’s films has set my bar kind of high, because both Hereditary and Midsommar presented painfully compelling stories of failing human relationships and made them essential to the horror that followed, bringing a strong tragic element to the table to both films’ credit. I don’t know that the filmmakers here hit quite that level, but both the horror elements and human relationship elements here were absolutely well-done (maybe a little clichéd here and there but certainly not enough to be off-putting), but they never really connected, nor did either piece go anywhere new or unexpected. Like with any monster film, what I was given was never going to be better than what I imagined. It wasn’t actively bad by any means, but it could have been more. It’s the classic parent line to their child: “I’m not mad, just disappointed.”

IMDB entry
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The Heretics: Un-Unorthodox

(Just as a heads-up, there are going to be spoilers in this piece. I mean, a lot of them aren’t REALLY spoilers, because this isn’t an especially subtle or imaginative movie, but if it’s one you were planning to watch, be forewarned.)

I think there are a couple of different ways we can think about horror films. One is the idea of horror as anything that evokes a particular mood or feeling in the audience, and the other is the idea of horror as films that hew to specific topics and employ specific plots and clichés. I’m a much bigger fan of the former than the latter, insofar as it brings a wider variety of films into the tent, and insofar as the latter tends to run to the formulaic, to product that faithfully meets preconceived expectations, but doesn’t really move people beyond some cheap thrill. The latter is far more profitable than the former, for sure, because I think a healthy chunk of people like to indulge a basic startle response without facing anything that genuinely haunts them or makes them feel uncomfortable. These are the kind of people who think “decadence” is a dessert that features five kinds of chocolate.

Why am I even going on about this? Well, it’s because The Heretics isn’t an especially good or interesting film, but it is one that is so transparent and obvious in its moving parts that I had the whole thing more or less figured out  within the first ten minutes. This is not a film in any danger of overestimating the viewer’s intelligence.

We open on a ritual in the middle of the woods. A young girl is chained to an altar, surrounded by robed and masked figures. She struggles, they chant. They raise their knives, she struggles. They chant, and chant, and cut…their own throats.

The young girl is Gloria, and she grows up to be reunited with her mother. Gloria goes to a support group for abuse survivors, and it was at this group that she met her partner, Joan. And so Gloria and Joan go to group, after which they volunteer at a shelter run by the church where their support group is held, and afterward, they lie in bed together, talking about what they’ve been through, and Joan said she’d go through all of it again, because it lead her to Gloria. Which, if you stop to think about it, is kind of creepy and manipulative. Never mind that, though. Gloria says her goodnights, and starts heading for home…when she is abducted by a man in an RV, who starts driving her far out of town.

It seems the cult isn’t done with Gloria just yet.

And it’s really here - twelve minutes in - that the problems start. The man in the RV is Thomas, and he’s taken Gloria out to a cabin in the country to “save” her. I know what they were trying to go for here. What we’re supposed to think is that Gloria got away from the cult, and Thomas has been sent by the cult to get her back, and him “saving” her is supposed to be parsed as creepy cult-speak for sacrifice, and now it’s a race against time for Joan and Gloria’s mother to find her before the cult can sacrifice her. And then, at some point in the film, the curtain will be yanked back on the shocking twist that no, in fact Thomas is trying to save Gloria, that the cult is using her as a host body for their demon god, and by hiding her from the cult, he’s going to make sure that they can’t complete the ritual, and in fact, Joan is actually a member of the cult! I suspect the filmmakers thought this was going to be more of a surprise than it actually is, and I had the majority of this shit figured out before the first act was even over, simply by virtue of paying attention to the movie.

Right off the bat, Joan is way, way too intense - during the support group scene (one where the counselor pressures Gloria to share her story, which is…a pretty big no-no, I think?), Joan advocates that another woman in the group torture her abusive husband, which is just…yikes. Joan almost stabs a guy at the shelter when he surprises her, and it doesn’t read like an exaggerated startle response, it reads like someone looking for an excuse. As it does when she’s taking fliers door-to-door after Gloria goes missing and decides to handle a refusal to look at the flier by holding a knife to the person’s throat. And then, when a police officer asks her about it (because that is a thing that will happen when you hold a knife to somebody’s throat and they get a good long look at you), she stabs the cop to death in front of Gloria’s mother. And then she stabs Gloria’s mother to death

Mind you, this is all well before the reveal that she’s a cultist. So when that reveal comes, all of the stabbing, plus her inordinate interest in the fate of a necklace she gave Gloria to “protect” her, plus her insistence that her and Gloria meeting was destiny, well, that reveal has absolutely no impact at all because it was clear from minutes into the movie that there was something very, very off with Joan.

Likewise, Thomas is revealed to be nonthreatening pretty much immediately. He’s gentle, shy, soft-spoken, and sympathetic. He also serves as an exposition engine, explaining to Gloria in great detail exactly who he is, why he left the cult (he was never really one of them, and watching them kidnap Gloria was the final straw, apparently), what the cult’s purpose was that night, and what’s happening to Gloria is that she’s undergoing physical changes because she’s a host for the demon Abaddon, which is why she’s experiencing fevers and chills and hallucinations and weird skin stuff and puking. He tells her this almost immediately - well, no, not immediately, he tells her what the purpose of the ritual was, but tries to claim that it was all superstitious nonsense right up to the point that he finally comes clean, and it all feels like the filmmakers stalling for time, rather than any natural denial or reluctance on Thomas’ part.

And this is the really exasperating thing - the pieces are there. Scary - looking dude kidnaps young woman who has kind of freaky nightmares, worried mother and girlfriend try to find her, maybe punctuating acts and story beats with Gloria’s weird nightmares until it’s revealed at the end that the cult sacrificed themselves. Joan’s real identity is revealed in a moment of betrayal, too late for Thomas to do anything as the reason for Gloria’s rapid decline becomes clear...it could have been good. Maybe not, like, Hereditary-level good, but good nonetheless. But instead, the filmmakers give away every secret they have at the first opportunity in the most obvious way possible. I finished actors’ lines for them more than once over the course of this film, that is how formulaic all of this is. Every seam shows.

And it’s all abetted by an execution that, although better than amateurish, never rises to the level of anything better than dull competence. The dialogue trades entirely in clichés, the acting is either wooden or histrionic, and none of it believable as human behavior. In terms of structure, there’s no real pacing or dynamism, just the necessary story beats, presented in sequence without any sense that one set of events arises organically from another. Even the music is too obvious, all echoing booms and shrieking strings regardless of the scene.

And because the events of the film are too immediately obvious to really be considered revelations, there’s no mystery or power to it. It isn’t scary. Things just sort of happen, punctuated by stock jump-scare and nightmare sequences arranged like they were taken from a kit (including one entirely gratuitous scene where Gloria attempts to seduce Thomas), one stupid choice after another, everything dragged out past the point of believability. All of this in service of a climax where Abaddon is indeed summoned (and apparently the Angel of Destruction is a skinny white dude in some unconvincing horn prosthetics), and even that is a problem, because stories like this work best when you never see the demon, when there’s no opportunity for rescue or hope, when the conspiracy has done its work and it’s too late, like in Hereditary, or Rosemary’s Baby, or Kill List.

No, here it all comes down to the wire, to one final confrontation between Thomas and Joan (who are, of course, brother and sister) in which evil is defeated…except it isn’t, as we get in a totally nonsensical rug-pull of an ending because BLERGH EVIL. The ending is as obvious, weightless, and meaningless as the rest of it, a testament to an utter lack of surprise, mystery, or deviation from basest cliché.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon

The Alchemist Cookbook: I’m Going Crazy Out There At The Lake

There’s all kinds of ways to treat dark magic in film - you can go lurid and sensationalistic with it, you can treat it with somber dignity as a path of scholarship, you can reduce it to a few candles and a pentagram, and all of these show up in films I’ve written about. But one thing they all have in common is some kind of religious context, a focus on ritual and communion. Which is fine as far as it goes. Sometimes it works well and conveys grandeur, and sometimes it’s mere cliché.

The Alchemist Cookbook treats it differently, like a ramshackle, homebrew process. It’s less ritual circle and more meth lab, and the results are interesting, framing a story of personal disintegration.

There’s a young man out in a trailer at the edge of a swamp. He’s blasting music really loud and messing with chemical substances of some kind on the oven in the trailer’s kitchen area. It’s littered, cluttered with candles, powders, cans, just a whole mess of things loosely cobbled together and all way too close to open flames. His name is Sean, and though it isn’t immediately clear what he’s up to, in between fitful preparations and decoctions he keeps consulting a book with some kind of mysterious sigil on the front. As it transpires, Sean’s trying to practice alchemy - real lead-into-gold alchemy.

It doesn’t seem like he’s having much success, and Sean, twitchy, manic, (he keeps popping some kind of prescription medication, and it seems to be very important that he keep getting this medication), out in the woods, is becoming increasingly frustrated at his lack of success. And since alchemy is at the intersection of chemistry and magic, what starts off as attempts at homebrew chemistry take a darker turn, and the stovetop experiments turn into rituals out in the woods.

Invocations of old, powerful names.

As loath as I usually am to discuss films in terms of other films, this is an odd one. It’s an indie film shot on a small budget, which helps determine its aesthetic and focus to a certain degree, and it’s about alchemy and dark magic, with a focus on a single person going through a ritual and the ways that starts to change their environment. So, in a lot of ways, this really strikes me as sort of being like A Dark Song by way of Resolution and Jug Face. And again, it’s very much its own thing, and “this meets that” is always going to be simplistic, but these were the touchstones that occurred to me.

Like A Dark Song, it’s about someone using dark magic to single-mindedly pursue an outcome in isolation, and how the results of this work start to change things around the practitioner. Like Resolution and Jug Face, it was shot on a small budget in limited locations, so what we get is less explicitly supernatural than odd and unsettling, by and large, but it definitely sets a tone. Sean’s friend Cortez visits him, brings him food, medication, and supplies for his experiments, and though the film is less focused on their relationship than Resolution is in its protagonists, there are echoes of that same thorny interplay between the one making very bad decisions and the one trying to pull his friend back from the brink. Like Jug Face, it presents a vision of rural life with very little dignity or grandeur - everything is squalid and cheap and shabby, rickety. Everything is falling apart,

Well, everything and everyone. The film is as much about Sean’s steady psychological disintegration as anything else. He’s already in a bad way when we meet him, and the isolation and meddling with powerful forces just speed the process along, so at pretty much no point does his situation feel safe or like he is in control. His recklessness and instability does a lot of the heavy lifting until late in the movie when it becomes very clear there’s something out there, staged as a firelight meeting between Sean and a Cortez who seems…different. The trailer has the ambiance of an illegal still, powerful chemistry being done with store-bought chemicals, flimsy equipment, and the barest minimum of safety precautions. Sean’s mental state and grip on the world are precarious, and he’s invoking demons and making dangerous promises. It could all blow up at any minute.

The film feels both highly claustrophobic, with lots of tight shots and close-ups  in cramped interiors, and at the same time like it’s careening out of control, hurtling toward self-destruction. And this is just the part of it that is about Sean and his own safety. However, it’s just as much about the dark forces with which he’s consorting - he’s out in the middle of nowhere, and all kinds of strange shrieks and howls and bellows come out of the woods at night (and then during the day), suggesting monstrous things just out of sight. And there is Sean, crying out into the dark, taunting those things, daring them to come get him. And they do.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Good Thing For Your Ears Alert

So a little while back, I wrestled with the dilemma of H.P. Lovecraft, and how his particular brand of cosmic horror has largely been overshadowed either by cutesy pop-culture reduction or the legacy of his truly awful beliefs. I really like cosmic horror, and appreciate seeing expressions of it that get out from under his shadow whenever I can. Well, over the holiday weekend, I was introduced to a horror anthology podcast called Old Gods of Appalachia, and I am here to tell you that it is well worth your time and the use of your ears. The episodes so far are short (I think the longest one tops out at 24 minutes), but they work in accumulation to build up a vision of life in the Appalachian hills, mountains, valleys, and hollers that connects the world we know to something much darker. Root workers make bargains with ancient things, coal miners dig too deep and free things intended to be forever imprisoned. It's cosmic horror emerging organically from a specific place with a specific history and specific traditions, not just a slapdash pasting of tentacles and cults onto hillbilly stereotypes. The people telling these stories live in those woods, come from those woods, and the result is highly compelling. My one complaint would be that the next episode isn't up yet because dammit, I want more. GO GET THAT SHIT.