Antrum: The Necronomicon In Paperback

When I was a teenager, I was really into cosmic horror (well, I still I am, but I was then too), and I remember browsing in a bookstore near my house one afternoon and coming across a copy of the Necronomicon. For those unfamiliar, the Necronomicon is a fictional book that features in some of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. It’s a cursed book filled with ancient, forbidden knowledge, and it drives anyone who looks upon it insane.

And since I was looking at a copy of it in mass-market paperback, sitting on the shelf at a B. Dalton’s, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the real thing. Antrum is kind of like that paperback copy of the Necronomicon.

I love stories about cursed media - films, books, records, plays, etc. that bring madness nr ruin on anyone who experiences them. Works of art that serve as literal gateways to hell, that offer up visions that destroy the sanity of anyone who sees them. Usually, very few copies exist, or they’ve passed into the realm of myth, and the protagonist is someone tasked with going down whatever rabbit hole will lead to the art in question. Sometimes these stories are done well and sometimes they’re done badly, but I will give them a shot pretty much every time. 

But there’s another thing these stories tend to have in common - the audience rarely if ever gets any firsthand experience with the art in question. We almost always see its effects secondhand, with the horrifying experience itself left up to our imagination. And I think Antrum (subtitled The Deadliest Film Ever Made), if nothing else, gives me a good idea why that’s the case. It’s an ambitious failure of a film that gives itself a very difficult task to accomplish and doesn’t pull it off, mostly because it doesn’t have confidence in its audience or its ability to tell the story

We begin with a sort-of documentary introduction to the titular film, which was supposedly made in the 1970s and exhibited in public exactly twice before vanishing from the face of the earth. The problems start early, with about 10 minutes of background on the film’s effects - some of them seem to be supernatural (a theater in Budapest showing the film burned down in a mysterious fire), but others are people befalling accidents which could easily be unfortunate coincidence, and yet others appear to be the direct result of things that have nothing to do with the film. Right off the bat, this muddies the brief because it seems to be as much happenstance as evil. If you’re going to tell a story about a cursed film, make that shit evil. Make it the kind of thing that drives people to gouge their eyes, to change their name and move far away. Make everyone involved in its production either dead or very difficult to locate. Especially if you’re going to subtitle your film “The Deadliest Film Ever Made,” you can’t sell it with things like people slipping in the bathtub, because nobody’s going to believe that a film that has caused death and madness is going to be available on streaming services. You aren’t going to find the Necronomicon in paperback. Instead of trying to sell the idea that this is a real film, let it be fictional and then sell the idea that it’s something truly unholy. 

So we’re already off to a shaky start. It’s handled convincingly enough from a mockumentary standpoint, it sounds and plays like an actual talking-head documentary, but it doesn’t make a strong enough case for the actual power of the film before introducing the film itself. We get just enough to know that there is a film called Antrum, it only showed at a couple of film festivals, and pretty much everyone who saw it met with one kind of bad end or another, and it’s not enough to establish the film’s myth. It could really use some more setup in terms of who made it, where did it come from, what happened to everyone who starred in it, and so on. Or, hell, even just establish that it was made by someone nobody had ever heard of, and that nobody could track down the cast and crew. That would help establish the mystique that the story really needs. Instead, we get some perfunctory setup before we’re introduced to the film itself with a 30-second countdown under a disclaimer, which feels too hokey, like an old William Castle gimmick. 

So the first problem is really one of plausibility - we’re being sold a bill of goods that doesn’t for a second feel likely, and there’s not enough mystique to get the audience invested. The second problem is that we’re being shown the film in question, and there’s no way it’s going to live up to whatever mystique it does have. Usually the way these stories work is that the protagonist is someone tasked with tracking down a copy of the work in question for someone wealthy and powerful and usually depraved. The story then is usually more about the journey than the destination, the dark, horrible things the protagonist discovers along the way, rather than the work itself. And I think there’s a reason for that - it’s really, really hard to directly depict a piece of art that opens doors to hell and destroys minds and do justice to the idea. It’s much easier to convince an audience that the artifact in question really is as bad as it seems through showing the effect it has on others than it is through showing us the artifact itself. Put simply, it’s a lot easier to show people watching a movie and losing their minds than it is to show us the movie itself and make it seem convincingly like something that would make people lose their minds. Imagination tends to beat out direct depiction - the worst thing you can come up with in your own is generally going to be freakier than what someone else comes up with, and so whatever follows is bound to be underwhelming.

And sure enough, it’s pretty underwhelming. It’s the story of siblings Oralee and Nathan, who have apparently just had to euthanize their dog, Maxine. Afterwards, Nathan is plagued by nightmares and the feeling that Maxine is somewhere in hell because she was a bad dog. So older sister Oralee takes Nathan into the woods, supposedly where Satan fell from heaven, to perform a ritual and dig a hole to hell so they can rescue Maxine’s soul and redeem her. And so they begin to dig, and as they do, strange things begin to happen around them. By itself, it’s not a bad idea - the film as presented does feel like a cheaply produced piece of outsider art, like a somewhat cleaner, slightly more professional Manos: Hands Of Fate. It’s just amateurish enough to make everything about it seem slightly weird and uneasy. And it’s plausible enough, technically speaking - it looks like something that was made on the cheap in the 1970s, albeit in surprisingly good condition, though I’d rather have its vintage underplayed than overplayed. But there are a couple of problems with the film itself, apart from the gap between imagination and reality I already outlined. 

First, if it’s going to be as plodding and unfocused as it is from a narrative standpoint, then the strangeness really needs to pop - either the whole thing needs to feel off-kilter or it needs to feel really mundane right up to the moments that it doesn’t. As it is, it takes a little too long to get really weird, and there are too many stretches where nothing really happens even after it does get weird. Second, there are sort of two layers of narrative strangeness here, and they sort of detract from each other. The things actually happening in the film, when they do occur, are more often than not sufficiently creepy by themselves. But then on top of that, you have obviously spliced and inserted material - occult symbols, words on the screen, what seem to be scenes from a different, equally low-budget movie - and it’s all at odds with the source film, both by being way too obvious, and by being obviously added digitally - it’s too clean and sharp compared to the source material. Puzzlingly, the documentary layer of the film explains - well, first it explains that it’s there to begin with, ruining any element of surprise that it could have had on its side, and then it explains that it seemed to have been added later, which if anything dilutes the mystique of the original film. And then once the film itself is over, we get even more explanation over the end credits, basically “see, there were hidden symbols in this film, and here’s what they mean,” which is kind of insulting to the audience’s intelligence, at the end of the day. It’s not enough to let us sort of experience the film as text, the filmmakers had to signpost and footnote everything in case we missed the point, just yelling “GET IT?” over and over again.

This was always going to be an uphill battle, but there was potential here. The film within the film starts off with a dreamy strangeness to it and has a few moments that are genuinely creepy, and I think if the filmmakers had trusted in that footage without the distracting spliced-in stuff, and had tweaked the actual story some, it could have been something pretty unsettling. Not the sort of thing to drive anyone mad, not by a long shot, but at least disconcerting. Let inference do more of the work up-front, make the film’s history and provenance more elliptical, let the audience read into it more, then show us what appears to be a circa-70s low-budget story that just feels…off, and then take it stranger and stranger places. Don’t obviously splice in ham-handed subliminal stuff, and definitely don’t explain the subliminal stuff after the fact. That could have been something, but this tries too hard on every front to convince us that the paperback book really is the Necronomicon, when nobody was ever going to believe that.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon 

His House: No Matter Where You Go, There You Are

So there’s horror, and then there’s horror. There’s all of the stock techniques and clichés that, when employed skillfully, still make for something scary, and those films are plenty popular and can even be really good, I’m not looking down my nose at them. But then there’s the horror that gets real, that grabs at the things that terrify us, that scar us in ways that move beyond basic escapism. Because that’s what a lot of horror is, a safe way to vent anxiety and fear, a place we can go where we can feel those feelings without having to experience the bite of whatever makes us feel those things in our waking life. We can walk away from the horror film and put those feelings away. 

But then there’s the stuff that’s genuinely unsettling, and no, I don’t mean “extreme” horror or whatever. That kind of shit is usually boring and gross because there’s nothing to it, just escalating gore and pointless misanthropy. I’m talking about films that hook into the things that scare us outside of the movies. The things we can’t walk away from when the credits roll because they’re the sort of things waiting for us when the movie ends. In literature, The Shining is an excellent example because the book really is as much about Jack Torrance’s mounting fear at being unable to support his family at failing his wife and child and his inability to control his own rage as it is the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel. In film, The Babadook is an excellent example because even though there’s a ghost, that’s not Amelia’s problem. The problem is the grief and guilt she lives with and a son that can’t be left unsupervised, who is a danger to himself and others, and who she is beginning to realize might never be independent enough to let her live her own life. Those are the fears adulthood and circumstance bring to our door, and they’re waiting for us when our brief sojourns from them end.

All of this is really just to say that His House is definitely one of the latter films, a smart, vivid, understated story about the ghosts we bring with us, wherever we go.

We open in war-torn Sudan. A crowd of people are hurrying to a pickup truck, piling into the back to get out of the country, to escape their home. Civil war has already taken everything they have, and all they have left is to get out with their lives. Among them are Bol and Rial Majur, and their daughter Nyagak. The truck leads to a boat, and a dangerous nighttime escape over the water, no running lights, people as crammed on the deck as they were in the truck. There is a loud thud, and people fall overboard, including Nyagak. Bol and Rial lose their daughter at sea.

And now they’re in the bleak institutional nowhere of refugee detention in England. We come back to them on the day their case for asylum is to be heard. And miraculously, they are granted the status of “asylum-seeker,” which is better than “refugee” but not citizenship. So, from hell to limbo. They are assigned a caseworker, a stipend, a whole host of rules where any violations mean getting sent back to detention and likely having their appeal dismissed, which is a guaranteed return to the country they fled, but most importantly, a house. They will have a house.

Of course, it’s not much. It’s public housing, drab and sad, trash-strewn yards, barking dogs, scornful neighbors and roaming gangs of delinquents. The wallpaper is peeling, the lights don’t work, the doors don’t sit right on their hinges. But it’s all theirs. Which is unusual, because typically people in their situation are packed three and four families to one of these places. But it’s all theirs. And that’s all that matters to Bol. They have a home in their new country. A new place to call home, far away from strife and death, far away from what they left behind. He’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

At least, not until night comes, with strange scratching and scurrying sounds behind the walls. A face peering out at them from the dark.

A face that looks like Nyagak.

There are, simplistically, three different narrative layers at work here - first, there’s Bol and Rial’s grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt. They have been through a lot. There’s whatever horrors they saw back home, the ones that drove them to flee, there’s the death of their daughter, and that they survived the journey when so many others did not, when so many others didn’t even make it out in the first place. They live with that constantly. Then there’s the constant low-level tension and menace that attends being a refugee in a country that does not want or welcome you and makes no bones about letting you know that. Finally, there’s whatever is happening inside the house. Bol and Rial are very sympathetic from the get-go, just two people displaced by war and trying to make the best of where they’ve landed, and we feel the weight on their shoulders, the way relief mingles with guilt for feeling relieved, the sense of displacement, being adrift in a strange and hostile land, and now even home, the one place that should feel safe, a place to which they are effectively confined for the most part, isn’t safe either. As things get worse for them (which, of course they do), we feel for them.

And this is true even at their worst, because they aren’t saints. They’re messy, imperfect people trying to make the best of a very bad situation, and they don’t always handle it with grace. There’s a tension between Bol’s almost desperate desire to assimilate to the culture of their new home and Rial’s resistance to it, which seems to be grounded in a weary awareness that they aren’t welcome here and a desire to hold onto the things she loves and values about the home she had to leave. They’ve been through a lot together, more than anyone should have to bear in a lifetime, but how they deal with that differs dramatically. Bol seems to be driven primarily by denial, by wanting to put the whole nightmare behind him and throw himself into the ways of his new home, to run from what he’s been through. 

Denial is generally not the healthiest way to cope with things, and so Bol’s descent over the course of the film is most pronounced, but Rial’s seeing ghosts too. She’s just more willing to face them head-on because they’re a part of where they come from, they are part of their own cultural landscape, and so she faces them with resolve. It’s the world outside she struggles with the most. To this film’s credit, it doesn’t paint its characters in broad strokes - just as the Majurs aren’t saintly, the people surrounding them in their bleak little corner of England aren’t villains - just garden-variety bigots at worst, yelling “go back to Africa” or following them around in the department store, vigilant for shoplifting, or at best largely sympathetic but coming from a place that can’t comprehend the enormity of what’s brought them here. Every trip out of their depressing little house is weighed down with menace, with what could happen. And inside isn’t any better - if it’s not the ghosts that come at night, it’s the constant weight of bureaucracy - periodic meetings, no outside employment to supplement a meager income, no social gatherings, no candles, no games, just sit tight while we review your case and maybe…just maybe, if you don’t slip up once…you’ll be upgraded from asylum-seekers to potential citizens. Maybe. If you’re lucky and never make a mistake.

So there’s the horror of where they’ve been, the horror of where they are, and the horror of what seems to have come with them, all pressing down at once. As a result, the film has very little downtime, there’s a constant thread of unease running through it that is only sharpened as the ghosts they face make their presence more and more known over the course of the film. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another from minute to minute, and it works because the film rarely if ever overplays things. Strange noises, faces peering from holes in the walls, the sudden nightmarish juxtaposition of images from their past with their life in the present, handled often through startling, unexpected reveals that are never really telegraphed. Even the one moment I was expecting the obvious jump scare never really came. There’s maybe some slightly dodgy practical creature effects toward the end, but it’s a strong enough sequence that it’s easy enough to overlook, and it comes in the wake of a revelation that I’d argue is the most horrifying thing here, though it’s the sort of thing most folks would say wasn’t “really” horror. I envy them their lives that they can think this way, because it suggests they’ve never dealt with the sort of thing Bol and Rial have, or any number of other real-world horrors. There are things that stay with you for your entire life, that follow you, that you can’t walk away from, and what you do with them makes the difference between living your life, finding a home, or forever being chased by them, wherever you go.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Possessor: In Too Deep

There are two things that make us uniquely us, among all of the other people in the world: Our body, and the consciousness that inhabits that body. So, one reliable source for horror is anything that interferes with either of them. Films about possession or duplication of the body have a storied history in horror because it’s sort of terrifying to think that even these two certainties are ultimately not that certain either. Neither the mind nor the body are sacred.

Normally these are supernatural stories about evil spirits or extraterrestrials, but Possessor - a sharp, brutal, skillfully realized story pivoting around the uncertainty of both mind and body - is about the monolithic forces of greed and power and technology, and how in the pursuits of their own desires, they profane both mind and body.

We open on a young woman who, as calmly as you please, picks up what appears to be a needle-thin fiber optic lead and pushes it into her head. Blood - the first drops of many - wells up from the entry site in lush close-up. She adjusts dials on a small device attached to the lead, and as she does so, her expression shifts from amusement to bewilderment to sorrow. And now here she is at a stylish hotel, dressed in a jumpsuit matching those of other women in an elevator with her. She’s going to be introduced to someone important, though we don’t hear why. She lingers upon leaving the elevator, walks by a buffet, looks over some knives. And now here she is, kissing a man on the cheek before ramming a knife hilt-deep into his neck. More blood everywhere as people run and she mounts the man, stabbing over and over until his shirt and the floor beneath him is red. Her shoes squeak in the blood as she stands. She says “pull me out” and then take s pistol from her purse. She tries to put it in her mouth to shoot herself, but she can’t, she resists, she gags. And then she turns it on the police who have arrived. They gun her down instantly.

Somewhere else, a woman wakes up, a strange machine pulled from her head. Shaken, gasping, and dehydrated, she retches. Now here she is taking some kind of memory test that uses objects from her childhood. The person administering it wants to make sure she’s “clear,” that there is no “false psyche.” That she can distinguish between things that belong to her and things that do not.

The woman is Tasya Vos, and she is a very specific kind of assassin. She works for a company that does jobs for wealthy, powerful entities. With the aid of some kind of brain implant technology, Tasya is able to inhabit the minds of specific people, to hijack their bodies long enough to kill someone close to them, her own consciousness yanked out on the death of the person she inhabits. She observes the “host” beforehand to get an idea of their mannerisms, she works with her boss to develop a narrative for the host’s behavior leading up to the killing, the host is snatched up off the street, anesthetized and implanted. No one is the wiser. They are the perfect crimes. 

But as we observe from very early in, Tasya might be starting to show the strain that comes with this kind of work. It’s jarring to be shoved into someone else’s consciousness. It threatens her own identity, her own sense of self, and over time can start to cause brain damage. It’s a delicate balance, and Tasya, as much as she denies it and acts like everything’s fine, is starting to fray around the edges. She’s frail and colorless, almost larval, separated from her husband and son because she feels like she might be a danger to them. She gets tremors, hallucinations, lingering memories of the things she’s done in other people’s bodies. She has to rehearse being herself. Her boss sees Tasya as a protégé and is grooming her to be the new director. But there’s one last job. There’s always one last job. It shouldn’t be a tough one - an insecure, unstable former coke dealer who is marrying up snaps and kills his fiancée and fiancée’s father. That’s the narrative. But as is so often the case with that one last job, things go awry in horrifying fashion.

I usually prefer to discuss films as singular entities, separate from the specific people involved and their other work, but I want to make an exception here. This film was written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son to noted director David Cronenberg, and much like his previous feature film Antiviral (and much of his father’s early work), this film turns a detached, clinical eye to the effect that technology has on what it means to be human, the ways social structures and social entities appropriate it for their own use, to satisfy their own appetites. Antiviral concerned itself with the body, celebrity, and the consumption of the products of celebrity. Here the focus is identity, autonomy, and will, and how those things can be subjugated to feed more abstract appetites. In both cases, the interrogation of these ideas is shockingly literal and direct. Something father and son share is a way of…not shattering taboos about the mind and the body, exactly, but sort of disregarding them. This film, like Antiviral before it (and classic David Cronenberg films like The Brood, Videodrome, and Dead Ringers) doesn’t seem to hold any idea particularly sacred or off-limits, but it also never feels like it’s violating the perceived sanctity of biology and consciousness for the sake of pure shock. The effect in both cases is highly unnerving, and here, given Tasya’s work as an assassin, this film is also intensely violent. It’s not the glib violence of a slasher film, either. Blood gushes and pours and people moan and struggle and suffer and don’t necessarily die right away. It’s messy and unpleasant. You’re supposed to see it for the awful thing it is. And then there’s the body committing the violence, and what happens when the host realizes what’s happening. The mental landscape Tasya inhabits when she’s working is rendered in liquid, nightmarish terms, in selves dissolving, being worn like sagging fleshy masks, awful to look at. Memories get mixed up, experiences get mixed up, people get mixed up.

Much like Antiviral, this is a very skillfully made film of singular vision. The cinematography is as cold and distant as the people inhabiting it (this isn’t really a character study), perpetually overcast days and opulence lit against encroaching dark, the world of the wealthy and powerful depicted alongside monolithic skyscrapers, the corporations that inhabit them, and the identically-uniformed employees who spend their days in the modern equivalent of a salt mine, doing tedious, repetitive work micromanaged to a particulate degree. It’s not the thrust of the film, but again, much like Antiviral, it infects the periphery of the world in which the story takes place. It’s narrative color that describes a world distant from but easily extrapolated from our own.  This narrative color is accompanied by a surprisingly vivid cinematic palette as well. The real world is cold and gray and full of sleek, impersonal architecture, but Tasya’s interior world overlays all of that with bright washes of color that indicate memory or stress or conflict, and between the strong use of light and color to describe interior experience and a majority of the effects being practical and thus more tactile (and squirm-inducing as a result), the film has sort of a vintage quality to it without being explicit homage. It feels timeless, like it could as easily be a restoration of something from the 1980s as a modern film - what technology we see doesn’t look especially futuristic, and some of it is downright grungy, kitbashed out of necessity. It’s a world that isn’t ours, but could be, quite easily.

And it’s important to remember that all of it takes place against a backdrop of monolithic, faceless entities jockeying for power. Tasya is an agent of a faceless corporation, used to give someone else leverage over another faceless corporation and in doing so give more leverage to the faceless corporation she works for. There is vast machinery at work here, and though it’s easy to forget about that part as we watch this struggle between these people in this moment, the film does not let you forget, and is in the final analysis as brutal to the idea of mind (and maybe even soul) as it is to the bodies of those unfortunate enough to get in Tasya’s way. It’s as powerful as anything I’ve seen in recent memory.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

As Above So Below: The Only Way Over Is Through

There’s a particular type of scary movie that makes movement through a space a big part of the narrative. Take, for example, The Descent, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. A group of women are trapped in a cave system, and must press forward in hopes of finding a way out. [REC] (and its remake, Quarantine) inverts this by trapping a bunch of people in a quarantined apartment building and forcing them to move up higher and higher in the building as the lower floors become more dangerous, also bringing them closer to the source of the danger. I don’t run across films that do this especially well very often, so it’s nice when they do - constrained space and a relentless push in a particular direction can give the story a nice momentum, a sense of dread inevitability.

As Above So Below was a really pleasant surprise in a lot of ways. I went into it assuming it was going to be a movie about thrill-seeking teens encountering zombies, but it really wasn’t that at all. What it turned out to be was a surprisingly gripping story focused on an ever-deeper descent into darkness, wrapped in some goofy particulars that don’t completely undermine it, but do end up taking some of the bite out of it.

The goofiness starts early, as we meet our protagonist traveling incognito through Iran in search of some artifact. It’s apparently a very dangerous trip, because she makes a point of telling the camera that she if she gets caught, it would be very bad for her, but…she’s telling this to a camera that she’s carrying. In the middle of a crowded passenger bus. So much for secrecy. She meets a contact who smuggles her to an off-limits part of the city after a military-imposed curfew. He’s really nervous and keeps talking about how they can’t stay and how they need to go, and she sends him on while she breaks through a stone wall to unearth an ancient stone idol covered in writing, which she records as fast as she can before the military catches up to her.

So, yeah. This is Scarlett. She has two doctorates, speaks four languages, and has a black belt in Krav Maga. She also appears to be maybe 28. She’s continuing her late father’s work, a search for the legendary Philosopher’s Stone, an alchemical substance capable of transforming base metals into gold. She’s a swashbuckling adventurer crossing the globe looking for the stuff of myth. After her narrow escape in Iran, her quest leads her to Paris, to seek out George, a reclusive young man who also crosses the globe, breaking into historical sites to…repair things. George doesn’t want to help her, he’s still sore about an incident in Turkey, but she needs his help - he speaks Aramaic, and she doesn’t. She also needs his help to break into a church where noted alchemist Nicholas Flamel’s tombstone is located, because she’s sure that the map to the Philosopher’s Stone is hidden in his tombstone. Scarlett is accompanied on the journey by Benji, a documentarian recording her search for posterity. 

(This is my big problem with the film right here - Scarlett and George are characters right out of National Treasure or Tomb Raider, exaggerated enough that they’re hard to believe as actual people, and thought it doesn’t really matter so much once things get going and they aren’t abrasive or anything, it starts everything off on a ridiculous note that seeps its way back into the final act. It’s a jarring tonal mismatch, and a puzzling narrative choice.)

So the three of them break into a church, translate some stuff, and do some ad-hoc chemistry on the back of the tombstone to reveal a location in the Paris catacombs, an extensive tunnel system under the city housing the skeletal remains of  millions of residents going back centuries. Apparently, there are sections of the catacombs that have been closed off to the public for decades, if not centuries, and some of them run right underneath Flamel’s resting place. There’s some finagling as Scarlett recruits a group of urban explorers - Papillon, Souxie, and Zed - to guide Scarlett, Benji, and a very reluctant George into the catacombs. It’s rough going - narrow, claustrophobic, filled with piles of bones and sections choked with water, and then they arrive at a junction with only two ways forward. One is a narrow crawl over piles and piles of bones, the other is a partially blocked tunnel that Papillon absolutely refuses to enter. He knows these tunnels, and he knows that nobody who has ever gone through that tunnel has ever come back out. It’s a bad place.

And that’s when the other routes collapse, leaving that tunnel as the only way forward.

So this is, then, a journey into darkness. The six of them only have one way forward, and it’s into territory that swallows up anyone who enters it. Much to my pleasant surprise, it makes the most out of this, and once the action movies into the catacombs, much of the silliness of the opening is forgotten (though not all - Scarlett is dressed for a casual afternoon out, not caving) in favor of something relentless, unsettling, and strange. A lot of this is down to how the film is shot. It’s not a found-footage film per se, but everything’s shot using headcams, so there’s the same immediacy and visual claustrophobia that made Gonjiam so effective, enhanced by the actual claustrophobia of shooting on location in the actual Paris catacombs. Our field of view is as tight and compressed and limited as the setting, and seeing everything from the point of view of the protagonists means that the camera doesn’t really linger on things, so there’s just enough time to register that something’s off before we have time to process what exactly it was. Our perspective is as limited as those of the protagonists. Likewise, the film relies on practical effects that are restrained enough that they don’t distract from the experience. At no point does anything we see feel contrived or artificial, it all feels like it’s happening in that space and in real time, which gives the film a real punch. Out six protagonists are forced to keep pushing forward into an increasingly treacherous dark, descending deeper and deeper into what starts to seem like something other than the world as we know it.

And it’s a good story - as I said in the introduction, I was really afraid this was going to be some story about thrill-seekers encountering zombies in the Paris catacombs, which could have been really, really boring. But it isn’t. It becomes clear pretty early that these six people have gone someplace that might not actually exist in our world, one that doesn’t obey conventional ideas of space and time. For most of its runtime, it does a pretty good job of making things weird without overexplaining - it’s very good about just dropping peripheral strangeness in and letting it sort of exist without lingering on it or drawing too much attention to it, and once things get going the whole thing has enough momentum that things just keep get increasingly stranger and stranger, and the constant urgency of their situation, the claustrophobic cinematography and equally claustrophobic setting just means that when the really weird shit starts happening it feels relentless and inexplicable.

Well, at least until it’s actually explained. It’s not necessarily bad that there’s an underlying logic to what’s happening to the protagonists (and it largely resists spelling everything out), but this brings us back to the initial premise of the film, of Scarlett the adventurer, seeking out objects of myth. In the final act, it brings in just enough of the sort of mythology that you’d expect from, say, a Tomb Raider film that it weakens the ending somewhat. It doesn’t cripple it, doesn’t completely undo its effectiveness, but the shift to something more Indiana Jones-ish does undermine it enough that it doesn’t stick its landing as well as it could. Which is too bad - if it had just been about a bunch of thrill-seeking urb-ex types who got in way over their head, and the imagery and mythology and everything had just been left as it was for sharp-eyed fans of the classics to pick up on, it could have been really solid. The journey ever forward, ever downward freights everything with dread and unease, and the deeper they go, the stranger everything becomes, and the more danger they’re in, but bringing magic artifacts into it adds just enough silliness around the edges to dilute the final result.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Available on Amazon

Southbound: On The Road To Nowhere

Horror anthologies are a tough proposition. On the one hand, I think horror lends itself especially well to short-form narrative because it’s easy for scary stories to sort of sag or bog down in the middle, or to kind of stumble to an end. A short story gets in there, scares you, and ends before you can really catch your breath. On the other, anthologies run the risk of inconsistency, of strong segments and weak segments, and that can sometime detract from the overall quality. 

There is none of that to worry about with Southbound. It’s a sharp, smartly paced and remarkably consistent anthology that never lets off the gas.

It’s also a little different, narratively, from most anthology films. It doesn’t really have bookending segments (well, it does, but they’re fleshed out enough that they’re practically stories of their own), and it doesn’t signpost its discrete segments. Rather, one story dovetails into the next, with the common thread being the same long, lonely stretch of desert road, where signs of life are few and far between, and what life there is seems...strange, somehow.

The Way Out

So the opening segment really sets the tone for the anthology as a whole. It sort of picks up in medias res, with two men - Jack and Mitch - pulling their pickup truck into a gas station/convenience store out in the middle of nowhere. Something bad has happened to Jack and Mitch last night - they’re covered with blood and decidedly freaked out, and there are these shadowy things on the horizon, watching, never far behind. They talk elliptically about what they did, about having to pay a price, and as much as they try to pretend like nothing’s wrong as they gas up the truck and wash off the blood in the gas station restroom, it is very clear that there is something very wrong, and it’s coming closer all the time. And as they drive away…they end up right back at the gas station. Over, and over, and over again. As I said, this segment sets the tone for the anthology. There’s a lot of energy here, an irresistible momentum that comes from two men on the run from something that they seem unwilling to talk about, something that it’s clear they can’t outrun. Because they can’t, and when it catches up, things get very weird and very bloody very quickly.

Siren

The focus shifts from Jack and Mitch to three young women - Sadie, Ava, and Kim - blearily stumbling out of their room at the motel adjacent to the gas station from the first segment. They’re a band on tour, on the road going from one gig to another. Three young women, but in pictures they have, there’s a fourth that they don’t really talk about much. It isn’t immediately clear why she isn’t with them now. There’s some tension around that. Sure enough, once they’re well away from the gas station, the van blows a tire. They don’t have a spare because they needed room for the drum kit. GPS can’t find them, their phones can’t get a signal. They’re miles from anything and anywhere. And what do you know, a couple stops when they see the women need help. They’re Dale and Betty, a surprisingly (unnervingly) chipper couple who seem to have stepped right out of the 1950s. They’re happy to help, happy to offer them a place to stay for the night until they can get a replacement tire. They’ll even introduce them to their friends, the Kensingtons, a couple (with very odd twin sons) equally out of time. They’re so happy that these young ladies are staying for dinner. 

This segment is more atmospheric than the previous segment, with a lot of the work being done by the relentless strangeness of their hosts as well as the gradual revelation about the missing fourth woman. It’s not subtle, this isn’t a case of everything seeming normal until something sinister is revealed, no, everything is pretty fucking strange right from the start, and it plays out with the woozy inexorability of a nightmare.

The Accident

This one leans even more into atmosphere than the last one, as Lucas - a man on the road, trying to get back home to his wife Claire - has a horrible accident in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert. He’s hit someone with his car, and they’re still alive, but just barely. Lucas does the right thing and calls 911 to try and get help. Only 911 can’t locate him. They’re trying to give him instructions while he drives to the nearest town to get them to a hospital. Emergency services are too far away and they aren’t sure exactly where he is, so he’s flying by the seat of his pants when he pulls into a small, blink-and-you-miss-it town. It’s a church, a bar, a tattoo parlor…and a hospital. He pulls in and rushes them to the emergency room entrance…

…but there’s nobody there.

So we have one man alone in what appears to be an abandoned hospital, trying to save someone’s life by following instructions given to him on the phone by an EMT and a surgeon. The hospital itself is creepy and awful in its emptiness - especially when accentuated by half-eaten meals and phones left off the hook, as if everyone left very suddenly and not of their own free will. It’s excruciating to watch at points, as Lucas is trying to do things he isn’t trained to do - it’s one of those stories where someone’s being talked through how to save someone’s life, but turned up to 11 as the person he’s trying to save is in desperately bad shape and getting worse by the minute, conscious the entire time but unable to speak. One of the common threads running through all of the segments of this film is a feeling of wrongness, of there being something unsettling lurking at the margins, of people too caught up in the momentum of desperate situations to notice the red flags all around them, and nowhere is that more evident than here.

Jailbreak

This one starts off relatively sedate, compared to the previous segments (well excepting one awful revelation from the previous segment that plays out at the beginning of this one), it’s just a bunch of folks at a neighborhood bar trying to have a quiet drink. Though the bartender’s insistence on making sure the door is latched shut is a little odd. Just a bunch of locals having a quiet beer at the end of the day, until a wild-eyed man toting a shotgun breaks in. The man with the shotgun is Danny, and he’s looking for his sister. He knows these people knows where he is, and he’s intent on them taking him to her. The locals are, well, nonplussed by the prospect, and they warn Danny that he’s not going to like where this is headed. And so the rest of the segment is basically Danny finding out exactly where this is headed, and how badly it’s going to end for him. It’s not as immediately nightmarish as the previous segments, and it reminds me of some of the work of Nathan Ballingrud or Clive Barker, in how it’s describing a world that coexists right alongside ours, just out of sight unless you know exactly where and how to look for it. The horror here, then, is the horror of revelation, as Danny learns what has happened to his sister, and how there’s much much more to this little desert town that he ever imagined. 

The Way In

And so we end the film at the ice cream stand from the previous segment. Daryl and Cait are stopping for a bite to eat, along with their daughter Jem, as they’re taking a road trip to see her off to college. They’re worried about her ability to live on her own, to stand up for herself, the usual stuff that you get when your child is getting ready to leave the nest. They’ve rented a house nearby to stay the night. 

And then, as they’re settling in, three men in masks show up. It’s not clear why they’re there, and they aren’t saying much. But they have knives and baseball bats. It’s very much a siege story in miniature, hitting all of the right beats without a lot of padding, pivoting around who is where in the house at any given moment, and who does or does not have the upper hand. It’s never made precisely clear why these three men are here, but we get the sense that Daryl has done something terrible and he is finally facing a reckoning for it. Just like that, an idyllic last night with their daughter turns into a fight for survival, and you get the sense that everyone involved is paying some terrible price for their part in all of this.

So we have five segments, with different directors, but more than pretty much any other anthology I’ve seen, this film is aesthetically consistent enough that it feels less like an anthology and more like one film with a series of shorter stories contained within it. Throughout, the cinematography has a grainy, washed-out feel to it, it relies on lots of dingy location settings, and the score is full of ominous, pulsing, analog synthesizer. This gives the whole thing sort of a grindhouse feel without tipping over into pastiche or even homage. It’s more like it preserves the rawness and the energy of those sorts of films at their best without being self-conscious about it, and the pacing and editing gives the whole thing a constant sense of momentum. It starts off with two men running, and just as their story winds down the next one picks up the slack, and that one ends with the beginning of the next, and so on. We’re sort of carried along without being given much time to catch our breath. Just as we’re processing what we’ve just seen, we’re on to the next, so the unease -whatever form it takes - is constant.

On top of that, it does a really good job of telling a lot of its stories in asides, allusions, throwaway lines and reveals. This is not a film that overexplains. In every segment it feels like we’ve come in after something bad has already happened, and something worse is about to happen. The stories are told very economically, giving us everything we need without slowing down, and the loose ends it does dangle in front of us just enhance the uneasiness. There’s not a lot of world-building or mythologizing, but we get the sense of a coherent world nonetheless, that this is all happening in a particular place and time, one with its own rules and logic. It’s tough to write this up without spoiling it because each story shares elements with the one that comes after it, and there’s a strong sense, never made explicit but available if you pay close attention, that there’s a cyclical or closed-loop element to the whole thing, as if this lonely stretch of road and the small towns and gas stations that dot it aren’t somewhere you’d be able to find if you just went out for a drive. That this stretch of road, this little town, the motel, the gas station, the tattoo parlor, the ice cream shop, that they all exist…elsewhere, and that maybe everyone we’ve seen is here for a reason. 

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

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The Devil’s Candy: Family Values

I remember, on a particular occasion, listening to a Baptist preacher go on and on about how Satan was the destroyer, and how he would try to tear a family apart. It was my sister’s wedding, so it kind of brought the room down. 

But it got me to thinking about how a couple of the better horror films I’ve watched recently - The VVitch and Hereditary - work with this very idea, the idea that evil worms its way into a family and destroys them from within, by capitalizing on their weaknesses as individuals and as a unit.  Well, add The Devil’s Candy to that list. It’s a tense, expressionistic story about evil’s effect on two families, made with a great deal of skill and attention to detail.

It begins with whispers in the ear of Raymond, a hulking manchild. We can’t quite hear what the whispers are saying, but it isn’t good. Raymond doesn’t like the whispers. They tell him to do things. So Raymond drowns the whispers out by playing the guitar, loud. Ominous, droning chords like a rolling bank of storm clouds. Raymond’s mother doesn’t approve, so he pushes her down the stairs.

But that was some time ago, and now Jesse, his wife Astrid, and their daughter Zooey are late for an appointment. Jesse’s a painter, and he’s been working on a commission for a local bank. It’s not work that fulfills him, but it brings in money. And they’re going to need it, because they’d discovered a deal on a house out in the country, a big, old turn-of-the-century number going for a song. They’re going to meet with the realtor, and once they see the house it’s love at first sight. Lots of original details, plenty of space, and a big barn out back that Jesse can turn into a studio. Oh, there’s just one thing, the realtor says, By law he has to disclose any deaths that have taken place in the house, and here there have been two. An older woman fell down the stairs, and her husband perished shortly after.

But it’s a big, gorgeous house, and they should be able to afford it as long as Jesse can keep picking up commissions. So they buy a house. And that’s when the troubles start. Jesse starts having nightmares, troubling visions that pour their way out of him into artwork he doesn’t even really remember painting. He loses large chunks of time. He starts hearing whispers. And then, one sedate night, there’s a knock on the door.

Raymond has come home.

We really have two stories here. The first is Raymond’s - he’s been away for some time, but now he’s come back to the only home he’s ever known, and he’s awfully taken with Zooey for some reason. Raymond has given up fighting the voices whispering inside his head, and he’s doing the terrible things they tell him to do. The second story is that of Jesse and his family. Well, it’s more about Jesse’s soul, as well as the soul of his family - he’s an artist and has to follow his muse, but he also wants to give his family a better life, so he takes commissions for stuff he doesn’t like painting, and so there’s this situation where something powerful is moving through him, speaking through him, and there’s compelling art coming from it, and there’s someone willing to dangle a lot of money in front of him for that work, but it’s also taking a toll on the relationship he has with his family. We’ve seen the way the pressures to provide can lead to horrible ends in the The Shining (though this family is far more sympathetic), and so he’s tempted by the money and prestige selling this new work would bring, even though it’s basically draining him of everything good. And they really do need the money. But in addition to the war for Jesse’s soul there’s a very real threat in the form of Raymond out there too, and so the film goes back and forth between these two stories, and we watch as they slowly converge and come to their inevitable collision.

It’s not exactly a character study, but the main characters are sketched out well and believably. Jesse, Astrid and Zooey feel like an actual family with a great deal of love for each other, and as a result the film feels as much like a battle for their salvation as anything else. You don’t usually think of horror films that way, but these three are such basically good, decent people that you’re as much rooting for them to be okay as you are for evil to be defeated. Raymond is doing terrible things, but you never really lose sight of the lost, broken child that he really is. He knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he can’t stop doing them. The voices won’t let him. There’s still implacable menace there, but he never feels like a cartoon villain.

This skill and care extends to the technical aspects of the film as well. The pacing is top-notch, starting slowly, introducing parallel threats, one earthly, one more spiritual, and ratcheting up the tension before stomping on the gas in a relentless third act. This film does a lot with reveals, sudden, dramatic cuts from one place to another, using powerfully composed shots to convey the emotion of the scene. A lot of tension is created in the editing, lots of close-ups on the act of painting (matched against horrible aftermath in one particularly compelling sequence), and a bold use of the color red throughout to signal heat, menace, blood, danger. It’s very much grounded in realism but still has all kinds of little arch touches, subtle Satanic references that sort of keep you on your toes, and it’s set in rural Texas, so the lighting and cinematography remind me a lot of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with better production values. Everything looks hot, people are sweaty, the sun beats down in the daytime, everything is dry and dusty. You’d think they were already burning in a lake of fire just to look at the screen. 

In the sound design, it’s also very much a love letter to metal - Zooey and Jesse share a love of it, and the soundtrack is well curated with examples of the genre that complements the film’s mood in different ways throughout. Sonically, it’s exactly the right choice - aggressive, abrasive, and sinister by turns, and as a style of music that often relies on Satanic imagery, so it’s consonant with the themes of the film, but here it’s actually sort of an antidote to the devil. The love of it bonds Jesse and Zooey, and Raymond uses it to keep the voices at bay. The director’s previous film, The Loved Ones, also used music to great effect, so its integration into the story here comes as no surprise. It reflects and enhances the themes and imagery of the film while also ironically commenting on them. 

It’s interesting, in some ways this is a really classic sort of haunted-house story - family moves into a house with a dark past, dad starts to kind of lose his shit and it’s up to his family to rescue him and keep himself alive. And it’s not afraid to get kind of old-school with its use of the devil, either. But it’s not as grim as films like The VVitch or Hereditary, and I think the big difference is the kind of family we have here. Those films explore how misunderstandings and resentments and lack of communication open the door to evil, and here we have a family who loves and cares for each other, and in the end that makes all the difference. That might sound corny, but it doesn’t come off that way. Make no mistake, it doesn’t pull many punches, and it had me on the edge of my seat. But after a few disappointingly mechanical efforts, it’s nice to watch something that’s really good, and after some seriously bleak films (which I do like), it’s nice to watch one that gives us people we can really care about. Satan may be the destroyer, but he doesn’t tear every family apart.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

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Devil’s Gate: It’s Not Unexpected If You Expect It

There’s this fun game you can play where you try to make movies sound as dull as possible, generally through generous amounts of understatement. For example, The Shining can be summed up as “a man struggles with writer’s block.” The Descent can be summed up as “a caving expedition encounters difficulties.” You get the idea. 

Now, I’m not saying that it’s a good idea to go that dull when you’re providing a blurb for a movie, but I do think understatement is useful, especially when it comes to horror films, because it hopefully preserves a certain amount of surprise. Surprise is an important part of scaring people - not just the cheap startles of jump scares, but twists and reveals, the unexpected and unanticipated. It can come halfway in, or in the third act, or at the end (just not at the beginning, because that doesn’t work out well too often), but wherever, if it’s well-timed and the audience doesn’t see it coming, it can be much, much more effective than any amount of gore or screaming figures out of nowhere.

The blurb for Devil’s Gate isn’t bad, as that sort of thing goes - “Seeking a missing woman in North Dakota, an FBI agent and a sheriff focus on her religious zealot husband but discover something far more sinister” - and it by no means gives away the entire story, but it would have benefitted from even more understatement. Along with, well, a lot of other things. It’s not really a horror film, though it begins like one, and not an especially subtle one at that. Actually, nothing about this film is especially subtle. There’s a little promise in the beginning, but it’s mostly squandered by the halfway mark.

It begins with an absolutely gorgeous shot of a rural plain broken only by a single two-lane road and the one car traveling it. As we pull closer to the car, we hear it playing some kind of corny butt-rock, the driver getting into it as he steps on the gas, indulging in the freedom of the open highway…

…until his battery dies. Crap. His phone won’t get a signal either. So he does what one does, getting his car onto the shoulder and heading for the nearest farm to try and call for a tow. 

And, sure enough, the farm he walks up to looks like your basic stock creepy farmhouse out of any given deranged backwoods cannibal movie. Windchimes made from scrap metal and cutlery, the fences are all jagged, everything’s dilapidated and boarded up, and everything is wrapped in barbed wire. There’s a “No Trespassing” sign that gives the dude pause for a couple of seconds before he unhitches the gate and walks through anyway. He knocks on the door, nothing. He shouts that his car broke down and he’d just like to use the phone, nothing. He walks around the side of the house, spots a figure through a basement window, ranting at something just out of sight. Apparently, this is the sign that maybe he shouldn’t be here. But it’s too late, as he discovers the hard (sharp, rusty, pointy, fatal) way that the yard is littered with improvised booby traps.

This stranded motorist has no relevance to the rest of the film. He’s just there to set up the idea that sinister things are afoot here, but, like, you can tell that just by looking at the place. The real story begins with Special Agent Daria Francis flying into Devil’s Gate, North Dakota. She’s there in response to a missing-persons report - a woman and her son were supposed to come stay with her sister and never arrived. She’s met by sheriff’s deputy Conrad Salter. He’s friendly and accommodating, she’s kind of uptight. The rude, dismissive sheriff doesn’t help any, nor does his insistence that she stay away from the most likely suspect. 

So what we would appear to have is a standard fish-out-of-water story: A federal agent called in where they aren’t wanted to investigate a mysterious disappearance that local law enforcement isn’t too keen to solve for reasons not readily apparent. Agent Francis is no-nonsense and sort of uptight, as you would expect, but also relatively inexperienced and still stinging from botching her first missing-persons assignment, which is sort of an interesting fillip. Deputy Salter is very much your standard small-town deputy - helpful, but as firmly embedded in the community as everyone else. But he’s also smart, thorough, and competent at his job. Going to high school with their prime suspect doesn’t compromise his instincts, and he can take care of himself. So yeah, they’re what this kind of story dictates they’re going to be, but that’s not all there is to them. There’s some nuance there, some surprise. In a different movie, these little character beats might matter, might help elevate the film above cliché. 

Here, not so much. See, one of the big problems with this film is that we’re sort of told up front that not all is as it appears to be - like, literally, it’s in the blurb for the movie - and that’s immediately clear because the initial setup is painted in such broad strokes that the viewer knows there has to be something else going on. Their prime suspect, Jackson Pritchard, is the husband to the missing woman, father to the missing child. He’s fervently religious, like his father before him. He’s also the owner of the farm from the beginning, the one ranting in the basement, the one burying the body of the hapless motorist. He’s too unstable to be the real antagonist here, if that makes sense. His farm shouts “creepy farm where there are sinister things happening” way too loudly (and, to the movie’s credit, Francis and Salter actually point out how creepy the place looks, which was a nice touch) for it to really be anything but misdirection. 

Which is kind of a problem, from my perspective - I think stories where an outsider comes into a community to investigate a crime and discovers something far worse going on underneath benefit from the pretext for the investigation being something relatively routine, and then escalating things gradually as information doesn’t add up, and as it becomes clear that things are being covered up, and in a small community, there’s always the possibility that a lot of people are in on it, and so the outsider doesn’t know who to trust and can’t feel completely safe. We get a little of that here, but again, it’s not subtle at all when you have a sheriff who flat-out tells the outsider not to investigate the prime suspect. It’s not subtle at all when that prime suspect is overtly creepy and very definitely doing creepy things in a story that we’ve already been told isn’t what it appears to be. There’s no real opportunity for tension or surprise to develop when everything is so clearly signposted or, at least, not when it’s this clearly signposted and then not subverted at all. There’s no uncertainty or mystery to it.

But that’s just how it all starts. Like, that’s just the first act. At around the halfway point, the twist (that we know is coming, because we’ve been told up front that there’s something else going on) gets revealed, and whatever potential there was in the first half of the film gets chucked out the window in favor of a muddled siege film where our protagonists decide to stop being the people they were in the first half of the film and instead be the complete opposite, the real threat is revealed as something that isn’t actually all that scary, and the whole thing sort of devolves into a lesser episode of The X-Files with some questionable cruelty to helpless creatures and desiccated fetuses thrown in to distinguish it from the kind of stuff you’d see on cable TV. The dialogue, already very much on the speechier side, starts spilling over into exposition dumps and even though the majority of the second half is confined to a single location, there’s very little sense of urgency or claustrophobia or even really danger, just a lot of yelling and running around. And so it just sort of drags, people telling us things and then running off someplace, and this happening over and over and it’s just really hard to care about any of it, and then it ends pretty much exactly how you’d expect. For a film that is ostensibly about how not everything is as it seems, a film that at least tries to push back a little against cliché in some (though certainly not all) of its characterization, once it gets rolling it manages to make every obvious, expected, anticipated choice that it can. There’s no horror here, because horror requires tension and a certain amount of uncertainty. This film pretty much tells you everything that’s happening as it’s happening and doesn’t really try to surprise us. It’s like the filmmakers didn’t stop to think that this is a story we’ve heard before, and could they maybe use our preconceptions against us? Nah.

It’s too bad - it might not have gotten off to an especially strong start, and the tone was a little disjointed at first, but our two protagonists at least seemed like they weren’t going to collapse into cliché right away. The budget was certainly well-spent, with lots of moody panoramic shots of plains country stretching on forever, storm clouds hanging low, and surprisingly solid creature effects, but a film can be as good-looking as it wants, but if there’s nothing to surprise, no mystery, nothing unexpected, it doesn’t matter. And when this film needed to surprise us, it didn’t, and when it needed to defy cliché, it didn’t, and what we’re left with feels like something we’ve seen dozens of times before. If you’re going to tell us everything isn’t as it seems, then it…shouldn’t be exactly as it seems.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

What Keeps You Alive: Running Out The Clock

I know I talk about it a lot, but boy, is pacing ever important in movies, especially scary movies. There are all kinds of ways to handle it, but knowing when to let off the gas and when to floor it is critical in terms of building up tension and mood. Sure, you can go full-tilt from the start, but that runs the risk of numbing the audience. The quiet moments make the loud ones stand out. An expertly paced horror movie plays the feelings of its audience like an instrument, and pacing has a lot to do with that. 

It’s the biggest problem with What Keeps You Alive as well. I mean, it’s also a clumsy, obvious melodrama in a lot of ways, but it’s the pacing that kills it. More specifically, how certain choices mean that the filmmakers have to fill a lot of time that they wouldn’t have if they’d built the story up more naturally, and the results end up blowing past scary and landing somewhere in the realm of the ridiculous.

This is the story of Jackie and Julie. They’re celebrating their first anniversary as a married couple by going up to a big lake house that Jackie’s family owns. It’s a huge, sprawling, rustic place overlooking a gorgeous piece of Canadian wilderness. They’re there for an idyllic weekend, but almost immediately, things seem just a little bit off. Jackie keeps sort of staring out at the lake, and she’s sort of evasive about how long it’s been since she’s been up here. And then, their first night there, a car pulls up to the lake house. It’s a young woman named Sarah, who lives on the other side of the lake and was surprised to see the lights on. She says it’s been awhile since anyone’s been up here…

…and then she calls Jackie “Megan.”

It’s not difficult to figure out what the basic hook is going to be: Jackie has been keeping secrets from Julie, and we expect that over the course of the film the deception will slowly unravel, as Julie discovers more and more about Jackie’s past, and what happened up here at the lake, all those years ago. That’s a time-honored story, and a slow build of unease leading to some horrible revelation could be really scary. I mean, in some ways that’s the basic story of Honeymoon, which builds to a chilling conclusion based on gradually increasing dread. There are a few ways you could subvert it as well - you could lead the audience to believe it’s one type of secret when it’s actually another, you could lead the audience to believe one person’s hiding something really bad when it’s actually another, you could even lead the audience to think that there’s something wrong with one of them when actually two people are in cahoots. It doesn’t even need to be an especially complicated story, since the real work is in finding out what happened and how bad it really gets. In finding out who this person you thought you knew really is. 

What this film chooses to do instead is forsake the slow, ominous buildup (apart from a few bits here and there) and just drop the other shoe at the end of the first act. That’s audacious, I’ll give it that - I wasn’t especially impressed with the film at the opening, but I didn’t see that coming, and it did give me pause. I didn’t expect it, and I like it when a film does the unexpected, at least on principle. The problem, then, is what it does with all of the time remaining in the film. 

By revealing the twist early, the filmmakers defy convention to a degree, but it leaves them with the problem of how to make the other hour or so interesting. As it turns out, they just aren’t up to the task. Now, instead of a gradually escalating sense of unease and paranoia leading up to a shocking revelation, we get a sudden, shocking revelation (that still feels a little underbaked - we’ve just gotten to know these people and now this is happening) followed by a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse that grows increasingly ludicrous the longer it continues, making everything feel less and less believable and more and more padded for the sake of the running time. 

Part of this is down to characterization. There are a lot of ways you can play someone whose dark secret has been revealed, and the longer they’re onscreen with the protagonists, the more and more the antagonist becomes a cackling villain from a Lifetime Network movie about how the person I loved wasn’t who I thought they were. There’s monologuing (so much monologuing) and even a point where the antagonist shines a flashlight under her face, I guess for the benefit of the audience? It just seems silly. And as the antagonist monologues and makes choices that make no sense outside of the need to fill time, the protagonists engage in tearful rounds of “why are you doing this?” instead of fighting for their lives. Nobody behaves in ways that make actual human sense after the first thirty minutes, and it’s obvious that that’s because if they did, the film would be less than an hour long.

It’s hard to overlook bad pacing, but no film is perfect, and generally flaws in one area can be compensated for by strengths in another. Do other things really well, and the things you do badly can be overlooked. But again, there’s not a lot here to distract us. The writing tends toward the wooden throughout - there aren’t a lot of exposition dumps for a (nice) change, but the dialogue still doesn’t sound like how people actually talk to each other, putting it at odds with the largely naturalistic setting, a problem exacerbated by how much of it there ends up being as the movie goes on. Like, the longer everyone talks, the less natural any of it sounds. The score’s a little too intrusive too - there’s no reason for almost every scene to be punctuated by minor-key piano or ominous synthesizer swells, it doesn’t add anything in terms of mood and is even a little distracting at points. There’s no reason for a jeep ride through the country before anything bad has happened to sound scary. That’s a technique that can be used to good effect when employed sparingly to create a sense of unease, but here it’s just like the soundtrack got stuck on “creepy” and nobody could figure out how to shut it off. It’s a good-looking movie, I’ll give it that, leaning heavily into gorgeous shots of the Canadian wilderness and not getting overly fussy, and whatever else is wrong with this film, there are some interesting editorial and directorial choices scattered throughout - uses of light and sudden cuts to suggest disorientation, some nice shot juxtapositions toward the end, it’s just too bad that it’s all in service of a story that beggars belief. 

If the filmmakers had made, say, the first half of the film a character study with little details that seem off scattered throughout, just enough to pique our attention without being too ham-handed, and then hit us with the reveal and escalated tension from there, there might have been something to this. As it is, it peaks far too early, runs out of steam way too quickly, and limps to its ending. Pretty much every cliché gets tagged along the way, and even after what feels like an eternity of increasingly contrived dilemmas leading up to a pretty stock ending…there’s still half an hour left. That means that things go from the contrived to the ridiculous, and after an hour or so of characters being underdeveloped and improbable twists and false endings, even more exposition has to be crammed in in the form of flashbacks to make the ending they DO come up with make any sense at all, except for yet another last-minute twist so unbelievable as to be almost comical. Of all of the reactions the filmmakers were aiming for, I don’t think any of them were me throwing my arms up and yelling “REALLY?” in the privacy of my own home. 

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Final Prayer: The Discernment Of Spirits

The story of St. Ignatius Loyola begins with him bedridden by fever, during which time a vision of an angel appears to him, telling him not to worry. What distinguished Loyola (and subsequently the Jesuit order he founded) was his response. He was not glad of the angel, but instead asked how he could know the angel was really an angel, and not a vision sent by the Devil to tempt him? Thus, the Jesuit order has as one of its primary precepts the “discernment of spirits,” a tendency to skepticism and intellectual rigor not always found in Christianity. 

Final Prayer (a/k/a The Borderlands) is a reasonably smart, tense, found-footage (of a sort) film that doesn’t overplay its hand, and thought it never quite reaches the heights of terror it could, it comes pretty close. It’s also very much a movie about the gradients of belief, and how it does or does not intersect with religious faith.

We begin with what appears to be some kind of archival footage from Portugal, of law enforcement raiding a church, pulling bricks away from the wall behind the altar to reveal what’s hidden there. It appears to be audiovisual equipment - speakers ,wires, etc. It’s all frantic and chaotic, interrupted by someone taking a call - a bunch of people have disappeared, someone else is in intensive care. It’s over before we can really make sense of it. Cut to what seems to be an entirely different movie, and a man named Gray cataloging a bunch of audiovisual equipment and rigging a cottage up with cameras. Gray has been hired by the Vatican to provide technical support to two of its official representatives - Deacon and Mark - who are headed to a very small village in rural England to investigate a miracle reported by the village’s priest, Father Crellick. 

As investigators of miracles for the Vatican, Deacon and Mark are in a profession that requires them to apply scientific rigor to matters of faith. There’s money in miracles - increases in church attendance, tourist business - and faked miracles undermine faith and the legitimacy of the church. So their job is investigating miracles, to try and debunk them to weed out the fake ones, then pass their reports up the chain. Gray is basically just the A/V guy, a gun for hire. Deacon arrives first, a dour Scotsman who greets the news that the cottage is wired for video and that he’ll have to wear a head cam all the time (official policy since “the incident in Belem”) with distaste. Mark is in charge, but he’s running late. Deacon greets the news that Mark is the lead on this investigation with even more distaste. There’s a history there. They’re all bunked up together in a small two-bedroom cottage for the duration. Mark gets the master bedroom, Deacon and Gray have to bunk together. Nobody’s happy about it.

The church is very small, and very, very old. Father Crellick seems nervous, but he has a videotape to show the investigators. It was shot during a christening, and as Father Crellick begins to baptize the child, the child begins to cry, then wail, then scream. And then there are strange creaking and shuddering noises. The cross falls from the altar. The footage goes staticky, as if something is emanating a powerful magnetic field, and Crellick greets something off-camera rapturously as “Our Father.”  

It’s a very old church.

The film itself is as careful and measured as the protagonists, the majority of its run time occupied by a meticulous investigation of the church and its archival documents. Deacon and Mark are here to find a mundane explanation for an apparent miracle. And really, that’s how science works. There’s an adversarial edge to it. It’s not intended personally (usually - there’s always the potential for ego to get in the way), but rather as a way to ensure that the work is as strong as it can be, the evidence as strong as it can be, so that the claims are as defensible as possible. You pick as many holes in the research as you can to show the researchers where they need to strengthen their argument. And that’s what Deacon and Mark do - they meet claims of mystery with adversarial empiricism. If the Vatican is going to declare something a miracle, they’ll want to be as sure as possible that it isn’t otherwise. So there’s an interesting contrast between the natural and supernatural right at the front here, but it isn’t overplayed. For the protagonists, it’s not a crisis of faith as in a film like The Exorcist, it’s just the job.

The three protagonists provide a study in contrasts as well - Deacon is equal parts a skeptic and man of faith. He sincerely believes in the mission, because he is a true believer in God, and he’s a skeptic because he reveres God and has seen plenty of bad fakes. Mark, it turns out, is a high-ranking church official, an officious little prick who has forgotten his faith, so caught up in the worldly affairs of the church (he was late because he was attending a fundraiser in Boston) that he vocally expresses his frustration that the church refuses to move past “medieval superstition.” He is skeptical to the exclusion of faith, more interested in bureaucratic procedure and fitting rules to the world than admitting the possibility of mysteries. Gray possesses neither faith nor skepticism - he’s not religious (he believes in “you know…stuff”), but he’s also the most gullible of the three, the one most likely to overlook mundane explanations once weird shit starts happening. Father Crellick completes the picture as a man entirely of faith without an ounce of skepticism. He’s seen a miracle, he’s sure of it. What else could it be?

The film works well as a slow burn - at first they’re just investigating a church, going through procedure, looking for the usual signs of fakery, then the strange noises start, then the strange events, Father Crellick starts off squirrelly and heads for downright erratic, and then the stuff they can’t explain starts happening. It kicks off late, in the third act, but once it does it picks up momentum quickly. It doesn’t quite reach the gonzo heights I was expecting or hoping for, but it also never overreaches in what it shows and doesn’t show, and so the result is solidly unsettling.

On the other hand, the found-footage conceit feels like a bit of an odd fit here. It isn’t handled badky at all, there’s narrative plausibility (even since the incident in Belem, everything and everyone gets recorded at all times, like the spiritual equivalent of body cams) and the filmmakers don’t overplay it with a goofy title card, but the conceit breaks in a couple of places. It’s not presented as recovered footage per se, and so avoids some of the bigger ways that conceit tends to strain credulity, but they commit to the perspective strongly enough that it’s a little jarring on the couple of occasions when they don’t. The acting is solid - everyone mostly seems like real people, if not especially well fleshed-out. There’s a bit of backstory related to the opening that gets developed throughout and shines some light on Deacon, but that’s about it. Gray and Mark are both kind of abrasive at first, but once they get down to the brass tacks of the investigation, everyone demonstrates a quiet competence that leavens the more obnoxious moments. Mark does start to verge on caricature by the end, but by that point the tension is high enough that the film’s momentum sort of carries you past it. The cinematography isn’t especially flashy, since we’re mostly looking at captured footage from headcams and static cameras installed in their lodgings and the church, but it employs camera noise and interference along with spare, careful sound design to good effect. 

The film too, on a structural level, explores the tension between the supernatural and the natural. As the film goes on, mysterious things start to happen - strange noises in the middle of the night, the crying and wailing of a child in the church when it’s supposed to be empty, an especially unpleasant omen involving a burning lamb - creating a sense of foreboding and unease. It’s easy to believe that there’s something supernatural going on (it is, after all, a horror film), only for each weird little incident to be explained as something mundane. There are all sorts of little moments that you expect to turn into scary moments, but don’t - part of this feels like it’s feeding tension and denying release, but it’s also sort of saying that sometimes your expectations are wrong. Sometimes it really IS just a small, quiet cottage in the middle of the night. 

It’s like the film itself is doing the protagonists’ job. There’s a plausible explanation for everything that happens to them…up to a point. And it is at that point the cracks begin to show, in the third act, when the rational explanations run out and each person’s approach to belief leads them into the dark and the horrible, utterly inexplicable thing that waits there. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” They wanted to know if the events Father Crellick witnessed were the doing of something beyond our understanding, and they found out. They discerned the spirits, and it cost lives. 

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Books Of Blood: Hastily Stitched Together

Anytime I write about something, I try to make a point of focusing on the film and not really talking too much about who wrote it, who starred in it, or who directed it. This is partially because I want to focus on the film as the final product, and partially because I think that sometimes the horror genre (at least in the U.S.) tends a little bit too much toward personalities. Sometimes otherwise-respected writers or directors turn out real stinkers, and reverence for the personality eclipses the quality of the work. Or franchises (ugh) get a pass for being more of the same based on the strength of the personalities (directors or actors especially) involved. Plus, films aren’t made by one person, they’re a collective effort. Basically, my thing is: Regardless of who made it, how did it turn out?

But this time, I kind of have to, because when I looked up Books Of Blood in anticipation that I would write it up, I was struck immediately by two things: First, that it was, as the title indicated, putatively based on the anthology of the same name by author Clive Barker, and that made me say “yay!” to myself. Second, that it was directed by Brannon Braga, whose most recent work has been on shows and films in the Star Trek franchise and more recently, science fiction comedy The Orville. And that made me say “uh-oh” to myself. There is little in his work as a writer or director to indicate much experience with horror, or at least the kind of horror found in Barker’s work at its best.

See, here’s the thing - the great thing about Barker’s writing, whether it’s more straight-up horror (e.g., The Midnight Meat Train, The Hellbound Heart) or dark fantasy (The Great And Secret Show, Imajica), is that it imagines that just below the mundane skin of everyday existence lies a hidden, secret world of great mystery, and some folks are unfortunate enough to discover this in the least likely of places. And in the instances where it makes itself known, the effect is more often one of terror than wonder. His stories also often treat the human body with the kind of detached objectification that you usually go to early David Cronenberg for, and at its best, it’s really unsettling, intense stuff. It’s hard for me to trust that someone who’s spent most of their career on franchise television is really going to go off and turn in something that does justice to the source material. That it’s a Hulu Original, well, Monsterland aside, that’s not encouraging either. 

But that’s not to say that people can’t surprise us. Every now and then someone known for a particular style of television or film will surprise with something out of left field, and Monsterland (at least the first episode) suggests that everything Hulu commissions doesn’t have to be disappointingly mediocre. So I wanted to give this a fair shot.

I gave it a fair shot, and sure enough, very little of what makes the source material so special makes it into this movie. In fact, it’s even worse than I anticipated. It’s a little too corny to be taken seriously, but too gory to really be camp. Even worse, it’s a mess. Apparently this was supposed to be an anthology series, but the decision was made just to throw three stories together and package it as an anthology film instead, and the result reads like one of those term papers that was written in an hour or two the night before. 

The film begins with someone closing up a used bookstore for the night. He seems nervous, vigilant. Being alone in a somewhat-spooky old bookstore makes that a reasonable response, but it’s not ghosts he’s worried about, as we discover when he’s confronted by a thug come to collect on a payment. The guy doesn’t have it, but tells the thug where he can find a one-of-a-kind book worth millions. A book called…you guessed it…the Book of Blood. (DUN-dun-DUUUNNNNNN!) He gives the thug an address, and the thug kills him for his trouble. Which seems like bad business to me, since the dead can’t pay, ever, but away the nameless thug and his accomplice go, to a neighborhood they describe as “cursed.” The accomplice is nervous, but away they drive. And then we come to the first entry…

Jenna

Jenna is a young woman who lives with her wealthy mother and…father? Stepfather? Dude seems kind of young to be her dad…in a sleek, modern house on a beach in the middle of nowhere. Jenna’s a morbid young woman, constantly drawing ghoulish, monstrous faces in her sketchbook, and she isn’t happy about anything. She looks out at the waves crashing against the beach, and sees drowning and freezing to death in “that hellish water.” Her mother’s mad, and at first it isn’t clear why, but as it transpires, she moved everyone out to this remote house for Jenna’s benefit. Jenna suffers from misophonia, which is typically characterized by aversion to specific sounds, but for the purposes of this film seems to include sounds of almost any sort, short of conversation. Jenna dropped out of college because of some unspecified “incident,” and then she went to live on “the farm,” which seems to have been some kind of treatment facility. Jenna sketches and wears noise-cancelling headphones a lot. 

And then, after dinner, Jenna overhears her parents talking (because apparently misophonia also gives you super-hearing in this film) and realizes her mother is pissed off that she’s blown off college and just sits around and mopes. Like any good parent, she decides she’s just going to ship her back to “the farm.” So Jenna grabs a bunch of cash out of a stash in her parent’s closet and hightails it for L.A.. Except that someone seems to be following her, so she jumps off the bus early and lands at a charming little B&B in a small town. Is that a lot? It’s kind of a lot, and that’s just the first 15 minutes or so of a segment that takes up most of the movie. The B&B is run by a charming older couple, who say that they like to think of everyone who stays there as family.

No, that’s not ominous at all.

By this point, the problems are already starting to show. Most notable is the clumsy, artificial dialogue. It’s true not just in this segment, but throughout the film - everything is an expository speech, nobody talks like actual human beings. We’re talking, like Criminal Minds or Law & Order: SVU levels of “nobody talks that way.” It’s most effective at killing any attempt at atmosphere that might develop. It does have help in that department, though - the pacing is completely squirrelly as well. This segment feints at being a couple of different stories before it settles on a through-line, and takes way too long to get there. What’s the deal with all the weird shit she sketches? What was “the incident?” When did her misophonia develop? All of these are sort of teased as meaning something - and they do, we just don’t get resolution on them in the actual segment about her, and they aren’t what’s driving her story. Then there’s mysterious figure following her, and then she gets to the B&B and there’s lots of weird stuff around the edges, some odd nightmare imagery, and so then it seems like maybe it’s about paranoia and an impending psychological breakdown. 

But…nope. To its credit, the real story is an interesting idea, and definitely feels like the kind of thing Barker would come up with (no, this isn’t actually one of the stories from the source text, it was written specifically for this), but it’s lost in all of the haphazard plot points before and after. And then, just when it feels like it should be coming to a close, it just keeps going and going, ending on a non-sequitur that robs it of any power whatsoever. Jenna’s misophonia never comes off more as than unnecessary contrivance, there’s no real mood to speak of (because everything feels so artificial), and so the stranger turns it takes feel more confusing than anything else. The whole thing sort of feels like a bunch of stuff being thrown at the wall to see what sticks, and none of it does. 

Miles

We open with a video recording of a man, standing nude in the middle of a white room. The lights shut off, and the darkness is immediately filled with a cacophony of shrieks, growls, and wails. When the lights come up, the man is curled up on the floor, the walls around hum now filled with writing - chaotic, overlapping scrawls in what appears to be blood. This is the kind of moment I expect from a Clive Barker story, and for the record, this is the only material taken directly from the source text…and it’s the narrative bookend of the anthology, so there’s not a whole story to work with. But it’s a striking image with which to open the segment. The man is Simon, and he is a speaker for the dead. This is how the dead speak through him. Mary is a professor in…well, her field is never specified, but she’s apparently made a career as someone who debunks psychic phenomena using science. A tried-and-true skeptic, who lost her son Miles to leukemia and has grieved ever since. Simon, of course, offers to perform a “convocation” on her terms to prove that his abilities are real, and that he can put her in touch with Miles. 

And so this is the story of how Mary comes to know Simon and learn about his abilities, and how their relationship changes over time. It’s a much more cohesive story than the first segment, and has some genuinely creepy and unsettling moments, but ends up being let down again by the dialogue (again, all tell, no show - Simon introduces himself by breaking into Mary’s office and going through a whole monologue about who she is and who he is and it’s like…fuck, we know) and by a disappointingly conventional turn and resolution that makes the whole thing feel like an episode of Tales From The Crypt, and like I said up front, this isn’t campy, at least not intentionally, so the end of what is an noticeably shorter segment compared to Jenna just has all of the air let out of it. Like the first story, there’s a germ of a good idea and some good imagery, but even though it’s much tighter and more economical about how it gets to the point, the narrative itself ends up being so pedestrian that it brings the whole thing down.

Bennett

So this isn’t so much a third story as it is the leftovers from the introduction and the other two stories. The titular Bennett turns out to be the thug from the opening, and he and his accomplice Steve are on their way to collect the book, from the address provided to them by the bookseller before he died. Without spoiling anything, I can say that it’s a neighborhood and a house we’ve seen before already, so we sort of know what Bennett is going to find. There’s really not much story here at all - Bennett and Steve arrive someplace that feels like equal parts urban blight and haunted forest (which to be fair is a very Barker kind of vibe), there are some jump scares and a messy death for reasons never made clear, and then Bennett’s journey very conveniently takes him through places we’ve seen before. It ends up feeling very, very much like they tried to pass off what was supposed to be the bookend to the opening as its own story, since there’s no real plot or development of who Bennett is and why he does what he does. He’s an unsympathetic character meant to meet a nasty end in the service of some moral, but just when it feels like his story should be wrapped up and thus the film ended, the perspective shifts from Bennett back to Jenna, and we learn what the incident at school was, and Jenna comes to some kind of reckoning. It does end up someplace I wasn’t expecting and there is some power to it, but it’s not nearly as effective as it could have been. Again, this is because the segment, like much of the film, is a disjointed mess, very obviously cobbled together from parts. It’s the second false ending of the film, the shift back to Jenna doesn’t really make sense because the film didn’t begin with her, and it reveals her to be a far less sympathetic character than she already was. I think the end would have packed more of a punch if we’d cared about her, but as it stands it sort of comes off like “you know what? Good.” There’s not a lot of horror there, and the film doesn’t so much end as lurch to a halt.

I don’t like to judge films by anything other than the end product if I can help it. But everything about this feels exactly like someone with little to no experience directing horror attempting to take what could be salvaged out of a failed anthology and present it as a marketable product, and if nothing about that sentence sounds great, well, there you go.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu